The Beauty of Teaching: Alum, Instructor Inspires Through Math

Tony Akhlaghi, 1993
Professor of Math, Bellevue College 

An immigrant from Iran, Tony Akhlaghi arrived in Washington as a young man and found Bellevue was the cheapest place for him to live in the late 1980s. 

“I immediately wanted to get an education,” he recalled. 

Without transcripts, he could not enter the University of Washington, but he could start classes at Bellevue College. 

“I attended Bellevue College for three or four quarters, but I ran out of money. I was not aware of student loans, so I dropped out,” Akhlaghi recalled, noting that a coffee delivery job kept him going until 1992. 

“A colleague asked me why I wasn’t in college, and I told him that I didn’t have the money. He told me about student loans. That day, after work, I immediately went to the financial aid office of Bellevue College.” 

With financing secured, Akhlaghi returned to college and graduated in 1993. 

“Initially, I was going to do a robotics engineering degree, but I found a job in the math lab at Bellevue,” he said. Encouraged by the faculty, he switched his academic plans. He even earned the department’s Lebon prize in mathematics. 

After securing degrees at UW and Western, Akhlaghi returned to Bellevue to teach, working for both Bellevue and South Seattle Community Colleges in the 1990s. But when a full-time teaching job at Bellevue became available in 2000, he grabbed it. A recipient of the Excellence Award from Bellevue College in 2020, Akhlaghi has been a student favorite for making math engaging and understandable. 

One of the teachers that Akhlaghi remembers as a particular inspiration was David Stacy. 

“When I saw the way that he taught, I told myself that is what I wanted to do,” Akhlaghi said. 

When he returned to Bellevue as an adjunct faculty member, Stacy was then head of the math department. After Stacy passed away in 2011, Akhlaghi kept his guitar in the corner of his office. “Every time I come in and see it, I think of him.” 

Akhlaghi never forgot that early encouragement and how it changed his life as a young man starting over again in a new country. 

“You can change people’s lives as a teacher,” he said. “A noticeable number of students struggle with math, but it’s essential for them. I have the opportunity to grab their hands and move them toward the goal that they have.”     

He calls these moments of inspiring others “the beauty” of teaching at Bellevue College.