Ready, set, go.

“Stay focused, keep your poker face on.”

These were the pieces of advice the El Camino dean of mathematical sciences gave his students during his mahjong class on Nov. 3.

Dean Marlow Lemons had dreamed of teaching at a community college and going into leadership.

He made both come true as a mahjong class instructor for community education and an organizer of American Mahjong at South Bay Torrance.

Mahjong is a game in which players match or sequence sets of tiles.

Lemons’ first encounter with mahjong was in 2021, when he was already a dean at El Camino College.

He was teaching a beginning bridge class for fun at a senior living facility in Redondo Beach for one year.

People there told Lemons the facility had a teacher who taught a mahjong class. Lemons started taking the class as a beginner for five weeks.

“Ever since the class, I fell in love with the game,” he said.

Wanting to bring mahjong to El Camino, Lemons started teaching some employees how to play the game after getting approval from former El Camino President Dena Maloney.

Director of Accounting Melissa Guess was one of the employees.

Guess said before she took the class, she didn’t even know there was a game called mahjong.

She enrolled as a beginner and Lemons helped her understand the game.

“He breaks the game down into understandable pieces, so you can learn part of the game before you move on to the next thing,” Guess said.

Because of the way Lemons explained the game to her, she won first place in the first mahjong tournament at El Camino which Lemons held in June.

Guess is not the only one who enjoyed Lemons’ mahjong class. It became popular with the employees, so Lemons thought he should teach it to a wider population.

“I thought well, maybe I should teach it to the community,” he said.

Lemons started offering a beginning mahjong class for community education in June 2022.

He has taught 52 students since then.

Noticing the students were getting better at the game, he started thinking of ways to make the most of their interest in mahjong.

His students encouraged him to lead El Camino to become the first community college in California to offer an intermediate mahjong class in October.

“The class has really brought the community together across all ages, all genders and I found it to be very interesting,” Lemons said. “I have taught students who are Asian, Black and Latino.”

Lemons not only teaches El Camino students. He also organized a group called American Mahjong at South Bay Torrance, which has 57 members from different walks of life.

Lemons is used to teaching people from various backgrounds because he taught statistics in Qatar, a country in the Middle East.

“I thought, what’s outside of university teaching?” Lemons said. “I wanted to see the difference between American students and students overseas.”

He went to Qatar in 2016 after completing his doctorate while teaching at Virginia Tech in 2014.

“I wanted to be a leader where a student can come to me for support [and] for advice to address any need that they have,” Lemons said.

Mechanical engineering major Greg Roa, 21, said Lemons’ support has helped him in a real way while taking the mahjong class.

Lemons told Roa it is important to keep his nerves while playing mahjong.

“It definitely was tougher to start, but he very much encouraged me to branch out into different strategies,” Roa said.

He also said Lemons is one of the best bosses he’s had and he felt Lemons could be a pretty good supervisor when they met for the first time.

“I wish everybody had a mentor like him,” Roa said. “I’m lucky to have a mentor like him.”