😅 Unpacking the weird relationship I had with extracurricular activities
Re: News journalist Janhavi Gosavi shares what she realised from writing an article about Kumon.
Re: News journalist Janhavi Gosavi recently wrote an article about Kumon, an extracurricular education programme some students called ‘traumatising’.
She shares her own thoughts on extracurriculars, self worth and relating to one of her interviewees.
The older I get, the more I realise I do not possess a single original experience.
At first, I was offended — how dare I turn out to be just like other girls ❗❗
But when it comes to unpacking the messy relationship migrant children have with education and success, I’m extremely glad I’m not alone.
Education was the main reason my parents moved us from India to New Zealand when I was two years old.
India’s education system is demanding, with the immense pressure to study hard leading some students to suicide if their exam results aren’t what they wanted.
My parents dreamed of raising me in a country where grades weren’t the be-all and end-all of a student’s self worth.
That didn’t stop me, or kids like me, from tying my identity to my extracurriculars.
When I was a teenager, if I ever felt bad about myself I’d remind myself I was a ✨booked-and-busy baddie✨ because my NCEA pie chart was primarily yellow (excellence credits are colour-coded yellow) and my weekly schedule was packed with activities.
I loved my extracurriculars so much, they became entrenched in how I saw myself.
I was the girl who performed in the school musical, did air cadets, played badminton, entered speech competitions, sat on the school board, and opted to do extra scholarship exams.
The path to success was a static staircase and the more activities I committed myself to, the further up I went.
That was until I eventually didn’t get a role I wanted in the school play, or I didn’t pass a scholarship exam, or I didn’t win a competition.
I’d sit there with my undeveloped prefrontal cortex and wonder what was the point of trying hard if I wasn’t constantly visibly succeeding.
Sanskruti Patel’s story isn’t much different to mine.
She’s one of the people I interviewed for my Kumon story and, now at 23 years old, she’s doing a PhD in cancer research.
You can read the full article here.
Sanskruti is, by all accounts, a very successful young woman.
But her whakaaro on how she viewed success as a child really hit home for me.
Sanskruti did Kumon for five years, an extracurricular education programme she says she hated but still worked hard at.
Every time she walked into a Kumon centre, it felt like walking into an NCEA external exam hall, she told me when I interviewed her for the article.
“Everyone felt super anxious, no one talked or joked around. Students seemed tired before they even got there,” she says.
Sanskruti felt the same way and she complained about it consistently across the five years she did Kumon.
She says she was good at maths and English but her parents enrolled her in both Kumon subjects when she was 11 as a productive way to keep her occupied after school.
Sanskruti says Kumon felt neverending — “once you’re done with one thing, it's onto the next”.
She said Kumon changed how she felt about learning because the programme progresses in a linear way.
Students start at one level, move through all of the worksheets in that level and get bumped up to the next level.
Their success is easily measurable because everyone is climbing the same staircase.
After years at Kumon, Sanksruti started believing every subject and skill could be learned in a linear way, and that if she did the necessary work she would see visible progress.
If she tried to learn something and her progress wasn’t easily measurable, it made her feel “like I was bad at it and wouldn’t get better”.
I myself did Kumon for three years and it was only after speaking to Sanskruti that I realised I felt the same way.
When I moved out of home and gave flatting a go, no one gave me an A+ for learning how to keep myself fed and pay my bills on time.
I have yet to receive a medal for figuring out how to regulate my emotions or a trophy for being a reliable friend.
It took leaving Kumon and finishing school for Sanskruti and I to realise success in the real world looked like the moving staircases at Hogwarts — there’s many of them and they’re all worth exploring.
Re: News’ recommendations:
These are not paid recommendations - they’re just things we like, including stuff we’ve enjoyed watching from our whānau at TVNZ 💗
‘How The Internet Fell Out of Love With’: YouTuber @kaylasays produces a series where each episode focuses on a different celebrity and recounts how the internet fell in and out of love with them. It’s great for anyone deep in the pop culture trenches, with episodes about Jojo Siwa, Lin Manuel Miranda, Grimes and Taika Waititi.
Practical Magic (available on TVNZ+): Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock answer the question most people asked themselves in the wake of #witchtok a few years ago: "Would I murder a man to protect my bestie and our upstate-slow-witching lifestyle? — from Callum Turnbull, our Social Media and Digital Producer
Ambrosia ice cream from Duck Island: It’s the perfect blend of tart and sweet. It has all of the flavour components of a classic ambrosia (cherry, chocolate, yoghurt and mini marshmallows) but never makes me feel sickly when I eat it.
And if you liked my Kumon story and have ideas for what I should cover next, my email is always open — janhavi@renews.co.nz
KaylaSays is so good - great rec!