About Your Instructor
Herve Fefer
"Go away daddy, this is the way Kumon wants me to do it so that's the way I'm doing it", my daughter told me when I asked her why she wasn't writing down her carries. And so began my journey into the fascinating world of Kumon. First as a Kumon parent and then, some eight years later, as a Kumon Instructor and franchisee running my own centre in Longueuil.
It was my sister, a school teacher in Vancouver who initially recommended Kumon. Both her children were in the program and were benefitting greatly. My daughter, Sarah, needed help in math and Kumon certainly provided that and more over the years. As a parent, I was thankful and appreciated Kumon but didn't understand the learning method and thought it was a structured "rote" methodology. I loved math as a child and remember learning it by doing it over and over again. As Sarah got older, her activities and interests multiplied and attending Kumon classes became harder to schedule.
At Kumon she was working well beyond her grade level and was doing very well in school. While driving back from class one night I offered to stop her Kumon study, expecting to hear shouts of glee from the backseat. Those shouts never came. Sarah politely turned down the offer and stayed in Kumon for another two years. It was at that moment that I realized Kumon was a lot more special than I, as a parent, had ever appreciated. Kumon was giving my daughter more than just math knowledge, and she knew it and wasn't ready to let go of it yet.
Fast forward a few years and I am at a crossroads in my career. For 30 years I have worked in finance, with the last two years as a partner in a small hedge fund. The fund didn't work out and I was left with two choices; retire or do something completely different. The former felt too early; the latter was full of possibilities. The Kumon seed planted in my brain years ago stirred and I began my research into the Kumon franchise opportunity. I had my own requirements too: not bridge travelling (I live on the South Shore), minimal front-end payments, and a location with good business potential. To my shock, all three conditions were met. I have always enjoyed trying to encourage and motivate kids through coaching different sports and love interacting with and watching them progress, but my enthusiasm was tempered by a voice that told me not to get too excited as I would surely discover something to bring me back down to earth, if not make me leave the process altogether. There would surely come a point where I would exclaim "I knew it was too good to be true!" That something never showed up, that point never came.
The intensive initial and ongoing Kumon training sessions have made me completely confident in my ability as a Kumon Instructor to be able to help my students' progress. These courses also serve to keep me humble as I always come out of them surprised at how much is always to be learned. As part of my training, I had to complete (and analyze) the same worksheets as my Kumon students and what an experience that has been. There really is magic in the way these worksheets have been constructed and the 65 years of experience in them go way beyond any "rote" methodology.