About Your Instructor
Jeanette Chan
I was born an island girl, even though I always love the mountains more than the beach. Maybe the fact that my family home was situated at the base of a small hill has contributed to my bias. In fact, foraging for edible flowers on the hill and eating them afterwards was my favorite pastime as a child. That aside, music lessons would also take up a good portion of my childhood memories since my mother saw music in me early on.
Despite an early start in my formal training for classical music, I was inspired to pursue a career in genetics instead of becoming a concert violinist. After graduation, I joined a startup biotech firm in Sunnyvale, California. My first project was to facilitate and evaluate a novel approach to generate high-throughput sequencing microarrays. I was subsequently recruited to establish a microarray lab for Stanford University’s Human Genome Consortium.
The birth of my firstborn also marked the completion of one of my major projects – a molecular library of the human genome was established and could be easily printed on microarrays for experimental use. Now with a new baby at home, my heart was no longer preoccupied with research in the field of genetics.
With that, my husband and I decided that the best path forward for our growing family was for me to raise our daughter full-time at home. Three years later, our son completed our family of four in addition to our two elderly cats. I would spend the next 18 years homeschooling my two children. Fast forward, both my daughter and my son have now completed their undergrad at Berkeley and are now charting their own course in life further on their own.
It was during my years of homeschooling that I discovered my calling as an educator. Being a Kumon instructor was a perfect fit for me as a second career since it allowed me to use the knowledge and experiences that I had accrued as a parent-teacher. The most important takeaway of my years as a parent-teacher was learning to strike a delicate balance of aiming high and working hard with validation and unconditional acceptance. To me, it is imperative that each of us realizes that we are more than just knowledge and skills. Integrity and character matter. It is not just what we do but how we do it! This belief is summarized in my center’s mission statement:
“We aim to serve our immediate community by training our students to be capable while fostering them to be kind.”
Truth is I love supporting my students and their families in their Kumon journey, every minute of it, and I look forward to working with all my future students as well!