Why my degree was far less useful than my gymnastics experience.

Hi guys, this is a draft for my recent podcast which you can listen to by clicking here. I am recording this podcast because I have recently enjoyed a surge in popularity on Instagram - I have been posting my gymnastics training clips on Alexadultgymnastics for a while but recently, I started adding a narration over the clips, each time telling a short story between one and two minutes long and somehow that format seems to have yielded much better results. I am getting a lot more hits and I would like to credit the woman who has inspired this new style - Joanne Lee-Molinaro otherwise known as the Korean Vegan an online cooking content creator. I am copying her social content presentation style: basically, there are already so many people doing food videos online, sharing recipes. So Joanne would film herself preparing a dish but instead of telling you exactly how to cook that dish, she would share a personal story that may or may not have anything to do with that dish and so you're entertained on two levels - she is a great storyteller and of course, her dishes look absolutely amazing. So that's my approach, I know that as a 49 year old gymnast my skills are never going to be enough to hold the attention of most people, I may be some kind of freakshow on the internet but even that novelty will wear thin with time and hence that's why I have paired up my videos with some creative storytelling.

My challenge though is to try to find a story I can do justice to in under two minutes - I often start a draft and realize I could probably speak for half an hour on the topic as it is so close to my heart but I really only have about 90 seconds to tell that story in that format. So today I am going to do a podcast on a topic that I only spoke about for under 2 minutes. It is about how gymnastics is such a great activity for children because they would get to experience how to function as a professional adult with responsibilities at a very young age and thus it would prepare them for the challenges of adulthood. Take a 12 year old for example, in the classroom, that kid is told exactly what to do by the teacher and there is often very little room for expressing one's opinion. Instead, the academic learning is usually focused on cramming a lot of facts and figures into the young child's head. That cycle goes on and on with little respite for the poor student who has to memorize all of these facts only to regurgitate them at the exam, only to be given yet another long list of facts to memorize for the next exam. The young students are told that education is so important, that's why they have to spend hours memorizing these long list of facts as if their futures, their very lives depended on it. Some students simply accept that this is their fate in life and that's what their childhood should be about - others rebelled and I was one of them. 

You see, in the classroom, we were treated like young children. In school, we were infantilized to the point where we never had to make any decisions. We were told what to wear and if you didn't conform to the school uniform, you were punished. We were told what to learn, what time to turn up for which lessons, the time table was prescribed to you and we didn't get a say in any of it. We were told when our exams were, we we told when our holidays were and even then, we would often be given a very long list of educational activities to do during those holidays. We couldn't pick our teachers, even if we got an awful teacher we couldn't protest, we couldn't pick our subjects, there simply wasn't an element of choice built into the education system as children were not trusted to make their own decisions about their education. The top students that the teachers liked the most were the most obedient and the troublemakers like me were the ones who asked too many questions. Contrast that to the gymnastics club, where I actually got a say in what I wanted to train. I had six apparatuses: the floor exercise, the pommel horse, the rings, the vault, the parallel bars and the high bar. I could choose which apparatus I wanted to spend more time on, I could choose which skills I wanted to develop, I could design my own training plan to ultimately determine what kind of gymnast I wanted to become. Those are the kind of skills I'd expect an experienced project manager in the corporate world to have but there I was, a young kid, learning what it is like to function as an adult with real responsibilities.How many children get opportunities like that? 

Sadly, my parents saw all this as a waste of time because in their opinion, I should be studying harder to make sure I performed really well in all my exams instead of wasting time doing sports. But what they never realized was just how much I learnt from my experience growing up as a gymnast and how that shaped me into the adult I became many years later. For many students who go through the system as  very obedient students who always did as they were told, they would emerge into the working world as worker ants who are very good taking orders but terrible at trying to take their own initiative to find solutions to complex problems, they don't know how to respond to tricky challenges when the right answer cannot be found in their textbook. They become paralyzed into inaction and they only know how to run their bosses for help as that was what they were trained to do as students. After all, they have never been in a position where they have been given any real responsibilities before. I experienced this when I was in the army. Yup, I'm from Singapore and we have national service there, so I served 2 years 4 months in the army back in the 1990s. The officers would bark orders at me and the only reply they wanted to hear was 'yes sir'. They didn't like soldiers who asked questions or tried to challenge their authority, they just wanted us to turn off our brains and do as we were told. I didn't want to be punished so I did just that, even when I knew that I had a better way of performing the task at hand, I simply wasn't in an environment that rewarded the person who tried to take their own initiative to solve problems in the workplace. I make that sound like a horrible situation to be in and it was for me, but that is the reality for a lot of people stuck in very working class jobs. 

Allow me to give you an example. I was at my local supermarket when I witnessed a manager publicly disciplining a young employee - his crime? He didn't do as he was told. Apparently, this manager had given the young man a list of things to do and the order he was to do them in. He tried too hard to be clever and tried to do them in a different order to save time and that really angered his manager. She was not prepared to give him the leeway to take his own initiative, but she had expected him to do exactly as he was told. I was instantly reminded of what it was like for me back in my army days when I was in a very similar kind of environment. In a supermarket, only the senior members of staff had the power to make strategic decisions and if that supermarket was a part of a major chain, then that decision would have to come from the corporate headquarters. So it was not like the local supermarket could even decide how to make the place look more festive for Christmas, no all those decisions would have to be taken by the senior directors at the corporate headquarters and the local managers would simply be given instructions on what to do. This is a necessary evil when it comes to running big corporations as you can't have every single member of staff having their own agenda and taking their own initiatives every five minutes - it would result in utter chaos. So the question I have for you is this: do you want to become a worker ant who turns off their brain and simply follows instructions at work? Or do you want to be a leader in the workplace who makes decisions on behalf of the team? The issue is that most of our education will only prepare you to become a good worker ant, if you want to rise to the top and become a decision maker, you really need to seek other experiences that will help you develop those skills you will never ever learn in a classroom environment. 

But why do some parents value the classroom more than experiences we can get through activities like gymnastics? Why do they put so much faith in school teachers? Can we explain their blind faith in the education system? Well here is my theory. I have to give you some context for my theory as I am speaking from personal experience: I came from a poor, working class family and my parents never made it to what we would consider 'higher education'. They always had the idea that if you wanted to learn something, you had to go to a school where a teacher will teach you everything you need to know about that subject. So if you wanted to learn how to drive a car to get your driver's license, then you had to go pay for driving lessons with an instructor. If you want to learn how to play the piano, then you had to go take piano lessons with a music teacher. But they never realized that when people make it to tertiary education, we will usually just figure stuff out for ourselves and we're not waiting for a teacher to spoon feed us with information about the subject. That is why a university standard class in geography is going to be vastly different from what you might learn in secondary school - in secondary school, the teacher will have a curriculum, a syllabus, you will have a textbook and the student would be passively sitting in the classroom listening to the teacher impart information about that topic. But at university level, you have tutorials where you are expected to actively contribute your own original ideas on the topic rather than just find the answers from a standard textbook. How does this apply to the world of gymnastics then? Well if you're just a beginner, then of course, your gymnastics coach would make sure that you have a very structured lesson and it will be like that geography lesson in secondary school where you're just learning the basics. But if you do get to a level where you know what you're doing, the coaches trust you and you can function very autonomously during training, then that would be far more like a university course. I'd rather depend on myself than anyone else as I know I can trust myself. 

Now the biggest benefit from training like that comes when you are in charge, you take responsibility for your own training programme and you can trust yourself to get the job done without someone else holding your hand or supervising you. Some people find that kind of situation really quite scary, they panic and think, what if I do something wrong? What if I don't know what I am doing? No, I want a teacher to hold my hand as if I am a 5 year old child. And so they are putting too much faith in these teachers to teach them rather than take responsibility for their own learning. In my case, I really didn't have a choice: my coach back then felt like he wasn't paid enough to take that much interest in my training and progress, so he pretty much just left me on my own to do my own thing. Now I could have either just given up as there was no one forcing me to train harder, or I could have grown up, learned to take charge of my own training like an adult even though I was still a teenager and step into that role, where I took charge of my own destiny in the gym. Sometimes the best thing parents can do for their children is to give them that freedom to make their own decisions, take responsibility for their own choices like an adult and essentially grow up. But some people refuse to believe that their best teacher would actually be themselves, that the best way to learn is to be completely autonomous and independent. They seem to be scared of that and would rather retreat to a safe space in their heads when they are 5 year old again and there is a teacher in the room telling them exactly what to do. In short, these people are scared to grow up and sadly, they would probably just end up in jobs where that teacher is replaced with a manager or boss barking instructions at them and treating them with such contempt for not being able to follow instructions well enough. 

So that's it from me on this topic. What do you think?  How do we allow young people to experience taking responsibility? How do we encourage them to take their own initiative, to make decisions for themselves? How should we convince people that they can often be their own best teachers and that they shouldn't rely on others? Many thanks for reading.