MATT BARDIN LLC
JAY, FLORIDA

Matt Bardin taught in public secondary schools in New York City in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Since then, he has tutored and founded Zinc Learning Labs and Zinc Educational Services (formerly Veritas Tutors & Test Prep) in New York. He has lived in Abu Dhabi and currently tutors students all over the world. He is developing digital tools to help students and teachers raise English reading comprehension levels. Classmates with comparable grades had scored in the high 600s or 700s on the PSAT already (scores for each section range from 200 to 800), but Hannah had landed in the low to mid-500s, a few ticks above the national average. Her grades at Dalton made Hannah a candidate for an elite college – not quite Harvard and Yale, but certainly an Ivy League or equivalent university. Her scores, however, were they to stay the same, would undermine her academic achievements. Hannah’s father, also a surgeon with gentle brown eyes and a firm-set jaw, had already written off a high score. You have to accept who you are, he told her. Just do your best. He hoped that with my tutoring she might raise some of her scores above 600. Hannah would barely look at him. I had already made several unsuccessful attempts to rectify the clerical error of Kevin’s English class placement when it dawned on me that he couldn’t read. Well, he could read – just not all the words. “‘Mr. Bumble wiped the per- pers-’ What’s that? What’s that say?” His demand would come so fluidly and the others chimed in so helpfully – “perspiration!” – that Kevin barely broke stride. Wait a minute, I thought. Why doesn’t he just read it? To avoid humiliating Kevin in front of the class, I kept him after the bell and confronted him. I offered to help. Sure, he said. He’d be happy to come for extra help. Kevin came to exactly one such session. After a couple of no-shows, he reluctantly confessed that he’d missed work scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins to make our first meeting and could not continue. His mom had not found a new job since an extended hospital stay with asthma cost her her last one. He needed to help out with the rent and find his own money for things like dates with girls and sneakers. No one had called Kevin out on his deficits – or, if they had, no one at home followed up. A couple of missed connections – like that butterfly flapping its wings in Japan – set a course for dysfunction through an apathetic school system, creating a young man with a missing mental limb. But Hannah Meacham’s predicament made no sense. How had her school, her parents – even Hannah herself – missed the elephant in her academic room? How had she managed to function and even succeed at Dalton, a school bristling with Ivy League-level intellectual rigor and competition? Was her inability to decipher words some kind of incurable and shameful condition that one simply must endure in secret? And how would I help her enough to raise her score? Classmates with comparable grades had scored in the high 600s or 700s on the PSAT already (scores for each section range from 200 to 800), but Hannah had landed in the low to mid-500s, a few ticks above the national average. Her grades at Dalton made Hannah a candidate for an elite college – not quite Harvard and Yale, but certainly an Ivy League or equivalent university. Her scores, however, were they to stay the same, would undermine her academic achievements. Hannah’s father, also a surgeon with gentle brown eyes and a firm-set jaw, had already written off a high score. You have to accept who you are, he told her. Just do your best. He hoped that with my tutoring she might raise some of her scores above 600. Hannah would barely look at him. I had already made several unsuccessful attempts to rectify the clerical error of Kevin’s English class placement when it dawned on me that he couldn’t read. Well, he could read – just not all the words. “‘Mr. Bumble wiped the per- pers-’ What’s that? What’s that say?” His demand would come so fluidly and the others chimed in so helpfully – “perspiration!” – that Kevin barely broke stride. Wait a minute, I thought. Why doesn’t he just read it? To avoid humiliating Kevin in front of the class, I kept him after the bell and confronted him. I offered to help. Sure, he said. He’d be happy to come for extra help. Kevin came to exactly one such session. After a couple of no-shows, he reluctantly confessed that he’d missed work scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins to make our first meeting and could not continue. His mom had not found a new job since an extended hospital stay with asthma cost her her last one. He needed to help out with the rent and find his own money for things like dates with girls and sneakers. No one had called Kevin out on his deficits – or, if they had, no one at home followed up. A couple of missed connections – like that butterfly flapping its wings in Japan – set a course for dysfunction through an apathetic school system, creating a young man with a missing mental limb. But Hannah Meacham’s predicament made no sense. How had her school, her parents – even Hannah herself – missed the elephant in her academic room? How had she managed to function and even succeed at Dalton, a school bristling with Ivy League-level intellectual rigor and competition? Was her inability to decipher words some kind of incurable and shameful condition that one simply must endure in secret? And how would I help her enough to raise her score? I had scant preparation for my first teaching gig, but I knew I’d better “start out tough.” “You can always ease up later,” went the conventional wisdom. I was a little worried about that. I’m not exactly tough – really more of an empath – plus, the ebullience I felt at the prospect of helping so many cool, New York City kids learn – the difference I was gonna make in their lives – all of that wiped out the realistic possibility of a stern demeanor from me.