My first name is pronounced ME-in.  It rhymes with Ian.  My pronouns are she / her.

I started my teaching career in 1996 as an adult literacy volunteer tutor for Project Second Chance in Pleasant Hill.  Shortly after that I began volunteering in the Resource Room at Happy Valley Elementary in Lafayette.  Six months later I went to work for the Active Reading Center in Walnut Creek where I taught the Reading Revolution method in a one-on-one setting for six and a half years.  During four of those years I was also an Assistant Director setting up, opening and managing a satellite location in Dublin.

During my time at the Active Reading Center I earned my Multiple Subjects Teaching Credential from Saint Mary’s College (1998) and my Reading Specialist Credential and Masters Degree in Education with a focus in Reading Instruction from California State University, Hayward (2003).

Over the next eight years I raised my family while taking on a couple private tutoring students and volunteering in my daughter's classrooms.

In 2012 I volunteered in the Reading Lab at my daughter's school in Lafayette.  At the end of the school year I was offered a Reading Intervention Teacher position and spent ten years supporting readers in small groups in Lafayette Elementary’s Reading Lab.  In 2022, due largely to school district budgeting, I left Lafayette Elementary to focus on my tutoring students.

While I tutored on and off between 2008 and 2010, I began privately tutoring in earnest again in 2016.  I have spent the last eight years building my tutoring business and working with elementary and middle school aged students on improving their reading and building their self esteem.

Over my career I have worked with students of all ages from kindergarten to adult with the majority of my time spent with elementary-aged students.  My true professional joy is back at my roots — teaching reading in a one-on-one setting where I can adjust my lessons to each individual student.  In true “reading geek” form, I find it thrilling when a struggling student makes a connection, when I find a book that really tickles a student’s fancy and when students get excited about what they are reading — when they forget about the nuts and bolts of reading and lose themselves in the meaning.

I am a Bay Area native who attended Lafayette Elementary, Stanley Middle School, Acalanes High School, and Diablo Valley College.  I earned my undergraduate degree in Psychology at Humboldt State University (1993).  My husband and I have been married for twenty-four years and we have two kids who are twenty-one and fifteen years old.  We live with our kids, my mother, and nine-year-old Yellow Lab, Tucker.  As a family we enjoy walking and hiking, playing board games, movies and, not surprisingly, reading!