Today’s teens are ready to become readers—if we give them the skills and help them discover the motivation.
Zinc started with a problem our founder, former English teacher Matt Bardin, couldn't ignore: students could read the words on the page without really understanding what they were reading.
More assignments weren't fixing it. More practice wasn't fixing it. Students needed to learn what strong readers actually do while they read.
So we built Zinc.
It started in an English classroom.
Matt saw students doing everything that looked like reading—decoding the words, turning the pages, offering vaguely related answers to the questions—without consistently building meaning from the text.
That disconnect became the problem Zinc set out to solve.
Zinc’s founder and former English teacher Matt Bardin breaks down the hidden teen reading challenge: comprehension.
The big question that drives us.
Zinc has grown a lot since we started in 2016 with vocabulary and articles, but we're still obsessed with the same challenge: What do students need to become successful, motivated readers?
Today, we work with secondary educators and students to keep finding better answers—combining explicit comprehension instruction, authentic texts, student choice, motivation, and a whole lot of learning from what happens in real classrooms.
We don't think better reading comes from a trick, a shortcut, or simply telling students to read more.
We think reading gets better when students know what to DO when they read.
Big questions. Strong opinions. No jargon required.
Zinc founder Matt Bardin is the author of Zen in the Art of the SAT. He writes about reading, education, motivation, tech, and the ideas that keep him up at night.