History

Seth Linden founded Tutorpedia at the end of 2005 after years of teaching, tutoring, and research in the field of primary and secondary education. Seth’s initial inspiration was to connect students with tutors more easily. “I found plenty of tutors, and plenty of students who needed and wanted tutoring, but not a very effective way of connecting the two. I hoped Tutorpedia would bridge this disparity in access by providing one resource where students could find exceptional tutors to meet any academic need they faced.”

In the summer of 2007, the state of California approved Tutorpedia's application to be a district-sponsored tutoring provider. In the following two years, Tutorpedia’s SES program provided over 4,400 hours of personalized tutoring to over 200 low-income students at under-performing schools for free, through the No Child Left Behind Act. This work represented Seth’s firm conviction to help students in need regardless of socioeconomic status.

In the summer of 2009, Tutorpedia expanded its repertoire of services and launched its first project-based workshops. That fall, after David Taus came on board as Tutorpedia’s Director of Operations and Education, Tutorpedia began to deliver free talks to schools and educational organizations on a variety of topics. It was at this time that the Tutorpedia Foundation was established in order to provide low income students with better and free access to high quality tutoring and other educational resources.

Tutorpedia now has over 60 exceptional tutors, offers over 30 enrichment and skills-based workshops, and delivers several talks on a variety of educational topics. Our tutors have worked with over 800 students in over 110 Bay Area schools, and we have no intention of slowing down. Even though we are growing in significant and exciting ways, we ground all our work in what is most important: the academic and intellectual success that students experience, bolstered by the relationships that they have built with their tutor.

Tutorpedia's Leadership Team

Seth Linden, MAT - Founding Director

Seth Linden graduated from Stanford with a Bachelor of Arts in Human Biology, taught for a couple of years, and then went to Brown for a Master of Arts in Teaching (Secondary Education, Science). He has over 12 years of teaching and tutoring experience in both public and private schools, including two years at Sacred Heart Preparatory, one of the Bay Area's premier independent schools. Seth has taught SAT classes, helped students pass the HSPT and CAHSEE, and tutored all areas and levels of math and science.

David Taus, M.Ed. - Director of Education and Operations

David Taus has been teaching since the age of 14. He worked as a private tutor and mentor while in high school and college, and graduated from Brown University with a degree in Psychology. David earned his Masters degree in Education and teaching credential at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. He then spent several years teaching high school biology, psychology, chemistry, and physics in the Boston Public Schools and at charter schools in San Francisco. In addition to his work in education, David has co-authored a book about evolutionary psychology and plays guitar in a successful Bay Area rock band, Guella.

Emma Bundy - Director of Marketing and Private Tutoring

Emma is a life-long learning enthusiast and Bay Area native who hails from Berkeley. Working as a camp counselor in Northern California at the Bar 717 Ranch, Emma developed an enthusiasm for working with youth, chopping wood, and educating kids about the outdoors. After graduating from Trinity College in Connecticut with a dual degree in Public Policy & Law and Spanish, she returned to the Bay Area. Emma worked for several years in the nonprofit sector, where she took note of the important issues education organizations are working to address on a daily basis. Fortunately this interest in education and in providing the best academic support for Bay Area students led her to Tutorpedia.

Alex Miley - Lead Tutor (SF)

Alex was born and raised in San Francisco, and earned her BA in Language Studies from UC Santa Cruz. She is passionate about linguistics and languages, and in addition to Spanish, has studied Latin, some French, and is currently studying Arabic. She has coached UCSC students in academic writing, tutored and mentored fourth graders in SF’s Chinatown through Americorps, and spent a year volunteering as an English teacher while studying abroad at the University of Chile in Santiago. After a year teaching English as a Foreign Language in Alexandria, Egypt, she is happy to be back home as a Lead Tutor with Tutorpedia!

John Norris - Lead Tutor (Peninsula)

John grew up in Atlanta, GA and moved to the Bay Area to attend Stanford, where he majored in Biomedical Engineering. He joined Tutorpedia in 2008 and quickly became one of our busiest and most popular tutors. In addition to working one-on-one directly with students and teaching our popular SAT workshop, John currently manages Tutorpedia school site programs in San Jose (Morrill Middle School), Redwood City (Kennedy and McKinley Middle School), and East Palo Alto (Chavez Academy and more recently East Palo Alto Academy, a Stanford New School).

Lara Kiswani - Lead Tutor (East Bay)

Lara was raised in the Bay Area, went to school at UC Davis and received her B.A. in International Relations, with an emphasis on Peoples and Nationalities. While at Davis, she organized workshops, teach-ins, helped develop the Middle East South Asia Minor program and tutored at local schools. She then worked as a substitute teacher and program director, developing educational programs at community nonprofits. She has since earned her M.A. in Education, with an emphasis on Equity and Social Justice, from SFSU, where her research focused on language, culture and identity.