Marcus, in his own words
My name is Marco Bernardi, but almost everyone calls me Marcus, and so does the school.
I grew up bilingual thanks to my mother, who loved languages. When I was about ten I read The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I fell in love with the language and with British culture.
My working life went through hospitality, management and running businesses in different sectors, always with an eye on technology. I lived and worked in countries and cultures very different from each other, and in 2017, while travelling, I started teaching English.
I was a good teacher. To be honest, though, I wasn't in the same league as the MEI tutors you'll meet today. My job at MEI is organisation, method and service. The magic happens in the lessons, and that's the tutors' work.
MEI is where the things I've spent my life on meet: languages, cultures, business and technology. The technology part has a name: MyMEI, our student area, where nothing from your lessons gets lost.
Why MEI exists
Years spent watching students and tutors taught us one thing. People don't give up on English because they lack talent or will. They give up because they have no method, and nobody outside them who gives them a system, a context and a path.
A private tutor is what works best. But it often fails too, and not because of the tutor: many freelance tutors are very good professionals. It fails because of how the freelance model works:
- You choose the tutor you like. Everyone does; it's natural. But that way you often choose someone who does what you want, not what you need. In any discipline, sooner or later, you have to trust the process.
- Flexibility on both sides. When the student and the tutor can both move everything, gaps open up: in the weeks, and in the method.
- A tutor who needs the work tends to say yes. For example, to "business English only", as if there were a business English without the verbs, the structures and the vocabulary of every day.
- One person can't carry a school alone. Tools and academic organisation, like a student area, regular tests and a supervisor, are expensive and hard to run on your own.
- A tutor for every age. On a marketplace, the same tutor often teaches children, teenagers and adults, and nothing requires specific training for adults. Teaching an adult who needs English for work, or wants to live better in it, is a different job.
MEI was born to keep what works in a private tutor, and to fix the rest.
