By Susan Elise Campbell
Jane Chen left Wall Street to start a writing center for youth in a career leap that surprised her peers in the world of investment banking. But helping children read and write is something Chen has been devoted to since she was 16 years old.
Her business, Eyre Writing Center, was launched January 2020 from Saratoga CoWorks and Chen has already helped 900 middle school children “take the mystery out of writing well,” she said.
“At the end of my time in asset management on Wall Street I was writing a curriculum for a new writing center for the new age,” said Chen, whose parents named her after The literary character, Jane Eyre. “My task was to break down the foundations of writing and make it a science.”
The center would focus on middle school students because “we have great elementary schools and, depending on the district, great high schools,” she said. “But middle schools are underperforming so it is difficult for students to jump from eighth to ninth grade. When I saw what books were on the recommended summer reading list for seventy or eighth grade, I realized I had these titles on my reading list in fifth grade.”
She said she doesn’t know exactly what is behind the drop in basic skills, it was “aggravated by COVID,” she said. “I don’t look at data to see where the problems may lie, but I know anecdotally that there has been a deterioration in the quality of writing.”
As Chen edited college essays on the side she was “learning what the students weren’t learning. Switching tenses, poor sentence structure and punctuation are fundamentals that should have been addressed 10 years earlier,” she said.
