Math Catch Up for Middle, High School, and Pre-College Students: What Actually Works
Last Saturday I had two students at my kitchen table, one at each end, both staring at math problems like they were written in ancient Greek. At one end, 12-year-old Mia, my niece, just finished 8th grade with a failing mark in pre-algebra, and needed to catch up before starting high school in the fall. At the other, 18-year-old Leo, a neighbor’s kid graduating high school this spring, got accepted to an engineering program but realized he couldn’t remember enough basic algebra to pass the college placement exam he needed to skip remedial college math. The coffee mug ring on the table was still new from my morning brew, Mia had half a blueberry scone crumbled next to her notebook, and Leo kept sneaking glances at his soccer practice calendar between problems.
Mia mumbled, “I don’t know why I can’t do this. Everyone else gets fractions, I just never have.” Leo said, “I used to get this. I aced this unit two years ago, why is it gone now?” I’ve been running small, informal math catch up sessions for local kids for four years now, and I hear these two lines on repeat, across every age group: middle schoolers who’ve fallen quietly behind, high schoolers who scraped by but built up gaps that trip them up every year, pre-college students who’ve realized what they memorized for exams didn’t stick long term.
A lot of parents I talk to think math catch up (what’s called remise à niveau in the French education system, and the same core idea applies anywhere) is just cramming a bunch of extra worksheets or repeating an entire grade’s material over summer. I saw that go wrong last year with Lila, a 15-year-old 10th grader who failed first semester geometry. Her dad bought a 500-page workbook and scheduled two hours of math every single day of summer break. She came back to school in September still scoring below passing, and refused to even talk about math homework for the first two months. The problem wasn’t that she didn’t do enough work. It was that no one stopped to find where her actual gaps were. She’d missed three weeks of middle school with a bad case of flu, and never learned how to work with angles on parallel lines. Geometry was built on that, so she wasn’t failing geometry—she was failing that one 7th grade concept that no one had ever gone back to fix.
When we started with Lila, we first did a 30-question diagnostic test that took 40 minutes, just enough to map exactly which concepts she was missing. We didn’t start with geometry review first. We spent 25 minutes three days a week for two weeks working through that angle concept, using actual protractors and drawing out street intersections near our house to make it concrete. Once that clicked, we only focused on the other gaps that would come up in second semester geometry, not every single topic from middle school. By mid-year, she was pulling a C+, and didn’t shut down when someone brought up math homework anymore.
Back at my kitchen table Saturday, Mia’s gap follows the same pattern. It goes all the way back to 5th grade, when she missed two weeks with mono and never caught up on equivalent fractions. Every new topic after that—adding fractions, pre-algebra ratios, everything—built on that one idea, so she just got further behind every year, and started thinking she was inherently bad at math. Instead of starting with 8th grade review, we started with that 5th grade gap. We use measuring cups when we bake after sessions to practice: I ask her to show me 3/4 of a cup two different ways, to compare 2/3 and 3/4, that kind of thing. It’s 20 minutes a day, three days a week. No two-hour blocks, no hundred repetitive worksheets. Last week she got three equivalent fraction problems right in a row, and didn’t mumble that she was bad at math when she finished.
For Leo, the pre-college student, his problem is different. He got good grades through high school by memorizing formulas and tricks for tests, never stopping to connect how different concepts fit together. He stopped taking math second semester of his senior year, so all the memorized stuff fell out of his head. His gap isn’t a missing early topic, it’s that he never built a solid understanding of how core concepts work. So instead of having him do 50 practice problems a session, we do 5, and after each one, he has to explain out loud why each step works, not just what step he did. When he got stuck on that quadratic Saturday, I didn’t give him the factoring rule. I asked him to walk me through what happens when you multiply two binomials, and he connected the dots on his own. Now he can factor it even if he forgets the little trick he memorized in 10th grade.
What I tell parents, regardless of their kid’s age, is that math catch up doesn’t have to be a huge, stressful project. You don’t need to hire an expensive tutor if that’s not in your budget, though small group sessions work well for a lot of kids. The concrete steps that work every time are: first, do a short diagnostic to find actual gaps, don’t just guess or start from the beginning of the last grade. Most free diagnostic tests are online, 30 to 50 questions max, that’s enough. Second, match the work to the gap, not the grade level. If a 10th grader is missing a 7th grade concept, spend time on that 7th grade concept first, don’t force them to keep struggling with 10th grade work that builds on it. Third, keep sessions short and consistent: 20 to 30 minutes three or four days a week is way more effective than three hours on a single Saturday. It avoids burnout, and the consistent practice sticks better. Fourth, for older kids, don’t waste time re-doing topics they already get right. For pre-college students, focus on the core concepts colleges always expect you to know: algebra, basic trig, functions, not the advanced AP material you just tested on.
By 12:30, Mia packed up her notebook, wiped the crumbs from the table, and ran out to meet her friend at the skate park. Leo packed his practice test, said he’d do the 5 problems I assigned for Wednesday, and headed to soccer practice. We’re still a month out from Mia’s first day of high school and Leo’s placement test, and there’s no guarantee everything will go perfectly. Leo might still end up in that introductory college math class he’s trying to skip. Mia might hit a new topic next month that trips her up again. But what’s working right now is that neither of them are staring at the page thinking they’re just bad at math. They’re seeing that gaps are just small, fixable things, not proof they can’t do the work. That’s more than enough to start with.
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