How To Help Kids Recover From Lost Learning Years: A Classroom Teacher’s Advice
Last Wednesday, I was erasing the whiteboard after my last 7th grade class when I noticed Mia still slouched in her desk, twisting the frayed cuff of her gray hoodie around her index finger. The room smelled like leftover Goldfish crackers and the lemon wipe I use on my desk, and the bus loop outside was already roaring with kids yelling to each other. I asked if she needed help with her homework, and she stared at her shoes for a minute before saying, “I feel like all the easy stuff I was supposed to learn is gone. I’m just always behind.” The next morning, her mom sent me an email that stopped me mid-coffee: Any help with my daughter’s lost education years?
Mia was in second grade when schools shut down. She did Zoom classes from her grandma’s couch while her mom worked 12-hour shifts at the local hospital. Grandma couldn’t figure out how to unmute her mic or pull up the daily worksheets, and most days Mia just watched cartoons off to the side while the class went on without her. By the time we all came back in person, she was already a full year behind on the basic skills that everything else builds on: fluent reading, multi-digit addition, remembering how to structure a paragraph. This isn’t unique to Mia. I’ve had more than half my class over the past three years tell me they feel like they missed big chunks of school, and their parents are all asking the same question: how do we get those years back?
When I met Mia and her mom a month after school started, her mom pulled out a printed sheet from an online assessment that listed 17 different skills Mia had not mastered, spanning second through fourth grade. She was already looking into summer programs that cost $2,000 a month, and was considering holding Mia back a year to “start over.” I see this all the time: when parents realize their kid has gaps from disrupted learning, they assume they need to redo all the missed years, cram every missing skill into as much time as possible, and fix it as fast as they can. That almost never works. I saw it with Javi, a student I had two years ago, whose dad signed him up for 2-hour tutoring sessions every Saturday after finding out he missed basic multiplication in third grade. Within a month, Javi was skipping tutoring to play basketball with his friends, and he stopped turning in homework at all.
What I told both families is that you don’t need to get back the whole lost year. You just need to find the one or two small core gaps that are holding your kid back right now, and practice those a little bit every day. For Mia, that was reading fluency. She could sound out any word I gave her, but she read so slowly that by the time she got to the end of a social studies paragraph, she couldn’t remember what she’d read. Instead of redoing all of second and third grade reading, we started with 10 minutes a day of shadow reading. What that means is, an adult reads a paragraph out loud at a normal conversational speed, then the kid reads the exact same paragraph right after, trying to match the pace. Mia and her mom do this right before dinner, while they’re waiting for the oven to beep. No worksheets, no tests, no grades. If she messes up, they just move on. For Javi, it was multiplication facts. Instead of an hour of flashcards every night, he and his dad started practicing while they waited for their pizza to bake every Friday, and he added up the total of their grocery cart while they waited in the checkout line. Five minutes a day, that’s all.
The other big change is how we talk about it. I told Mia’s mom to stop saying “you have so much to catch up on” and start saying “this month we’re working on reading faster, so it’s easier to remember what you read.” When the gap is just one small thing you’re working on right now, it doesn’t feel like this huge, permanent weight that you’ll never outrun. Most parents think they need to fix every gap at once, but that just overwhelms the kid and makes them shut down. I also tell parents not to rush to hold their kid back. In 12 years of teaching, I’ve never seen retention help a kid who has gaps from disrupted learning. It just makes them feel disconnected from their peers, and they end up no further ahead than they would be with small daily practice. Intensive, expensive programs work for some kids, but most of the time, they just add stress to the whole family and take time away from the things that keep kids mentally healthy, like playing outside or hanging out with friends.
Last week, Mia did her book report on Wonder and read a full page out loud to the whole class. She didn’t stutter, she didn’t stop to sound out words over and over, and she finished right on time. After class, she came up to me, still twisting that hoodie cuff, and said “That didn’t even feel scary.” She’s still slower than most of the other kids in her class. She still gets frustrated when we have 3-page readings for social studies. We haven’t “gotten back” those lost years, and I don’t know if we ever will, by the standard that tests and curriculums say we should. But 10 minutes a day of consistent, low-pressure practice has given her enough confidence to raise her hand, to turn in her homework, to not feel like she’s permanently broken because she missed a few years of school. Some days that’s all you can ask for, and it’s enough.
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