How to Help Kids Recover Lost Education Years After Disruption
The sticky peanut butter spot on our kitchen table has been there for three days, and last night I watched my 14-year-old Javi push his crumpled pre-algebra worksheet into it until the edge turned translucent. “I lost two whole years of school, okay?” he said, not looking at me. “What’s the point of even trying? Those years are gone. I’m always going to be behind.”
We moved cross-country in 2021, right when the after-effects of the pandemic were still messing up school districts. My husband got a new job, our housing fell through, we spent eight months living in a friend’s basement with six other people. Javi was supposed to start sixth grade, but the online school we could get him into required consistent Wi-Fi that we didn’t have. Half the time he couldn’t even log into class, and when he did, the connection cut out every ten minutes. By the time we got our own place and he enrolled in public school, testing put him three grade levels behind in reading and two in math. The term “lost education years” got thrown around so much in parent-teacher meetings that it started to feel like a permanent tattoo, not a temporary setback.
I sat down with his learning support teacher, Ms. Lopez, a month after he started, drinking burnt coffee from the teacher’s lounge vending machine that ate my dollar before I got it. She had a golden retriever sticker peeling off the corner of her laptop, and she didn’t start with the generic “he’ll catch up if he just tries harder” speech I’d heard a dozen times. “Most parents I work with mess this up by trying to cram three years of work into one,” she said. “You can’t get back the time that’s gone, but you don’t have to. You just have to build forward, one small piece at a time.”
First, we threw out the three full-grade workbooks I’d bought on Amazon for $180. They’re still in a corner of our closet, unopened. Instead of trying to backfill every single gap from sixth and seventh grade, we pick one or two core skills each quarter that tie directly to what Javi’s learning right now. This semester, he’s in pre-algebra, so the only extra work he does is 10 minutes of fraction and decimal practice four nights a week. That’s it. No hour-long sessions after he’s already sat through seven hours of school. No weekend workshops. Just 10 minutes, usually while I’m washing dishes after dinner.
For reading, the school suggested starting with sixth-grade level novels to build his skills, but Javi would rather clean the bathroom than read a book about a middle school kid’s camping trip. His whole life right now revolves around fixing up the old 2008 dirt bike he bought for $300 from a neighbor. So we got a subscription to a dirt bike magazine, checked out used repair manuals from the library, and he reads one short article a night, out loud if he wants, silently if he doesn’t. In six months, his reading level went up half a grade, and he didn’t even feel like he was doing “school work.” Ms. Lopez told me any reading is good reading, regardless of what it is, and she was right.
We tried one big-name tutoring service first, where the tutor mapped out a two-year plan to get Javi “back on grade level” that started with re-doing all of fifth grade math. Javi checked out after the first session, slouched in his chair and didn’t say a word the whole ride home. Now we have a 16-year-old kid from the high school who races dirt bikes comes over once a week for an hour. They work on fractions while they calculate engine ratios and tire sizes for Javi’s bike, and Javi looks forward to it. It’s a third of the cost of the big tutoring service, and it works ten times better.
Javi still has bad days. Last month he failed a history test because he couldn’t get through all the reading fast enough, and he came home and slammed his backpack down and said the same thing he said that first night: “I lost those years. I’m never going to catch up.” I used to jump in and say “Of course you will, you just have to try harder” which never helped. Now I just ask him one question: “Do you want to order pizza and start working through that test retake tomorrow, or do you want to load the bike in the truck and go ride the track for a couple hours?” He almost always picks the track, and the next day he’s ready to sit down and try again.
I’ve stopped thinking about those two years as something that’s gone forever that we have to get back. Ms. Lopez pointed out that Javi is learning the skills he missed when he’s 14, which is older than when he was supposed to learn them, so his brain is more developed and he picks things up faster than a 12-year-old would. Those years weren’t wasted, anyway. Javi spent that time helping our friend fix his fence, learning to change the oil on my car, hanging out with older kids in the neighborhood. They just weren’t the years of school we expected.
Right now, Javi’s still a year and a half behind where state standards say he should be. He might not be “caught up” by the time he starts high school, and that’s okay. We’re not in a race. He just wrote a three-paragraph essay for English class about his favorite local riding trails, and got a B on it. He can calculate how much gas he needs for a full day of riding without pulling out a calculator. Those lost years don’t come back, but the skills do, one 10-minute practice session at a time. We’re still going slow, and some days are harder than others, but that’s all we can do.
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