What I’ve learned helping my teen make up for lost education years
It was 8:17 on a Tuesday last month, and I was wiping peanut butter off the kitchen counter when Javi crumpled his algebra worksheet into a ball and threw it at the recycling bin. It bounced off the edge and rolled under his soccer cleats, which had been sitting by the door since practice that morning. “I shouldn’t be this stupid,” he said. “Everyone my age knows how to do this. I lost all those years, and I’m never going to catch up.”
When I say “lost years,” that’s what we call the two years of middle school he spent mostly learning from his bedroom during lockdown. My husband and I were both working full time from our dining room back then, and we couldn’t stand over his shoulder to make sure he logged into every class or turned in every assignment. He was 12, he hated zoom, he’d turn his camera off and play phone games under his desk while we sat 10 feet away in back-to-back meetings. We didn’t notice how bad the gap was until he went back to in-person school in 9th grade. His first quarter report card had a D in math, and his teacher wrote that he couldn’t solve basic fraction problems taught in 7th grade.
I panicked. I called the school counselor, got a referral to a top-rated local tutor, paid $320 up front for four sessions. Javi would sit on the couch after school, stare at his shoes, and not answer when the tutor asked him questions. After the fourth session she emailed me and said he wasn’t engaged, she couldn’t help him if he wouldn’t participate. I sat on the garage step that night after she left, staring at my old 1998 dirt bike that Javi had been bugging me to fix up for months. I called him out, kicked a loose nail on the concrete, and said, “What if we stop doing the tutor thing. What do you actually want to be able to do that you need school skills for?”
He kicked the tire of the bike and said, “I want to get this running. I want to ride it to my friend Mia’s house this summer. To do that I need new sprockets, I have to figure out what size fits, and everyone online says you have to calculate gear ratio, and I don’t know how.”
That was the turning point. We threw out the original plan: no redoing all of 7th and 8th grade math in order, no hour-long after school worksheets, no forcing him to “get back to grade level” by the end of the semester. Instead, we started with gear ratio. I pulled up a 10-minute YouTube video that broke it down for beginners, we sat on the garage floor with a calculator and a spiral notebook, and we figured out what size sprocket he needed. The whole thing took 12 minutes. A week later, he found a used sprocket on Facebook Marketplace for $25, and he had to add sales tax and figure out if he had enough from his lawn mowing job. That’s when we did percentages, right there on the hood of my car, while we waited for the seller to text him back.
I used to think making up lost education years meant checking every box that was missed, in order, until you hit the official grade level marker. That’s what all the school newsletters and online articles told me. But what I found is that for most kids who’ve missed big chunks of school, the biggest problem isn’t just the missing facts. It’s the shame. Javi used to skip math class once a week because he didn’t want to be called on to solve a problem he couldn’t do. He didn’t want other kids to know how far behind he was. When we started learning only what he needed for the thing he cared about, that shame started to fade. He wasn’t doing useless worksheets to please a teacher. He was doing work that got him closer to riding his bike.
I made one small concrete change at school that made a huge difference. I emailed all his teachers and asked them to swap the 17 missing 8th grade assignments he was supposed to make up for credit for small, project-based checks. Instead of writing five 5-paragraph essays on 19th century poets to make up his missed English credit, he now writes a monthly post for the local teen dirt bike group about used parts he’s tested, and that counts for his writing practice. Most schools will agree to this kind of adjustment if you ask clearly and come with a specific alternative, instead of just asking for “extra help.” I also cut all catch-up work to 15 minutes a day, max. If we get through what we need for his current project in 10 minutes, we’re done. No extra work just to fill time.
I stopped saying the vague encouraging things everyone tells you to say, too. I don’t say “it’s okay, you’ll catch up” anymore—it feels hollow to him, like I’m brushing off how stuck he feels. Now when he gets frustrated, I say, “This feels hard because you never got taught this the first time everyone else learned it. Let’s just do this one step right now.” That works far better.
It’s been a year and a half since we threw out the formal tutor plan. Javi still scores below grade level on the school’s standardized math tests. He still has nights like that Tuesday last month, where he crumples up paper and says he’s too far behind. Last month, he calculated the fuel ratio for his bike’s two-stroke engine all by himself, ordered the right amount of oil online, and got the engine started for the first time. He rode it around the block, and came back grinning with grease on his cheek. Next month he’s studying for his learner’s permit, and he’s been working through the driving math questions—stopping distance, speed, gas mileage—on his own after dinner.
We don’t know if he’ll catch up to the official timeline before he graduates high school. Some days I still worry about it. But right now, he’s showing up to class every day, he asks for help when he needs it, and he knows how to learn what he needs to get the things he wants. That’s more progress than I ever thought we’d have when we were staring down all those lost years.
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