What To Do When Your Child Has Lost Years Of Education: Practical Tips From A Classroom Teacher
Last month, I pulled a plastic folding chair next to my desk for an after-school parent meeting, and Mia twisted the strap of her canvas grocery tote while she talked, a half-empty travel coffee sweating on the table between us. Her 12-year-old son Javi is in my 7th grade class, and she got right to the point: “I see all these posts about learning loss, and I can’t stop panicking. We moved three times during COVID, I worked two jobs, he barely logged into remote school. We basically lost three years. Any help for his lost education years? I don’t know if he’ll ever catch up.”
Javi is the kid who slumps low in his chair, turns his notebook face-down when I walk by, and cracks jokes to get the class laughing when I call on him to read. I’ve been teaching middle school for 14 years, and I’ve had this same conversation with at least 30 parents just in the last two years. “Lost education years” isn’t an abstract statistic to me; it’s Javi’s half-blank notebook, it’s a mom staying up late googling tutoring centers after her second shift, it’s a kid who thinks he’s “bad at school” before he even walks in the door each morning.
When we first started seeing widespread gaps after schools reopened, I bought into the idea that we just needed to cram. I assigned extra homework, pulled kids out of recess for skill drills, sent home 20-page practice packets. What happened? Every single one of those kids ended up more stressed, more disengaged, more convinced they couldn’t do the work. One mom told me her son started throwing up before school because he was so scared of the extra work I gave him. That’s when I stopped, and started trying something different.
With Javi, we started by throwing out the phrase “catching up.” It’s a terrible phrase, because it implies you have to make up every single missed lesson in a year or two, or you’re a failure. Instead, we picked exactly two non-negotiable skills to work on this school year. That’s it, not 10, not 20. For Javi, the two skills were reading a 3-page text out loud without stopping more than three times, and writing a 5-sentence paragraph with correct capitalization and end punctuation. Those are the two skills that were blocking him from doing 7th grade work – he can understand the big ideas in social studies when I read the text out loud, but he can’t get through it on his own. No extra stuff, no cramming 3rd, 4th and 5th grade spelling words all at once.
At home, Mia doesn’t add an extra hour of school work after Javi’s already done a full day. Instead, we weave those two skills into the stuff they already do. When they order pizza on Friday nights, Javi reads the toppings list out loud to his little sister for 2 minutes. When he texts his cousin to plan a skate trip, Mia just asks him to check that every sentence has a period before he hits send. When they go to the skate park, Javi reads the park rules out loud once before he starts skating. That adds up to 10 minutes of practice a day, no fighting, no extra screen time for tutoring, no stress.
We also didn’t hide the gap from Javi. A lot of people think you should just pass kids along and pretend everything is fine, but kids know when they’re behind. Javi thought I thought he was just a lazy kid who didn’t care. I pulled him aside after class one day, and I said “You missed a lot of practice when you were younger, that’s not your fault. We’re not going to pretend it didn’t happen, we’re just going to work on one small thing at a time until it gets easier.” That’s it, no big speech, no pity. He just nodded, but after that, he stopped turning his notebook over when I walked by his desk.
Last week, Javi read a 3-page story I found about a teen who built his own skate ramp out of scrap wood. That’s his thing, skateboarding, so we don’t use generic passages about cats or farm life. He got through the whole thing, only stopped twice to sound out a word. After class, he hung around by my desk, didn’t say anything, just held up the paper so I could see the check mark I put on it. I said “That took a lot of focus, nice work.” He shrugged and walked out, but he was smiling a little.
I get it, it’s scary when you realize your kid missed years of school. The headlines make it sound like one interrupted year means they’ll never graduate, never get a job, never be okay. But the biggest damage isn’t the missed lessons. It’s the panic that makes us push too hard, that makes kids think they’re broken because their education got interrupted.
If you’re sitting where Mia was six months ago, start small. Pick two skills, not 20. Integrate practice into the stuff you already do, don’t add extra hours of work. Talk to your kid about it plain and simple, don’t sugarcoat it and don’t blame them. Skip the $80 an hour cramming tutor if that stresses you out and stresses your kid out – if you need extra help, look for someone who starts with getting to know your kid’s interests before they pull out a worksheet.
It’s been four months since we started with Javi. He’s still three grade levels behind in reading, according to our district’s tests. He still skips homework sometimes when he’s had a bad day, still cracks jokes to get out of reading out loud. But Mia told me last week they don’t fight about homework every night anymore. Javi raises his hand at least once a week now, instead of never. We don’t know if he’ll be “caught up” by the time he gets to high school. We’re not even aiming for that right now. We’re just aiming for one small, good week of practice at a time, and right now, that’s enough.
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