My son lost 18 months of learning during COVID. We're still catching up.

My son was in P1 when the schools closed for the second time. He was in P2 and P3 for the stretches that were partly online, partly in-class, inconsistently managed, and delivered by teachers who were doing their best in circumstances that nobody had trained them for. He came out of those years technically having completed P1 through P3 and actually having consolidated somewhere between P1 and P2 in the subjects that most needed physical, social, in-person delivery.

I am not exaggerating the eighteen months. I have counted it. I tracked his reading fluency against benchmarks I found online, his written Chinese against samples from a friend's child who didn't experience the same degree of disruption, his number sense against where his sister had been at the same age. The gap was real and it was specific and it was not the same across all subjects.

Maths: relatively intact. Screen-based maths practice worked reasonably well. The facts and procedures held.

English reading: moderate gap. Vocabulary was narrower than expected; comprehension of extended texts was weak in ways that only showed up later.

Chinese: significant gap. Written Chinese requires learning to produce characters through physical practice. Online Chinese lessons for P1-P2 children are an extremely poor substitute for the in-class, teacher-monitored character writing practice that the curriculum assumes. My son's character formation was poor. His stroke order was chaotic. His dictation performance in P4, when he was finally back full-time, was significantly below where it should have been.

Social-emotional: hardest to quantify but unmistakeable. He found group work difficult in P4 in ways that had nothing to do with the academic content. He had lost some facility with the ordinary friction of being with other children all day — the negotiation, the tolerance, the reading of a room. It came back gradually but it took time.

I want to be clear about what I mean by "catching up" because I don't mean drilling him into exhaustion to replicate what was missed. What I mean is identifying the specific gaps, addressing them with targeted support, and doing this at a pace that doesn't create new problems in the process of solving old ones.

The Chinese was the biggest intervention. We found a retired teacher through a neighbour who did small-group tutoring. Four children, two hours a week, focused entirely on character formation and dictation practice. It was not expensive and it was extremely effective because it was specific and consistent. Within one term, his stroke order had normalised. Within two terms, his dictation scores were within the expected range for his year group.

The English comprehension gap we addressed through reading — genuinely reading, for pleasure, not comprehension exercises. We found books he wanted to read and he read them. This took longer to show results than the Chinese tutoring but the improvement, when it came, was more durable.

The social-emotional piece resolved itself mostly without intervention, through the simple act of being back at school full-time with his cohort. By P5 he was indistinguishable, as far as I could tell, from children who hadn't experienced the same disruption.

There are things I wish I had done differently. I wish I had been more specific, earlier, in identifying which subjects were genuinely behind versus which were fine. For the first year back I was treating everything as in deficit and doing too much across the board, which was expensive and anxiety-inducing. A clearer triage would have been better.

I also wish I had been less apologetic about the COVID year when talking to his teachers. I spent P4 prefacing every conversation with "because of COVID" as if I needed to justify my child's gaps. The teachers knew. They were navigating their own versions of this with every child in every class. What would have been more useful was the specific information: here is where he is, here is what I think is behind it, here is what I'm doing at home, what do you see?

The pandemic did something to this cohort that we are still processing. The children are older now and most of them are fine. Some of the gaps closed. Some didn't close fully and became part of how these children have moved forward.

My son is in P5. He is doing well. He still finds long dictations harder than his sister did at the same age. He doesn't find Chinese effortless. But he's working, and the working is his.

That's what catching up actually looks like. Not recovering to an imaginary perfect baseline. Getting to somewhere that works.