There are eight weeks left and eleven chapters outstanding. Somebody has to decide what is not going to happen, and it should not be the clock.
Updated 3 November 2026 · Great Home Tutor · Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon
First establish which kind of behind you are dealing with: the school is behind, your child is behind the school, or one strand within a subject has collapsed. The remedies are different and they are not interchangeable. Then triage honestly into what must be secure, what can be compressed, and what is a loss this year.
| Applies to | Classes 9 to 12, all boards |
|---|---|
| First step | Decide which of three situations this is |
| Service area | Home tuition in Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon · online anywhere |
| Enquiries | +91 92121 42427 |
Three different problems that look identical
Before anything is planned, find out which of these you have. Ask the child which chapters the class has finished, and separately, which chapters they themselves could attempt today.
- The school is behind. The whole class is in the same position. The last chapters will be rushed in the final weeks, or handed over as self-study.
- Your child is behind the school. The class has moved on and your child has not. Every new lesson is being received on a base that is not there.
- One strand has collapsed. Coverage is fine on paper, but within the subject, a particular type of material has never worked. The child is not behind, they are hollow in one place.
Treating the second as the first is the commonest and most expensive error. It leads to a plan that races ahead of the school, on a foundation that is already missing.
If the school is behind
You have more warning than it feels like, and the useful move is to get ahead privately, but not on the chapters that look hardest. Get ahead on the chapters that take the longest to learn, which is a different list. A chapter that is conceptually simple but needs forty problems before it is reliable is far more dangerous to leave until March than one that is difficult to understand and then finished.
Ask the tutor to identify those, and start them now, in parallel with whatever the school is teaching. When the school eventually rushes them, your child is revising rather than meeting them for the first time in a hurried week.
If your child is behind the school
The instinct is to chase, and it is usually wrong. Chasing means learning today's lesson tonight, on top of the three lessons that were never understood, and it produces a child who is permanently a week behind and increasingly convinced they are not capable.
The better arrangement is deliberately two-track. A fixed part of each week goes to the current chapter, so the child is not lost in class and can attempt the next test. The rest goes backwards, to the specific earlier chapter everything is resting on. This feels slower for about three weeks and then stops feeling slow, because the current chapter starts making sense without extra effort.
It also requires accepting that the next unit test may be poor. That is a real cost and it should be discussed rather than discovered.
The triage: three buckets
Sit down with the tutor, the syllabus and the marking weights, and put every remaining chapter in one of three places.
- Must be secure. High weight in the paper, or foundational for next year. These get the time regardless of how the child feels about them.
- Can be compressed. Self-contained, procedural, learnable late. Often formula-driven chapters that reward a fortnight of focused drilling and do not depend on anything else.
- Accepted as a loss. Low weight, isolated, not needed next year, and there is genuinely not time. Say so, write it down, and stop feeling guilty about it every evening.
The third bucket is the one families refuse to fill, and refusing to fill it does not make the chapters get done. It only means the choice is made later, at two in the morning in February, by a tired student who will make it badly.
What must never be cut
Whatever the next class is built on. A chapter dropped in Class 11 does not disappear; it turns up in Class 12 wearing a different name, and the cost is paid with interest. This is the one rule worth holding against every argument about marks weighting, and it is the reason the triage should be done with a tutor who teaches the following year, not only the current one.
Gurgaon: fewer sessions, longer ones
Catching up needs more contact time than ordinary tuition, and in Gurgaon that runs into travel. Sectors are spread out, and a tutor adding a third weekday session may be adding an hour of driving to a day that is already long. In practice two longer sessions often work better here than three short ones, with a shorter online session mid-week for checking work rather than teaching it. We run home tuition across Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon and online anywhere, and a mixed arrangement is usually the cheapest way to buy the extra hours.
The thing most parents get wrong here. They cut the chapter the child dislikes. The correct cut is usually the one that is self-contained and cheap to learn late, which is frequently a chapter the child quite enjoys. The disliked chapter is often disliked precisely because it is foundational and has never made sense, which makes it the last thing to abandon.
Questions parents ask
Should we add more tuition hours?
Some, yes, but hours are not the main lever and they are the most expensive one. A correct triage with the existing hours beats an extra session a week spent on the wrong chapters.
Is it worth complaining to the school if the school is behind?
Worth raising, calmly, and worth asking what the plan for the remaining chapters is. Do not build your plan on the answer. Build it on the assumption that the last chapters will arrive late and fast.
My child wants to skip the chapters they find hard and finish the easy ones for the morale.
A small amount of that is reasonable, and one quick win early genuinely helps. As a strategy it fails, because the hard chapters are usually the ones the rest depends on.
How do we know which chapters carry the most marks?
The board publishes the weighting, and the last few years' papers show what actually gets asked. Both are freely available and worth half an hour of somebody's evening.
Can a child recover a whole term in the last two months?
Sometimes, in a procedural subject with a disciplined plan. Rarely in a subject that builds cumulatively, and promising it is unkind. What is nearly always recoverable is enough to pass well and to start the next year without a hole.
Should we tell the child which chapters we are giving up on?
Yes. A student who knows there are seven chapters, not eleven, works better than one carrying a vague and growing sense that it is all impossible.
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