A card failed four times has stopped being a memory problem. Repeating it harder is the wrong response; re-teaching the idea behind it is the right one. So the card quietly stops being the strategy, and the tutor picks the topic up in conversation.
At a glance
| What happens | |
|---|---|
| Trigger | 4 failures ("Tricky") on the same card |
| What the child sees | Nothing changes |
| What the tutor receives | The card's misconception, scoped to their own subject |
| Framing to the tutor | Re-teach this idea — do not re-drill the card |
| Cards reported at once | Up to three, so a session is not hijacked |
| Cards no longer in use | Never reported |
The word comes from Anki
Anki calls these cards leeches: cards that suck up review time indefinitely without ever being learned. Its default response is to suspend the card after eight failures and tag it, leaving the user to decide what to do. That is a reasonable answer for an adult who can diagnose their own deck.
It is not a useful answer for a twelve-year-old, for two reasons. A child will not rewrite the card, and — more importantly — the card was probably never the problem.
Four failures means the idea is wrong, not the memory
If your child has failed When is a fraction in its simplest form? four separate times across weeks, the missing piece is not repetition. Something upstream is misassembled: perhaps they think "simplest" means "smallest numbers", or they are looking for a rule to apply rather than a property to check.
No amount of showing them the card fixes that. A card can only test the idea; it cannot install it. What fixes it is a person noticing and explaining it differently.
So at four failures, the card stops being the intervention. It is flagged, and the tutor is told at the start of the next session — along with the misconception the card was originally written to catch, which is stored on the card precisely for this moment.
What the tutor is told, and how
The tutor receives something close to:
Stuck card (re-teach this, don't just re-drill): "When is a fraction in its simplest form?" — misconception: thinks simplest means smallest numerator.
Three rules govern that message, and each exists to prevent a specific failure:
It is scoped to the subject. Professor Pi hears about stuck maths cards and never about a stuck chemistry card. A tutor who starts a maths session by raising a chemistry difficulty is not being helpful, they are being surveillance.
It is framed as re-teach, not re-drill. Without that framing a language model will do the obvious thing and ask the question again. The instruction is explicit because the default behaviour is wrong.
It is capped at three cards. A child with a bad fortnight could otherwise generate a list long enough to turn the whole session into remediation. Three is enough to guide the lesson without replacing it.
Your child is not told
Nothing changes on their screen. There is no warning triangle, no "you're struggling with this" banner, no notification.
This is a deliberate stance. Telling a child they are stuck is information they almost always already have, delivered in a form they can do nothing with. The useful move is invisible to them: the next conversation happens to approach the idea from a different angle, and the card starts working. The intervention should feel like being taught, not like being flagged.
Cards that have left rotation are never reported
If a card has been put away or locked in, it stops being reported, even if it was a leech before. The reason is that a stuck card is only interesting while it is still part of your child's practice. Reporting a card the child has deliberately retired would mean the tutor commenting on their housekeeping, which is not the tutor's business.
Why the threshold is four, not eight
Anki's default is eight failures. Ours is four, for two reasons.
Collections here are small, so waiting for eight failures on a card with widening gaps could take most of a year. And there is a tutor available: because the cost of acting is a sentence in the next session rather than a decision the child has to make, we can afford to act earlier. Where the response to a problem is cheap and gentle, the threshold should be low.
What this looks like as a parent
Mostly, you will not see it. What you may notice is that a topic your child kept getting wrong stops being a sore point after a session or two — not because they drilled it, but because someone explained it again in a different way, at the moment the system noticed it was needed.
FAQ
What is a leech card?
A card that keeps being failed. The term comes from Anki, where such cards drain review time without ever being learned. Ours are flagged after four failures.
What happens when a card is flagged?
The tutor is told, with the misconception the card was written to catch, so the next session re-teaches the underlying idea rather than testing the same card again.
Is my child told the card is a problem?
No. Nothing on their screen changes, and no warning appears. Being told you are stuck rarely helps; being taught the idea differently does.