I remember tutoring undergrad math back in the day; it was a walk-in thing where students would tutor other students and the only qualification required to be a tutor was that you passed the class yourself with a 3.5 or whatever. I recall distinctly one evening helping a group of sophomores with their intro linear algebra homework. It was early in the semester, the deadline for dropping classes was a week or two away, and they just weren't getting it. More than likely they were going to just wash out.
As we were plugging away through an example exercise in the textbook, I said something like "so this is a vector and this is a matrix, so to multiply them you need to do this" and one of them said in exasperation, "well how'd you even know that's what they were??" and it finally clicked that no one had explained to them basic notational conventions. They didn't know that the bold and italic variables in the textbook actually meant something. This was compounded by professors using different notations on the blackboard during lectures - typically lowercase letters with overbars for vectors and poorly-rendered double-struck capital letters for matrices.
It took 5 minutes of listening to understand what the real problem was, and 5 minutes to fix it, but really it just took empathy. I don't know if those students ended up dropping the class - statistically they very well could have. But if they did I hope it was because they found something else to be passionate and curious about, and not because they were bullied out of it.