How To Help A Kid Struggling With Pressure In Chinese Schools: A Tutor’s Real Story
The fluorescent lights in my after-school tutoring room hummed too loud the day Xiao Yu’s mom pushed him through the door. He slouched against the wall, school uniform sleeves pulled over his hands, a chipped Minecraft Creeper keychain dangling from his backpack. His mom laid a crumpled math midterm paper on my desk, the red 52/150 bleeding through the thin paper. “He used to be top 10 in his primary school,” she said, voice tight. “Now he won’t do homework, won’t talk to anyone. Please help this kid.”
I asked his mom to wait outside, pulled out a chair for him across from me. He didn’t sit for a full minute, just stared at the scuff mark on the floor. I didn’t push math. I nodded at his keychain. “You play?” He mumbled yes, so quiet I almost missed it. Said his mom deleted his two-year survival world three weeks before, after he spent an hour playing after the midterm. “Said I was wasting my life,” he said, still staring at the floor. He finally looked up at me then, and I saw the faint pale scar on his wrist, peeking out from his sleeve. He looked away fast. Said it was nothing, just a stupid accident.
That first session, we didn’t do a single math problem. I pulled up my own old world on my phone, the tiny cottage I built by a lava lake when I was stressed between jobs two years before, and sat quiet while he pointed out what I did wrong, how I could have made the mob farm more efficient. By the end of the hour, he was talking a little louder, his hands coming out of his sleeves.
That’s the first thing I’ve learned with kids like Xiao Yu, who shut down mid-way through the gaokao track in China. Everyone around them is already talking about effort, and scores, and future, so the last thing they need is another person asking for more performance. The first concrete change I make with every kid like this is build 10 minutes of ungraded, unproductive time into every meeting. I set a timer on my phone, put my lesson plan aside, and we talk about anything that isn’t school or scores. It’s not a reward for finishing work—it’s a guarantee, no matter what. If he wants to spend the whole 10 minutes complaining about how his math teacher picks on him, that’s fine. If he wants to show me TikTok videos of people building ridiculous Minecraft castles, that’s fine too. It’s low effort for me, but for a kid who hasn’t had 10 minutes of unjudged time in months, it’s like opening a window.
When I met with his mom after that first session, I didn’t ask her to pull him out of cram school or stop caring about his grades— that’s not a realistic ask for most families here, who see good test scores as the only path to a stable life. I just asked her to make one small change: the first question she asks Xiao Yu when he walks in the door after school. Instead of “how was your test” or “did you finish your homework”, ask “what’s the weirdest thing that happened at school today”. That’s it, one 12-word question. No big life overhauls. She was skeptical at first, said she didn’t care about weird things, she cared about his gaokao score. But she agreed to try.
Two weeks later, she texted me a screenshot of their WeChat chat. Xiao Yu had come home, answered her question, and rambled for three paragraphs about how his classmate brought a pet duck to school and it got loose in the hallway, pooped on the teacher’s shoes, and got sent to the principal’s office. He didn’t mention his quiz that day until the end of the conversation. That’s a bigger win than a 20-point score jump, I told her.
When we started working on math, I changed one more small thing from the standard routine. Most teachers and tutors mark every wrong answer with a red X, add up the score at the top, right? That’s what Xiao Yu was used to. I stopped doing that. I just circle the wrong problems, write “let’s walk through this” next to them, and don’t add up the score until we’ve fixed them together. And after every three problems, I stop and ask him what he thinks—does this problem make sense? Is it stupid? Does it remind you of anything? I’m not trying to make math fun, I’m just trying to remind him that his opinion matters more than the final answer.
A lot of people outside China look at our education system and say the problem is just too much homework, too many exams. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. The quiet kids shutting down like Xiao Yu aren’t just tired. They’ve had their entire identity reduced to a number. If the number is good, they’re a good kid, a good son, worth loving. If it’s bad, they’re a disappointment, a waste of time. When that’s the only story you hear every day, why would you keep trying? If you try and still get a bad number, you’re just a bigger disappointment. It’s easier to shut down, to stop trying, than to carry that.
Last week, Xiao Yu got a 68 on his monthly math test. It’s still way below the passing mark for his grade. His mom got upset, went back to old habits, didn’t talk to him for two days. He came to tutoring, didn’t say a word for the first 15 minutes of our ungraded time, then pulled a crumpled drawing out of his pocket. It was his Minecraft castle, with a moat full of creepers, a little cottage off to the side just like mine. He asked if I thought he could make it bigger when his mom lets him have his phone back.
He’s not suddenly going to jump to the top of his class. There’s still a lot that’s hard, a lot of pressure that doesn’t go away just because we have 10 minutes of unjudged talk a week. But he’s not hiding in the school bathroom during lunch anymore, like he was before. He talks now. That’s the first step, and it’s the one no one was willing to take before. Some days, that’s all you can do.
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