Why Is My Kid Disengaged At School? A Teacher’s Real Experience Helping A Student In China
Last October, I was leaning over Xiao Ming’s desk during 4th grade morning self-study, waiting for him to pull out his math homework, and he just stared at the black scuff on the toe of his canvas sneaker, wouldn’t look up. Eraser crumbs were piled around his pencil, his blue uniform sleeve had a frayed hole at the cuff from where he’d picked at it all week. The other kids were already chattering about their weekend trips to Chimelong Paradise, their homework stacked neat on the corner of their desks. After three minutes of waiting, I just nodded and moved on. I’d been here before.
Xiao Ming moved to our Guangzhou public school from a small town in Hunan at the start of the school year. His dad works in a furniture factory an hour outside the city, his mom cleans office buildings downtown and gets home after 9 most nights. He lives with his grandma, who speaks no Cantonese and can’t read enough Putonghua to help with homework. The first time I called his parents in for a meeting, his dad showed up straight from the factory, sawdust still on his jeans, and said before I could even open my mouth: “We know he’s slow. Just discipline him if he misbehaves, we don’t mind. We can’t help him with homework anyway, we’re too tired when we get home.”
I tried the standard stuff first: I kept him after class to finish missing work, sent reminder notes home, moved his desk to the front so I could check on him more often. Nothing worked. He’d just sit at his desk after school, twisting his pencil between his fingers, and not write a single word until it was time to leave. Other kids started joking that he was “the mute who can’t do math,” and he just pulled his hood up further and didn’t say anything back. I started to think maybe his dad was right, that he was just too far behind to catch up.
Then one Tuesday in November, I stayed late to pack up for a parent-teacher conference, and I noticed him hanging by the back door, shifting from foot to foot. I asked what he needed, and he walked over slow and pulled a crumpled sheet of drawing paper out of his backpack. It was a detailed sketch of a solid wood dining chair, every line of the joinery, every grain mark on the legs drawn in. “I draw these when I wait for my dad at the factory after school,” he mumbled. “He makes these.”
That’s when I stopped trying to make Xiao Ming into the student every other 10-year-old is supposed to be, and started making small changes that fit him. The first thing I did was stop assigning him piles of old homework to catch up on. Instead, I wrote three problems from that day’s lesson on a small slip of paper every morning, and taped it inside the cover of his math textbook, where only he would see it. If he finished those three problems, that was all the homework he owed me that day. It took him a week to finish the first three, but he did it. I wrote a small “nice work” on the slip, and he folded it up and put it in his pencil case.
Next, I worked his drawing into our lessons. We were starting a unit on solid geometry that month, so I asked him to draw the 3D diagrams for our problems, the same way he drew his dad’s chairs. I taped his drawing of a rectangular prism to the blackboard at the front of the class, and told everyone that it was clearer than the one in our textbook. No one joked after that. A few kids even asked him to teach them how to draw 3D boxes that look real.
With his parents, I stopped sending long lists of what Xiao Ming was doing wrong. I just send one 1-sentence text every Sunday evening, something small and positive: “Xiao Ming helped me carry all the exercise books today” or “His diagram won a small class compliment this week.” I didn’t ask them to start helping with homework, because I know they can’t. I just asked if Xiao Ming could bring one of the small wooden stools his dad makes to our class plant corner, to hold our potted mint. They brought it in the next week, and I asked Xiao Ming to tell the class how his dad makes it. He talked for almost two whole minutes, about how he helps sand the edges to make sure no one gets splinters. It was the first time he’d spoken in front of the whole class.
It’s been six months now, and it’s not like everything is fixed. He still forgets his homework two or three times a week. He failed last month’s unit math test, because he still hasn’t caught up on all the stuff he missed from last year. He still rarely raises his hand to answer questions. But he now says hello to me when he walks into class. He turns in his three problems most days. Last week he brought in a new drawing of a bookshelf he’s helping his dad build for a customer, and showed it to me before class.
A lot of people look at kids like Xiao Ming and say their parents don’t care, or they don’t want to work hard. But what I’ve learned is that most of the time, these kids already know they’re behind. They’re just embarrassed to ask for help, and they don’t see the point of trying when everyone already expects them to fail. You don’t need to run a big tutoring program or force stressed parents to change their whole lives to help. You just need to start smaller than you think: three problems a day instead of thirty, one small positive update instead of a list of complaints, a way for them to bring what they already care about into the classroom. It’s slow, and it doesn’t always lead to perfect test scores, but it’s something. And for a kid who’s been invisible for a long time, that’s enough to start with.
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