How To Help A Quiet, Withdrawn Kid In Chinese Primary School: A Teacher’s Real Experience
Last October, I was circulating between groups during an English role-play activity at the Hangzhou public primary where I teach part-time. I stepped around a wobbly stack of shared textbooks and found 8-year-old Xiao Mi sitting with her arms folded, staring hard at the black scuff on the toe of her white sneakers. The rest of her group was bickering over who got to play the zookeeper, and no one had noticed she hadn’t spoken a single word in 15 minutes.
I’d seen this same posture from her every week for two months. She always turned in homework half-blank, never raised her hand even when I asked questions I knew she could answer, and if I called on her directly, she’d just squeeze her eyes shut and shake her head, sometimes with a few silent tears rolling down her cheeks. Her homeroom teacher told me early on that she was just slow and shy, her parents worked in a factory in Wenzhou and only came home once every few months, she lived with her grandma who couldn’t keep up with homework. “Don’t waste too much time on her,” she’d said. “There’s 45 kids in this class, we can’t wait for the slow ones.”
I tried the usual things first: I pulled her aside after class once, gave her a strawberry lollipop I kept for nervous kids, and asked if anything was wrong. She just stood by the door twisting the cuff of her blue uniform, which always had a faint soybean milk stain near the pocket, and wouldn’t say a word. I left it at that for a couple weeks, but I couldn’t stop noticing her. She’d sit through recess leaning against the wall watching the other kids play jump rope, never joining in. She’d draw little doodles in the margin of her textbook instead of taking notes.
The turning point was a rainy Tuesday in November. I stayed late grading papers, and when I walked out to the gate to catch the bus, I saw Xiao Mi sitting on the stone steps, her backpack pulled tight to her chest. Grandma was running late, she told me when I asked, she’d stopped to pick up medicine for her knee. I pulled out my umbrella and sat down next to her, and that’s when I saw the crumpled drawing tucked in the side of her backpack: it was a one-eared orange cat, drawn with colored pencil, so detailed I could see the little white patch on its chest. “That’s the stray that hangs around the dumpster by the bike shed, right?” I said. “I tried to get a photo of it last week and it ran off before I could even pull out my phone.”
She nodded, and for the first time, she spoke to me in more than a one-word mumble. She feeds it every day, she said. Grandma saves leftover rice from dinner. It had a little scratch on its ear from fighting with another cat. It only lets her pet it, no one else. We sat there for 12 minutes, according to my phone’s clock later, talking about nothing but that cat. She told me mom calls once every Sunday, and always asks if her test scores went up, and if she’s being good and talking more in class. She told me she stopped raising her hand after she got a pinyin question wrong in front of the whole class last semester, and the teacher told her she never pays attention, and the whole class laughed.
That’s when I realized all the things I’d been doing wrong. I, like everyone else, had started with her grades. I’d been thinking if I could just get her to speak up, get her grades up, that would fix things. But that was backwards. She wasn’t quiet and underperforming because she was slow. She’d checked out because she didn’t feel safe in the classroom. There was no point pushing her to perform before she felt like she belonged there.
I didn’t make any big changes, just started doing a few small, specific things that didn’t disrupt the whole class. First, I gave her a tiny, fixed job for our weekly English class: she writes the date on our group’s small whiteboard before we start, and collects everyone’s exercise books after class. It’s a role that lets her be part of the group without needing to speak much, and it took less than a week for the other kids to start saying “thanks Xiao Mi” when she handed their books back. Second, instead of calling on her in front of everyone, I write short questions on sticky notes and pass them to her when we do whole-class work. She writes her answer back and passes it to me, no one else sees it. If she gets it right, I just mention that we have another correct answer from the group, no need to call her out. Third, I didn’t pressure grandma to start checking homework— I knew her eyesight was too bad for that, and she already had enough to do. I just texted grandma once a week to ask how the cat was doing, and if Xiao Mi could bring extra rice to school, which she was already doing anyway. I also asked the homeroom teacher if we could move her desk from the middle of the back row to the empty spot in the first row near the door. That way, she doesn’t have 40 pairs of eyes on her back whenever she stands up to answer a question, a small change that took 2 minutes and made a huge difference.
It’s been six months now. Let me be clear: this isn’t a story where she turns into a straight-A kid who loves raising her hand. She still doesn’t speak up in whole-class discussions. She still gets nervous if I unexpectedly ask her to say a sentence out loud. Her math test scores are still below average. But she says good morning to me when I walk into class now. She draws tiny little cat doodles on the edge of her sticky notes when she passes them back. She turned in a full set of homework for 12 straight weeks now, even if half the answers are wrong, she’s trying. Last month she brought me a drawing of the one-eared cat and its three new kittens, with a tiny messy note that said “they opened their eyes.” I taped it to the edge of my desk.
Some days I still worry about her. When her mom comes home for Spring Festival, will they push her to be more outgoing, and scare her back into her shell? Will the school’s focus on test scores push her further behind as the classes get harder? I don’t have all the answers. But I know this: you don’t fix a kid like Xiao Mi by pushing her to be someone she’s not. You start with the cat, not the test score.
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