Helping A Quiet 10-Year-Old In China Who Won’t Participate In Class: What I Learned As A Tutor
The bell rang for after-school dismissal last October, and all the kids streamed out of the community center tutoring room except for a pair of scuffed white sneakers hovering just outside my door. I looked up from stacking workbooks and saw Xiao Ming, 10, the boy his classroom teacher had asked me to help three weeks earlier, half-hidden behind the door frame. “You left your math workbook,” I said, holding it up. He shifted his weight, mumbled something I couldn’t hear, and kept his eyes fixed on the crack between the floor tiles. I set it on the edge of my desk and said, “I’ll be here for another 20 minutes. Come get it when you’re ready.” Ten minutes later, when I was throwing away empty iced green tea bottles, he slipped in, grabbed the book, and was gone before I could say another word.
His mom had come to our first meeting, her hands still chapped from washing fabric at the textile factory where she works 12-hour days. She kept repeating that he was lazy, that he didn’t care about grades, that if he didn’t pull up his math and Chinese scores he’d never get into the district’s top public middle school, and then he’d never get into a good high school, never get into college. Everyone said the same thing: his teacher, his grandma, the neighbors who saw him wandering the street after school instead of doing homework. He was the slow kid, the bad kid who didn’t try.
I started noticing small things no one else mentioned. When I asked the kids to stack chairs after class, he did it faster and neater than anyone else, aligned every leg exactly with the tile line. One day I forgot my colored pencils for a reading activity, and he pulled a set out of his backpack, all sharpened, organized by hue. When I complimented that, he just stuffed them back in and looked away. A week later, I found a crumpled scrap paper under his desk with a tiny, perfectly drawn T-Rex, scales and all, and I taped it to my desk wall. Next class, he stared at it the whole hour, and after class he left another scrap with a triceratops on my desk.
We started talking slow, after other kids left. He told me that in second grade, his teacher called him up to read a paragraph out loud in front of the whole class. He got stuck on three characters in the first sentence, and the teacher told him to sit down and said “some people just don’t bother to study, do they?” After that, he never raised his hand again. He never told anyone that when the teacher writes on the board, the characters look a little shifted and mixed up sometimes, that he can’t keep up when they read out loud, that he can’t memorize 20 new characters a week like the rest of the class. No one ever asked. A quick vision test ruled out poor eyesight, and it was pretty clear he has mild dyslexia—something most primary schools in smaller Chinese cities don’t screen for, that most parents and teachers have never even heard of. They just call it laziness.
The first change we made was small, something any parent or teacher can copy. Instead of making him read out loud to me, which made his hands shake, I let him read silently to himself. If he got stuck on a character, he just points to it and I tell him the word immediately. I don’t say “try again” or “sound it out” that just makes him shut down. It removes the shame of getting stuck, and that alone made him willing to practice 10 minutes longer every session.
Second, the school requires kids to write every new character 10 times to memorize it. That took Xiao Ming an hour every night, and he still forgot half of them a week later. We cut it down to three repetitions, and after the third, he draws one tiny doodle of what the character means next to it. For “mountain” he draws three little peaks. For “tree” he draws a thin line with a blob on top. It cuts his homework time in half, and he remembers 80% more characters now, because the drawing connects the word to something he cares about.
I also texted his mom on WeChat and suggested she swap one question when Xiao Ming gets home each day. Instead of opening with “what grade did you get on the last test?” she asks “what was the most fun thing you did today?” It sounds tiny, but before that, every conversation about school ended with her yelling about bad grades, so he just stopped talking about school entirely. Now they chat for 10 minutes every night before she leaves for her night shift. I talked to his classroom teacher too, who was surprisingly open to a tiny adjustment: she agreed to only call on Xiao Ming if he raises his hand, no cold calling, and if he answers correctly, she just nods and moves on, no big public praise that makes him uncomfortable. It takes zero extra work, and it took all the pressure off.
It’s been five months now. Last week, his teacher texted me a photo of Xiao Ming’s hand up in the air during math class. He answered a question about area correctly, and he didn’t even slump down like he wanted to disappear after. His Chinese grade went from a 42 to a 71, which is still not great, but it’s passing. We put his name in for the public learning difference testing back in January, and the earliest appointment we can get is in August. He still gets anxious before tests, he still draws dinosaurs in the margins of his notebook instead of taking notes sometimes, and his parents still worry some nights that he’ll never get into a good middle school.
Last week he gave me a full-page drawing of a dinosaur park, signed with his name in big, wobbly characters. It’s taped next to the first tiny T-Rex he drew. Things aren’t fixed. We still hit days where he won’t say a word the whole tutoring session, and we just sort homework and go home. But that’s enough for now. A lot of kids like Xiao Ming here don’t get anyone to stop and ask why they’re struggling, instead of just labeling them lazy. That’s the first help they need, really. We’re still taking it one day at a time.
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