When a quiet kid won’t participate in class: What I learned teaching in rural China
Third period math on a Tuesday in mid-October. The osmanthus tree outside the classroom window is dropping small yellow flowers into the open windows, so the whole room smells sweet. The kids are bent over their warm-up worksheets, pencils scratching, and I’m walking between the rows to check progress. I stop at Xiao Ming’s desk, like I do every week, and his paper is still blank. The eraser he keeps tucked in his pencil case is worn down to a thin gray nub, the wrapper peeled off completely. He’s hunched so far over his desk his nose is almost touching the paper, and he doesn’t look up when I stop.
After class, I mention it to the retired local teacher who mentors me at the school. She shakes her head and wipes chalk dust off her trousers. Xiao Ming’s repeating third grade for a reason, she says. Three years ago, his grandma had a stroke, and his parents couldn’t afford to hire someone to care for her while they worked in Guangzhou, so Xiao Ming stayed home to help. He missed a full year of school, and now he’s just too far behind to catch up. “Don’t wear yourself out,” she says. “His parents barely call to ask how he’s doing. Most of these kids will leave for factory work after middle school anyway.”
I almost left it at that, until a few days later when I was grading worksheets after school and flipped Xiao Ming’s paper over to the back. There was a detailed pencil drawing of a tower crane, the kind you see stacked against the Guangzhou skyline in news photos. He’d drawn tiny marks for every window in the half-built office building next to it, and a stick figure in the cab labeled “ba ba” (dad). I’d seen him doodling in the margins of his notebook before, but I’d never stopped to look closely.
I called him over after the next day’s class, and didn’t mention the blank worksheet first. I just tapped the drawing and said, “This is really good. Your dad works on cranes?” He stared at his shoes for a full minute before nodding, then mumbled that his dad sends one photo a week to his grandma’s old beat-up phone, and he draws them when he’s alone at home after homework. That’s when he finally said what I’d been missing: he can’t do the word problems because half the characters are words he never learned in the year he missed school. When he does work up the courage to raise his hand and ask what a word means, the boys in the back call him “stupid repeat” and laugh. So he just sits quiet, stares at his paper, and hopes no one notices he doesn’t know what to do.
That’s when I realized all the “help” we’d tried to give him before was wrong. Pulling him out of class for extra tutoring just made him stand out more, and confirmed what the other kids were saying. Sending angry texts to his dad about missing homework just made his dad feel so guilty he stopped replying—he can’t quit his job to come home and help with homework, after all. He’s working 12-hour days to send money back so Xiao Ming and grandma can see a doctor when they need to.
I started small, with changes that barely took any extra time. First, I started adding one tiny note in the margin of Xiao Ming’s worksheet every day before I hand them out. It’s just the pinyin for the two or three hardest characters in the word problems, and a tiny 2-millimeter doodle that matches the word: a crane if it’s about construction, an apple if it’s about fruit. It takes me 10 seconds a day, something I do while I wait for the kids to pull their books out at the start of class. No one else sees it, so there’s no embarrassment.
Second, I told him he can turn in one homework assignment a week that’s a drawing instead of a full math worksheet, as long as he writes at least three characters to label what’s happening. He doesn’t have to stress about finishing the math if he’s stuck, just gets practice writing characters he cares about. He started turning in drawings every week, and slowly, he started adding more and more characters, then tried the first math problem, then the second.
Third, instead of texting his dad a list of missing assignments and bad grades, I send him one photo a month: just a picture of Xiao Ming’s latest drawing, with one line that says “Xiao Ming drew this this week, he’s doing great.” He never replied to the school’s complaint messages, but he replies to every one of mine. A few months in, he started sending Xiao Ming 10-second videos of himself at work on the crane, and Xiao Ming brings grandma’s phone in to show me after class sometimes.
It’s been six months now. Xiao Ming still doesn’t raise his hand to answer questions. He still fails half of our unit tests, because he’s still a year behind in reading, and that doesn’t fix itself in a few months. Last week, he got a 32 on our midterm, and he handed it to me with his head down, like I was going to yell. I just circled the two tricky problems he got right that almost no one else in the class got right, and wrote “good job” next to them. He smiled for the first time all class.
A lot of people see calls to help kids in rural China and think it’s all about big donations or new school buildings. Those things matter, don’t get me wrong. But most of the time, the help these kids need isn’t big. It doesn’t cost money, and it doesn’t require a grand intervention. It’s just noticing why the kid is checking out, instead of labeling them slow or unmotivated. It’s small, daily adjustments that don’t make them stand out in front of their friends.
Last Friday, Xiao Ming left a crumpled drawing on my desk after school. It’s me standing by the blackboard, with a big osmanthus flower next to my head, labeled “lao shi” (teacher). He didn’t wait around to see what I thought, just ran out to catch his bus home. He’s still quiet, he’s still behind, and some days he still hands me a blank worksheet. But now, I know there’s usually a drawing on the back. That’s enough to keep going for now.
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