How To Help A Quiet Kid Falling Behind In Chinese Primary School: A Tutor’s Real Experience
The bell rang for after-school dismissal last October, and the 4th grade classroom erupted like a shaken soda can. Kids stuffed crumpled worksheets into backpacks, yelled across the room about weekend park trips, and shoved past each other to get to the door. Only Xiao Ming stayed in his seat, hunched over his blank math workbook, his eraser worn down to a pale gray nub that fit in the palm of his hand. His homeroom teacher leaned against the doorframe, nodded at him, and mouthed to me: Please help this kid.
I was volunteering two afternoons a week at this public school in suburban Chengdu, mostly helping kids who couldn’t afford private tutoring catch up. Most of the kids I worked with were chatty, eager for extra sour candy or a sticker for good work. Xiao Ming didn’t say a word for the first three sessions I sat with him. He just stared at his desk, twisted the hem of his too-big uniform shirt, and shook his head when I asked him any question. I found out a few days later from his grandma, who came to pick him up, that he’s a left-behind kid. His parents run a fruit stall 300 kilometers away in Shenzhen, and only come home once a year for Spring Festival. He lives with his 72-year-old grandma, who never finished primary school and can’t read most of the characters in his textbooks. All the teachers say he’s just lazy, she told me, shaking her head. If he flunks again this year, he’ll have to drop out and go work with his parents.
After a week of sitting together in silence, I started to notice it wasn’t laziness. When I read a word problem out loud to him, he could solve the math just fine, even the harder ones most kids his age get wrong. But when he had to read it off the page by himself, he skipped three characters out of every ten, mixed up the order of 3 and 5, and said the words “look blurry when I try to read fast.” I’d learned about this in a short training course I took on common learning differences—most primary schools in China don’t screen for dyslexia, so kids get labeled lazy or disruptive before anyone realizes what’s actually going on. It’s an easy mistake to make; no one is taught to look for the signs, especially in underfunded suburban and rural schools.
The first change I made didn’t cost any money, and it took 10 minutes to arrange. His teacher assigned 15 math problems a night, which took most kids 30 minutes, but would take Xiao Ming two hours of staring at a blurry page, and he’d still get most wrong. I talked to his homeroom teacher and agreed we’d only do 2 problems a day together, and make sure he got those right before moving on. That took the pressure off immediately—he stopped hunching over his workbook to hide the blank pages, and started looking up when I talked.
Next, I bought a pack of thick index cards for 2 yuan at the corner store, and wrote all his practice problems on them with a bold black marker, leaving an extra centimeter between each line and cutting out all the extra graphics and unrelated text that cluttered the textbook page. Extra visual clutter makes it harder for kids with dyslexia to process what they’re reading, and this simple change made a noticeable difference after the first week. I also asked his teacher to move his seat from the back row next to the sunlit window to the front row, where the overhead classroom light is more even and there’s less glare on his workbook. That’s another adjustment any teacher or parent can make, no special resources needed.
I also changed the way I talked to him, which is a trick any caregiver can use. Instead of asking “what don’t you understand,” which always got me a shrug, I started asking “which character is jumping around today?” He immediately got what I meant, and would point right to the problem character, and we could sound it out together. For grandparents or parents who don’t know anything about learning differences, the small change is just to read one line at a time together out loud, instead of yelling at the kid for being slow. A lot of the time, that’s all they need to stop feeling stupid and start trying.
Last month, he brought me a crayon drawing he did of his parents’ fruit stall, with watermelons the size of dinner plates. He wrote his name at the bottom, correctly, all by himself. He stood there twisting his shirt hem until I told him it was the best drawing I got all semester, then he grinned and ran off to PE.
His test scores went from the lowest 5% in the class to just above passing this semester. We still don’t have an official diagnosis—those are expensive and hard to access in this part of the country, so we just work with what we have. His grandma still tells him sometimes that he just needs to try harder, and he still has days where he stares at the page for 20 minutes and can’t get through one problem. The school doesn’t have any special support programs for kids like him, so we just take it one 2-problem session at a time. It’s not perfect, and it’s not the fix everyone hopes for, but it’s more than he had before. Some days, that’s all you can do when someone asks you to help a kid.
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