What I Learned From A Struggling 10-Year-Old In Rural China: Tips For Teachers And Parents
I’m erasing the blackboard after third period math last fall, when I notice Xiao Ming still slouched in his seat in the back row, his workbook open to a blank page. The other kids are already chasing each other out to the playground for recess, their plastic water bottles clinking against the cinder block walls, and the recess bell is still ringing down the hall. I walk over, tap the edge of the page with my chalk. “You didn’t finish the problems today, Xiao Ming. Want to work through the first one with me?” He hunches his shoulders further, pulls his notebook toward his chest like I’m trying to take it away, and stares at the scuffed toe of his blue canvas shoe. He doesn’t say a word.
I’d been warned about Xiao Ming before I started my volunteer placement at this rural primary school in Guangxi. He’s 10, in fourth grade, two years older than most of his classmates because he repeated second grade. His parents left for a factory in Guangzhou when he was 3, come home once a year for Spring Festival, if they can afford the bus ticket. He lives with his 72-year-old grandma, who can’t read or write. The full-time teacher here told me he’s just lazy, doesn’t care about school, and spends all class folding paper cranes instead of taking notes. “Just ignore him,” she said. “He’ll drop out as soon as he turns 12 to go work with his parents anyway.”
A week later, I stopped by his desk during independent reading, and that’s when I saw what no one had bothered to notice. He was holding his textbook open, but his eyes were fixed on the wall, and he’d turned the page upside down without realizing it. When I asked him to point to the first sentence and read it to me, he stumbled over every other character, mixed up “day” and “big”, swapped the order of strokes when I asked him to write one character down on scrap paper. I’d done a short workshop on dyslexia when I taught tutoring in Chengdu a couple years back, and the signs were obvious. But no one here had ever connected the dots. For years, everyone had just called him slow or lazy, and he’d learned to shut down rather than admit he couldn’t do the work everyone else took for granted.
I called his grandma on her cracked old flip phone a few days later. She told me she couldn’t help him with homework, didn’t understand what was wrong, just knew he came home every day saying he was stupid and didn’t want to go back. His parents text her once a week saying he just needs to try harder, that they worked hard for their money, if he won’t work he can just come join them sorting parts in the factory. There’s no pediatric psychologist within three hours of this town, no formal testing for learning differences, no extra support services. I didn’t have a fancy plan, just a few small tricks I remembered from that workshop, so I started trying them.
The first change was the easiest, and it’s something any teacher or parent can do, no extra resources needed. I stopped calling Xiao Ming out in front of the whole class for not turning in work, and I started checking in with him for 10 minutes before class every morning. Instead of assigning the same 10 characters to write 10 times each that the rest of the class gets, I write down 3 characters, and ask him to write each 5 times, then come show me before he moves on. Big, open-ended assignments feel impossible for kids with processing differences, so cutting the workload into tiny, achievable chunks removes the overwhelm that makes them shut down completely. It doesn’t lower the standard long-term; it just meets them where they are right now, so they can build small wins instead of failing every single day.
The second change was to stop forcing him to perform when he’s uncomfortable. I don’t ask him to read out loud in front of the class anymore, unless he raises his hand first. I paired him with a quiet girl in his class who loves drawing, and I worked out a trade: she helps him sound out new characters during reading time, and he folds her a new paper crane every Friday. He’s incredibly good at folding – the cranes have tiny, detailed wings that no other kid in the class can make – so this lets him contribute something he’s good at, instead of only ever being the kid who can’t read right. That small shift alone made him stop hiding his notebook and participate in group work.
I’ve found that a lot of caregivers and even teachers default to the “lazy” label really quickly, especially for kids who don’t act out or draw attention to themselves. These are the invisible kids – quiet, withdrawn, no one notices they’re struggling until it’s almost too late. You don’t need a formal diagnosis to make these small changes. If your kid or student consistently takes twice as long to finish work as their peers, mixes up character or letter order, avoids reading out loud, or says they’re “dumb” all the time, the first step isn’t to yell or push them to try harder. It’s to look for a pattern that isn’t just laziness, and adjust your expectations to meet their needs.
It’s been eight months now, and things aren’t perfect. Xiao Ming still doesn’t turn in all his homework, he still mixes up similar characters more often than not, and his parents still ask when he’ll “catch up” enough to either move up a grade or come work with them. There’s a lot that’s still out of my control. But last month, he raised his hand on his own and read a whole sentence out loud to the class. Last week, he slipped a folded paper crane on my desk after class, with a wobbly character written on the wing that says “shi” – teacher. One of the strokes is backwards, but it’s the first full character he’s written on his own for me. It’s not a big, dramatic win, not the kind that makes the evening news, but it’s something. And for a kid that everyone had already written off, that’s enough for now.
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