How To Help A Struggling Kid When Resources Are Scarce: A Teacher’s Experience In China
The plastic fan above our after-school classroom wobbled so hard on a 32-degree October afternoon that I half expected it to fall into the lap of the kid slouched in the back row. That was Xiao Ming, 10, a migrant worker’s son who’d been coming to our free program for three months and had yet to turn in a single complete homework assignment. I’d stopped by his desk a dozen times that week, and each time he’d press his forearm over his workbook like he was hiding a stolen candy bar. That day, I pulled the empty chair next to him and asked to see what he’d written. He slid the book toward me slow, and all I saw were half-erased lines, a few characters scrawled way too big, and half the page left blank.
I asked him what was hard, and he just stared at the scuffed packing tape holding the sole of his hand-me-down sneaker together. His grandma, who picks him up every day after class, pulled me aside by the door a week later, her canvas bag bulging with bok choy she’d picked up from the adjacent market. She kept her voice low so Xiao Ming wouldn’t hear, twisting the bag’s strap between her fingers. “Teacher, I know he’s stubborn and slow,” she said. “His parents work 12-hour days at the garment factory an hour outside town, they only come home once a month. They say they can’t keep wasting money on extra help if he doesn’t improve. Please help this kid. We just don’t know what to do.”
Everyone around Xiao Ming had already drawn their conclusion: he was lazy, unmotivated, not worth the extra time. His homeroom teacher sat him in the back row because he dragged the class’s test average down, and stopped calling on him after he repeatedly failed to answer. I’d volunteered at this storefront program for migrant kids for two years, and I’d seen this pattern dozens of times. But when I started sitting with Xiao Ming for 20 minutes every day after class, I noticed something no one else had pointed out. He could tell me rambling, funny stories about the stray cats that hang around the school gate, and he drew them so well you could almost see their tails twitch. But when he looked at a page of text, he mixed up characters that are near-mirror images, skipped from line one to line three without noticing, and forgot what he’d read by the time he got to the end of the sentence.
A friend who works as a school psychologist in Guangzhou told me this matches the profile of dyslexia, but that’s where the help stops. Most public schools in China don’t do routine learning difference screening, and migrant kids like Xiao Ming don’t have local hukou, so they don’t qualify for the few free support services that exist. A private assessment costs around 3,000 yuan, which is almost two weeks of wages for his parents. No one was going to hand us a formal diagnosis or a specialist to work with him. We had to figure out what we could do with what we had.
The first change cost me five extra minutes a night and no money. I started retyping Xiao Ming’s homework assignments to give his eyes a break. The school’s standard worksheets cram 20 small lines of text per page on thin scrap paper, which makes characters blur together for him. I use a bigger font, leave an extra half-inch between each line, and print on thick white paper. That small change cut the number of characters he mixed up in half in the first week. Next, I asked his homeroom teacher to move him from the back row to the second row, closer to the board. She was hesitant at first, but agreed when I said I’d check in with him daily and take care of any extra work. Then I adjusted his writing assignment: instead of copying 10 of each new character like the school requires, I have him write three big ones, so he doesn’t get tired and frustrated halfway through. When he makes a mistake, I don’t cross it out in big red pen – I circle the part he got right first, then point out the mix-up gently. Red pen used to make him slam his book shut and refuse to work the rest of the period.
For his parents, I started sending one short, positive text every Sunday, no long essays, no complaints. Once it was “Xiao Ming told a really funny story about feeding stray cats today, he’s great at describing things.” Another was “He got 8 out of 10 on his spelling quiz this week, that’s a big improvement.” His dad used to never reply, now he sends back a thumbs up once in a while, and last month he asked for a photo of Xiao Ming’s cat drawing to save on his phone. None of these changes are fancy, and none of them required any special funding or training. Any teacher or caregiver can do them tomorrow.
A month ago, Xiao Ming turned in a full page of character writing with only two mistakes, and he didn’t hide it. He pushed it across the desk to me, and had a tiny half-smile I’d never seen before. Last week, he got his first passing grade on a math test – 63, 20 points higher than his last test. He still has bad days. Last week he forgot his workbook three times in a row, and spent the whole class drawing cats in the margin of my lesson plan instead of doing work. I don’t yell at him for that anymore. I just ask to see the cats after class, and we make up the work the next day.
We still don’t have a formal diagnosis. His parents are saving up, but it’s slow, half their wage goes to rent and money for relatives back in their village. There’s no guarantee we’ll ever get the official label or formal support that would make things easier. Some days I wonder if the small changes are really going to add up to anything long term. But what I do know is that he doesn’t press his forearm over his workbook anymore when I walk by. He raises his hand to answer questions sometimes. Last week he shared one of his daily lollipops with the new kid in the program. That’s more than anyone expected of him six months ago. It’s not a perfect fix, but it’s something. And for a kid everyone else had given up on, that’s enough for now.
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