How to help a quiet kid falling behind in Chinese primary school: A volunteer teacher’s real experience
It’s 4:30pm on a mid-October afternoon in the after-school tutoring room I run out of my community space in Dongguan. The window’s propped open, and the sweet smell of fried chestnuts from the street stall downstairs drifts in. All the kids push their finished math homework to the edge of their desks for me to collect. Xiao Ming’s stays right in front of him, his left arm curled over the page like he’s hiding a stolen candy. I walk over, and he pulls it even closer, shoulders hunched up to his ears.
I’ve known Xiao Ming for eight months. He’s 10, in fourth grade, his parents work 12-hour shifts at the local phone assembly plant, 20 minutes by bike from our space. He moved here from a village in Hunan two years ago, after his village primary school closed and merged with a bigger school in the county town. By the time his parents got him a spot at the urban public school here, the local curriculum was a full year ahead of what he’d learned. He never caught up. Other kids tease him as “the repeater,” even though he wasn’t held back—he’s just too far behind to follow most lessons. His grandma, who watches him after school, can barely read enough to fill out his school forms, let alone help with homework.
When I first started working with him, I did what every well-meaning teacher does: I printed out a stack of simpler, extra worksheets, told him if he finished two a night he’d catch up by midterm. He never turned a single one in. When I sat down and asked him why, he stared at his scuffed sneakers and mumbled, “I’m stupid. It doesn’t matter.” I felt that twist in my chest that all of us who do this work know, but I didn’t know what to do next, besides keep pushing the worksheets.
Then one day I was picking up trash off his desk after class, and I flipped open his notebook to check what he’d done. All the margins were covered in tiny, detailed drawings of motorbike engines, with little handwritten labels for every part. Next to one drawing he’d scribbled, “125cc, dad uses this for delivery.” I remembered he’d mentioned once that he helps his dad fix electric bikes and motorbikes at his dad’s roadside stand every weekend, when his parents aren’t working overtime. That’s when I stopped doing the “catch up” plan everyone told me to do.
I started showing up 15 minutes early every day just for us. The first 10 minutes we don’t touch textbook pages at all. We talk about whatever bike problem he worked on that weekend—last week it was a customer’s electric scooter that kept dying halfway up the bridge near the factory. Then I turn that problem into his practice work. When they were learning decimal multiplication in class that week, I asked him: If you need to replace two tires at 75.5 yuan each, and a new battery housing for 120 yuan, how much change do you give a customer who paid you 300 yuan? He got the total right before I even finished writing the numbers down. When I told him that was exactly the problem the textbook was asking for that week, he blinked like he didn’t believe me.
That’s the thing no one talks about when we talk about helping kids like Xiao Ming, kids from migrant families who fall through the cracks between rural and urban schools. Everyone says we need more extra classes, more worksheets, more test practice to fill the curriculum gap. But most of the time, what these kids need first is to stop feeling like everything they bring from their life outside school is useless. I’ve talked to so many parents and teachers who write these kids off as slow or unmotivated, but that’s almost never the case. They’ve learned problem-solving and numbers and language through helping their family, through the work they do outside the classroom, and no one has ever connected that to what the school is asking for.
If you’re working with a kid like this, you don’t need fancy resources or extra training. First, skip the generic gap-filling worksheets for the first week. Spend just 10 minutes a day asking them what they do when they’re not in school. Do they help their mom count change at the vegetable stall? Do they fix bikes with their dad? Do they track how much feed their family needs for the chickens when they go back to the village for holidays? Write down the problems that come up in those tasks, and use those to teach the concepts they need for school. It’s way easier than starting from the textbook page they’ve already failed at a dozen times.
Second, don’t force them to speak up in front of the whole class at first. Most of these kids have been teased or told they’re wrong so many times that they’ll shut down completely if you put them on the spot. 5 to 10 minutes of low-pressure one-on-one time every day, no grades, no audience, builds trust way faster than any group activity. When they get something right, point out that they just did the “hard” school work using what they already know. That’s way more convincing than any generic “you can do it” speech.
Last month we held a small community repair day at our space, and Xiao Ming’s dad brought a broken old kids’ bike to fix up to give away to a new migrant family in the area. Xiao Ming ended up explaining how the gear system works to a group of his classmates, showed them how to count the teeth on the front and back gears to calculate how fast you can go. He talked for almost six minutes, didn’t stutter once, and the other kids crowded around asking questions. No one called him slow that day.
He still scores 20 points lower than the class average on most math tests. He still doesn’t raise his hand very often, and he still sometimes hides his homework when it’s not done. But he pushes it to the edge of the desk most days now, and he’ll point to the problem he got stuck on and ask me to look at it with him. That’s more than enough for now. Progress doesn’t always look like catching up to everyone else. Sometimes it just looks like a kid stopping hiding his work.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » How to help a quiet kid falling behind in Chinese primary school: A volunteer teacher’s real experience