Why This Kid in My Chinese Classroom Struggled to Focus (And What Helped)
The first time I noticed Li Chen, he was drawing a small robot in the margin of his math workbook. The rest of the class was chanting multiplication tables in the call-and-response style that fills Chinese classrooms from first grade onward, and his voice was nowhere among them. His pencil moved in precise, careful strokes—like he had all the time in the world. His textbook was open to the right page. His workbook was complete. But his mind was somewhere else entirely.
He wasn’t being difficult. That’s the thing. Li Chen was eight years old, and he never talked back or disrupted the lesson. He just drifted. His eyes would land on the window, on the dust motes in the afternoon light, on the thread peeling from his uniform cuff. When I asked a question directly, he’d blink, snap back, and give an answer that was either brilliant or completely off-topic. There was no middle ground. He could explain how a bicycle chain worked with surprising detail, but he couldn’t remember the difference between “b” and “d” in English class.
I teach English at a regular public primary school in a mid-sized city in Guangdong. My classroom has forty-eight students, which is actually considered a good size around here. The desks are arranged in neat rows. The air smells like chalk dust and the detergent the cleaning lady uses on the floors. And when you have forty-eight kids, you learn to notice the ones who are trying to disappear.
For the first few weeks, I assumed Li Chen was just a slow developer. Or maybe bored. His test scores were middling, his homework occasionally unfinished, his handwriting cramped and messy. I tried the usual strategies. I moved him to the front row. I praised him when he was paying attention and gently called his name when he wasn’t. I gave him small jobs—handing out worksheets, wiping the board—to keep his hands busy. These things worked for about ten minutes at a time, and then he’d drift off again. I started to feel like I was doing something wrong.
What surprised me wasn’t Li Chen’s behavior. After a decade of teaching, I’ve seen plenty of kids who lose focus. What surprised me was the schedule his mother sent me when I finally asked for a meeting.
On a typical Tuesday, Li Chen woke up at 6:30 AM. School ran until 4:30 PM. Then, twice a week, he had math enrichment until 6:00 PM, followed by English tutoring from 7:00 to 8:30 PM. On the other days, he had homework—sometimes two hours’ worth, written into a little communication book that parents had to sign. His mother, a kind woman with dark circles under her eyes, told me proudly that she believed in “filling every hour.” She worked at a bank. She saw the school grind as a necessary step toward a stable future. She was doing her best.
Li Chen wasn’t eating dinner until nearly 9 PM. Then he’d shower, finish any last-minute homework, and fall asleep around 10:30. He was getting roughly nine hours of sleep, which sounds like enough. But when I asked her whether he actually slept or just lay there, he admitted to lying awake. He was thinking about his drawing. Or about a video he’d seen about space. His mind, which was so quiet at school, was loud at night.
I have a policy in my class: every student must read aloud to me once a week, even if it’s just one short paragraph. It’s not mandatory curriculum, but it gives me a window into their listening, pronunciation, and comprehension. Li Chen’s reading was slow but accurate. He stumbled on multi-syllable words—words like “important” and “everywhere.” When he finished, he exhaled like he’d been holding his breath. I asked him if reading was hard for him. He shrugged. “It’s tiring.”
That word stuck. Tiring.
I started watching him more carefully. In the afternoons, during the last hour of class, his head would droop. He’d prop it up with one hand. He’d rub his eyes. And then I noticed something else. When the board was far away, he squinted. When a paper was right in front of him, he was fine. But when he had to copy from the board, he copied maybe half of it, skipping letters, skipping entire Chinese characters. He never complained. He just quietly fell behind.
I asked the school nurse to do a basic vision check, which all students get once a year anyway. The results were enough to flag him. He had a mild myopia—nothing severe, but enough that he couldn’t follow the board comfortably from the front row without strain. His parents took him to an optometrist over the weekend. He came back to school on Monday wearing glasses with round, plastic frames that made him look like a little professor.
I expected a transformation. That’s what movies teach us. But there was none. He still looked tired. He still fidgeted. He still wandered off mid-lesson. The glasses helped him copy the board correctly, but they didn’t solve the bigger problem.
Here’s what did help, at least a little.
I had a long conversation with his mother—not a scolding, not a lecture, but an experiment. I asked her to try something for two weeks: cut the evening tutoring down to one day instead of two, and instead of doing extra worksheet practice at home, let him go outside with his father for thirty minutes before dinner. She hesitated. She worried about the upcoming midterm. I told her, “Let’s test the theory. If his grades drop, we can always add the tutoring back.” She agreed, half-heartedly.
I also did something small in the classroom. I stopped forcing him to finish every single question in classwork. Instead, I gave him a choice: complete five math problems, or complete all ten but skip the bonus question. This wasn’t about lowering expectations. It was about reducing the physical load of holding a pencil, which for a tired kid is genuinely hard. He took the five-problem option. He finished it faster than I expected. Then, instead of slipping away into his drawings, he got bored enough that he asked me for more. I gave him six. He did them.
The school didn’t change. The system didn’t change. The pressure on kids in China to perform is huge, and I’m not going to pretend that a single teacher can undo that. But what shifted was this: Li Chen’s mother stopped measuring every minute of his day. She started trusting him to know when he was tired. And I started accepting that his focus wasn’t a discipline problem—it was a battery problem.
A month later, Li Chen’s mother reported that he was falling asleep around 9:30 PM without lying awake. His teacher in math class said he was making more “careless mistakes,” but also that he was participating more. I’ll take that trade. He’s still not the best student in my class. He will probably never be the best student. He sits in the second row now, and sometimes I catch him staring out the window at a bird or a passing truck. When I see it, I don’t call his name right away. I give him two or three seconds to come back on his own.
He usually does. And when he turns back, his new glasses sit a little crooked on his nose, and he looks at the board with slightly less strain. He’s reading more fluidly now, though he still misses the word “everywhere” from time to time.
I don’t know what his future holds. There will be more tests, more pressure, more nights where he stays up late and drifts away during class. That’s the system, and it’s not going anywhere. But I’ve learned not to assume that a kid who disconnects doesn’t understand what’s happening. Li Chen understands plenty. He just needed someone to stop asking him to run on empty.
He’s eight. He should still be drawing robots.
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