Please Help This Kid: What a Struggling Student in China Taught Me About Real Support
The first time I met Kai, his mother opened the door to the tutoring room, gave me a quick nod, and said, “Please help this kid. His teacher says he won’t listen.” Kai was nine, small for his age, wearing a blue jacket with a cartoon dinosaur on the sleeve. He didn’t look at me. He looked at the floor, then at the window, then at the clock.
His mother sat him down at the table and pulled out a folder of homework. “He can do it. He just refuses.” Kai’s pencil started tapping. Tap. Tap. Tap. “See?” she said, and left.
I didn’t start with the worksheet. I put a blank sheet of paper in front of him and asked him to draw his favorite thing from the weekend. He hesitated, then drew a very fast, very messy picture of a dog chasing a bicycle. He looked up. “That’s not a good drawing.”
“It’s a good start,” I said.
That small moment told me more than any test could. Kai was a kid who had already learned to expect failure. He wasn’t lazy. He was nervous.
Over the next few weeks, I saw what his mother meant. When I asked him to read a short story, he could read the words, but by the end of the paragraph he couldn’t remember what had happened. When I asked him to solve three math problems, he did the first one, erased it, redid it, then told me his stomach hurt. He checked the window constantly. He had a habit of pressing his eraser into his palm until his skin turned white.
His mother texted me once: “He says he hates school. What did we do wrong?”
The answer was complicated, but a useful part was simple. Kai was not really avoiding schoolwork. He was avoiding the feeling of not knowing what to do. In many classrooms—especially in China, where the pace is fast and the focus is on results—kids like Kai don’t get much room to say, “I’m lost.” They learn to say, “This is boring” or “I’m tired.” It’s easier.
I started changing how I worked with Kai. I stopped saying “Let’s do your homework.” Instead, I said, “We have three things to do. You pick the order.” He always picked the easiest one first. And that was fine. It built a small win.
We also used a timer. Not to race, but to make limits visible. I’d say, “You write for ten minutes. Then you can get up, stretch, look out the window—whatever. Then we do another ten.” At first he thought it was a trick. But after a few days, he started telling me when the timer was almost up. The pressure of an endless assignment was gone. The assignment became a short block of time.
His mother was skeptical. At the end of a session, she asked me, “But if he only studies ten minutes at a time, how will he keep up with the other kids?”
It was a fair question. I understood her worry. In many Chinese schools, a child who takes breaks can seem like a child who is falling behind. The system rewards kids who can sit for long hours and absorb information. But Kai was not one of those kids—at least not yet. His brain worked in shorter bursts. If I forced him to sit still for an hour, he would spend forty minutes fidgeting and hating himself. If I gave him ten focused minutes, he gave me nine minutes of real effort. That’s not a bad trade.
I also noticed something else. When Kai made a mistake, he panicked. He’d rip the paper or press his pencil so hard it broke. His old teacher had told him to be more careful. So he learned to avoid starting. I started saying, “Let’s make a mistake on purpose.” We wrote one wrong answer on purpose, drew a circle around it, and moved on. It sounds silly, but it helped him see that a mistake didn’t end the world.
I was not trying to make Kai love school. That was too big a goal. I was trying to help him feel that schoolwork was a series of small, manageable tasks—not a judgment on his worth.
There were setbacks. One week, Kai’s class had a major math test. He came to his session with red eyes. His mother had made him finish a practice paper the night before, and he had cried at the table. She stood in the doorway, exhausted, and said, “Please help this kid. I don’t know what to do with him anymore.”
We sat quietly for a few minutes. Then I asked Kai, “What was the hardest part of the test?” He said, “I couldn’t remember the formula. But I knew I had seen it before.” That is a specific, real problem. It’s not about attitude. It’s about working memory. When kids are anxious, their working memory shrinks. The formula is there, but the stress blocks it.
I told his mother that the next time before a test, they should do something really simple: have Kai write down one thing he did remember, any tiny detail, and then close the book. Not review everything. The point was to end on a small success. She looked at me like I was a little crazy, but she tried it.
It helped. Not because a one-line review made Kai smarter, but because it changed the emotional tone for the night before a test. Instead of a long, tense session, he spent five minutes, wrote something he knew, and went to bed. He still didn’t love tests. But he wasn’t starting them already defeated.
A few months later, Kai’s mother told me a small, almost accidental thing. One evening, she saw him doing homework without being reminded. He wasn’t doing it perfectly. He was tapping his pencil, staring at the wall, and then writing two lines. But he was doing it. She said, “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to break the spell.”
That’s the kind of progress that doesn’t show up on a report card. It’s quiet and uneven. Kai still forgets things. He still loses his pencil. He still says “I don’t want to” when a task feels too big. But his mother is no longer asking me to “fix” him. She’s asking different questions now: “What can we do tomorrow?” “Do we need a break or a snack first?” “Should we do the worksheet before or after dinner?”
Those questions are better. They don’t assume something is wrong with the kid. They assume that the day has small adjustments, and that Kai has a say in how it goes.
I don’t know how Kai will do in middle school. The pressures will get bigger, and the system won’t adapt to him. I hope he learns to adapt to the system without believing that he’s broken. He’s a kid who needed someone to say, “I see you, and help doesn’t have to mean pressure.” That’s not a final answer. It’s just a place to start.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Please Help This Kid: What a Struggling Student in China Taught Me About Real Support