What Actually Helped an Overwhelmed Kid in My Chinese Classroom – A Teacher Explains
The first time I really noticed Liang, he was sitting in the back row of my fourth-grade math class, chewing on the cap of a pencil that had already lost most of its eraser. The rest of the class was working through a set of long division problems, and the only sound was the scratch of pencils and the occasional sigh. I walked over to his desk. His workbook was open to the right page, but the blank space under problem one was still white. He wasn’t staring out the window or playing with a toy. His eyes were just fixed on the page, unblinking, like he was waiting for something to happen.
I knelt down. “Are you stuck?” He nodded, barely. “Show me what you know already,” I said. He looked up at me with a mix of fear and confusion. “I don’t know anything,” he whispered.
That broke my heart a little, because it wasn’t true. I’d seen him answer questions correctly the week before, when we were doing simpler multiplication. But at some point, he had decided that not knowing the answer meant he knew nothing at all. That’s a heavy thing for a nine-year-old to carry.
A few days later, I called his mother. She picked up on the first ring, and I heard the television in the background. We exchanged pleasantries, and then she said, without any prompting, “He’s lazy. I tell him every day to focus, but what can I do?” I thought about the math workbook at home, the two private tutors he had on weekends, and the stack of exercise books his grandmother had bought from the bookstore. Every adult in his life wanted him to do well, but no one had asked him what he was thinking when he couldn’t start a problem.
I didn’t lecture her. I told her about a small thing I’d started doing in class. Instead of saying “Do these five problems,” I was giving Liang a choice: “Pick two you feel comfortable with, and then try the third one if you want.” The goal was just to get him moving. I asked her to try something similar at home for his homework. Not, “Finish all your homework,” but, “Show me the problem you understood best.” She was skeptical, but she agreed to try it for a week.
What I realized over the next few weeks is that Liang’s problem wasn’t about ability or effort. It was about fear of getting it wrong. He had been told so many times, in so many ways, that his mistakes meant something bad about him. His mother’s sighs, his tutor’s red pen, the way his classmates would glance at his paper when the teacher called on him—it all added up. By the time he sat down to do math, his brain was already busy protecting him from failure. And the easiest way to protect himself was to not try at all.
The choice method helped him start, but it wasn’t enough. One day, I gave the class a problem that was intentionally too hard for their level—something they couldn’t solve in five minutes. I let them struggle. Liang’s hand shot up almost immediately. “I can’t do it,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. Instead of telling him to keep trying, I said, “Good. That’s exactly what I wanted. Now, write down one thing you tried before you gave up.” He looked at me like I was crazy. But then he picked up his pencil and wrote: “I tried 40 divided by 8, but that’s not the problem.” That was his first written work in days.
This is where I want to be careful, because I don’t want to make it sound like a simple trick solved everything. It didn’t. Liang still struggled. His mother still sent me long WeChat messages at night, with photos of his homework, asking why he couldn’t do simple division. But something shifted. He stopped freezing. He started making mistakes, which sounds bad, but actually meant he was thinking. He’d raise his hand to ask a question, which he’d never done before. He even corrected a classmate once, very quietly, and the classmate listened.
For parents and teachers who are dealing with a similar kid—whether in China or anywhere else—here’s what I learned, not from a textbook but from sitting next to Liang for four months.
First, ask the child to show you where they get stuck, not what the answer is. When a child says “I don’t get it,” that’s usually a wall. But if you say, “Show me the last thing you understood,” you force their brain to retrace a step. Often, the gap ends up being small—a forgotten carrying rule, or a misread sign. Liang could always show me something. Even a wrong step gave us a place to talk.
Second, reduce the perceived cost of being wrong. The usual classroom dynamic says: wrong answers are public, and right answers are private. To break that, I started asking for wrong answers on purpose. Once a week, I’d say, “Tell me the most interesting mistake you made today.” The kids would laugh at first, but after a while, they’d genuinely compete to share the funniest error. Liang once shared a mistake so upside-down that the whole class cracked up. He turned red, but he also smiled. That small moment mattered more than any worksheet.
Third, change the way you talk about effort. Liang’s mother used to say, “Try harder.” That’s useless advice, because it doesn’t tell the brain what to do. I asked her to instead say, “Show me where you spent the most time.” That puts the focus on the process, not the outcome. She started doing that at dinner. Liang would say, “I spent a long time on problem three, but I still don’t get it.” She was able to say, “Then that’s the problem we’ll talk about tomorrow.” It wasn’t a magic fix, but it turned homework into a conversation instead of a battle.
Fourth, create manageable choices. This is something any parent can do at home. Don’t say, “Do your homework.” Say, “Do the first two problems, and then tell me which of the remaining ones looks interesting to you.” For kids like Liang, an open-ended task feels like an ocean. A small choice gives them a piece of land to stand on. It doesn’t have to be every task, either. Just one or two decisions a day is enough to rebuild a sense of control.
The school year ended last month. On the last day, Liang came up to my desk with his workbook. He had a habit of hiding it under his arm, but this time he opened it to a page from the first week. There was the blank space under problem one. “I remember this,” he said. “I was so scared back then.” He didn’t say what he thought about it now, and I didn’t ask. But he showed the page to a classmate next to him, and they both laughed.
I don’t know how Liang will do in fifth grade. His mother and I still exchange a few messages now and then. She told me he didn’t cry before a test last month, which she said was a first. We haven’t solved everything. He still avoids hard problems sometimes, and I still catch him staring into space. But the difference is, when he stares, I know his brain is working on something. And when I ask him what he’s thinking, he now says, “Trying to find the easy part first.”
That’s enough for me.
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