Please Help This Kid: How I Reached a Struggling Student in a Chinese Classroom
The grandmother was waiting for me by the classroom door after the morning bell. She held a plastic bag of oranges and kept pushing them toward my hands as she talked. “老师, please help this kid,” she said. It took me a moment to realize she meant Xiaolei, her grandson, already inside with his head down, pretending to look for something in his desk.
I taught Xiaolei Chinese and math, both, because that’s how it works in a small county school. In the beginning, he was a textbook “trouble kid”: homework half-blank or lost, head buried in his arms when I explained new material, a habit of picking fights over a missing pen. The other kids had stopped including him in group work, not because they hated him, but because he never did his part. A colleague once shrugged and said, “His parents are gone. What can we do?”
Xiaolei lived with his grandmother and a younger cousin because his father worked on a construction site near Shanghai and his mother was on the night shift at a factory in Shenzhen. He saw them once a year, at Spring Festival, sometimes for two weeks. His grandmother fed him and kept him in clean clothes, but she couldn’t read his textbooks, couldn’t keep track of homework, couldn’t do much when he answered her questions with silence.
I don’t like the term “left-behind child” because it makes a child sound passive. But Xiaolei had learned to live without adult expectations at home, and his schoolwork showed it. For the first month, I tried the usual things: moved his seat closer to my desk, told him each morning to hand in homework, kept him after school when he didn’t. The last part worked for exactly four days. Then he just stopped staying.
The morning the grandmother brought the oranges, something shifted. Not because of the fruit, but because of how she said it. She wasn’t complaining about him. She wasn’t asking me to fix his grades. She was worried, and she was asking me to help without knowing what help looked like.
That weekend, I called Xiaolei’s mother. It took a few tries, and when she answered, I could hear factory machinery in the background. She spoke quickly, defensively, assuming I was calling about a fight or a failing mark. Instead, I asked her a question I hadn’t planned: “What was Xiaolei like when he was little?” She went quiet. Then she said, “He used to sing. He learned songs from the TV and sang them while washing vegetables with my mother.” She started talking more slowly after that. We ended the call after ten minutes, and she said she would try to video-call from the dormitory on Sunday evenings.
This isn’t a dramatic turnaround story. But here is what I learned over the next few months.
First, I gave up on homework for a while. Not all of it—just the long, repetitive copywork that left Xiaolei empty and defeated. I sat with him at lunch once a week, and we did the practice book together. He couldn’t read the instructions well, so I read them aloud. I asked him to do one problem at a time, and I pointed to the exact place in the text where the answer lived. This sounds obvious, but I had been telling him to “try his best” for weeks, and he already knew his best wasn’t enough. Pointing at the actual place was more helpful than any encouragement.
Second, I made him the class “caller.” Every morning, he collected the exercise books and carried them to my office. It took him nineteen minutes the first day because he searched for missing books under desks and in the lost-and-found bin. But he came back the next day and did it again. By the end of the month, the errand had become a routine he owned. Sometimes a struggling kid doesn’t need a big speech; he needs a small task that shows him the classroom can work with him rather than against him.
Third, I used the video calls. His mother did call that first Sunday night, and for two weeks, Xiaolei answered her questions with one syllable. But I asked her to talk less about grades and more about what she saw. “Tell him you saw his drawing on the wall,” I said. “Tell him you heard he collects the books.” She sent him a voice message every few days instead of typing in the family group. Xiaolei started writing small notes before Sunday: “I made a paper plane today” or “The exercise books were heavy.” He would leave them on his desk, and I began to see that he was practicing describing himself—something he had almost no chance to do.
There were setbacks. On a timed math quiz in March, Xiaolei looked at the page for ten minutes, drew a small square in the corner, and turned it in blank. I felt the familiar heat of frustration, and I had to stop and ask myself what I actually knew about him. He was not being lazy. He had a word-reading problem we hadn’t identified yet, and a home environment with no structured time. The quiz was a picture of his current situation, not his potential, and neither of those was his fault.
What helps, I realized, is not grand. It’s saying one specific, true thing about what you saw: “You found three missing books” or “You started a question on your own today.” That’s different from “good job,” because it gives the child a mirror of what he is capable of. I started saying those sentences to Xiaolei, and he began seeking me out to show me small things: a new line in the exercise book, a neatly sharpened pencil. He was asking me, without words, to tell him what I noticed.
At the end of the term, his grandmother came again, not with oranges but with a bag of fresh noodles. She told me that Xiaolei now did homework at the kitchen table every evening, even the parts he couldn’t finish—he left a little mark beside them and said the teacher would explain the next day. She said that with a kind of pride I hadn’t heard from her before.
I don’t want to pretend everything is settled. Xiaolei still had failing scores. His father still calls only every few weeks, and I don’t know if the video calls will survive a factory holiday shuffle. But in the last week of school, I saw him show another child how to fold paper into a boat, and the other child laughed with him, not at him. That is a small thing, but a small thing is the most honest measure of progress when the bigger systems are not cooperating.
If there is a kid like Xiaolei in your school or family, the useful question is not “How do we motivate him?” It’s “Where does he feel he can trust the day?” Sometimes it’s a morning errand, sometimes it’s a ten-minute call with his mother, sometimes it’s a teacher who reads the instructions aloud and then points to the place on the page where the answer is hiding. That’s how help actually arrives: one pointing finger, one small task, one Sunday call at a time.
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