Please Help This Kid in China: What One Teacher Learned From a Left-Behind Student
The first time I stood over Xiao Lei’s desk, I wasn’t angry yet. It was math class, and I had asked for yesterday’s homework. Most kids handed in neat, folded worksheets. Lei reached into his bag and pulled out a piece of paper so creased it looked like a paper crane. On it, three problems had been started and then abandoned. The rest was blank.
“How long did you have?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
I wanted to say, “Two hours. You had two hours.” Instead, I counted to ten and told him to stay after class. He didn’t argue. He just put the paper back in his bag and sat there, waiting.
Later, when the room was quiet, I sat down next to him. “I’m not trying to get you in trouble,” I said. “I just want to understand what happened.” He looked at the floor. “My grandma leaves at four to sell vegetables,” he said. “I have to make dinner before she comes back.”
That was the first time I noticed something I had missed for two months. Neither of us mentioned it again that day. But when I got home, I wrote a post in a small teacher forum: Please help this kid in China. I didn’t know what else to call it.
Over the next week, I learned more. Lei’s parents worked in Shenzhen. They sent money, called on Sundays, and saw him twice a year if the train tickets were cheap enough. He lived with his grandparents in a two-room house at the edge of town. His grandma ran a vegetable stall. His grandpa had bad knees and mostly stayed on the bed in front of the TV. There was no desk, no table, no quiet corner. Homework was done on one end of the kitchen counter while his grandpa watched a show and the rice cooker steamed.
This is not an unusual story. In China, there are millions of left-behind children like Lei. Their parents leave to earn a living in big cities, and the kids stay with grandparents who love them but cannot help with English or math. Teachers often see these kids as lazy or distracted. But that word—lazy—never sat right with me.
Lei wasn’t lazy. He was carrying something heavy. Every afternoon, he knew that if he stayed at school too long, the kitchen would be dark and dinner would not be ready. He knew his grandma would come home tired and find him not doing anything. So he did the only thing he could: he sat with his homework and stared at it, waiting for someone to come home.
I made three small changes. None of them cost money. None of them required a psychologist or a new policy.
The first was a homework starter. After lunch, the other kids went outside to play. I asked Lei to stay with me for twenty minutes in the classroom. The rule was simple: he did one problem, just one, while I checked other students’ work at my desk. If he got stuck, he could come and ask. On the first day, he finished two. He didn’t show me, but I saw them. The next day, three. We weren’t trying to complete the whole assignment. We were just trying to make the blank page less enormous.
The second change was a job. I have a student whose job it is to hand out worksheets. I gave that job to Lei. It sounds small, but there is something about being trusted with a stack of paper and a class list that changes how a child stands. Everyone had to wait for him. His name was called out. He walked up and down the rows, and for those three minutes he existed in a way that doing homework alone never allowed.
The third change was with his mother. I didn’t have her number, but his grandma had an old smartphone. We set up WeChat voice messages. I told his mother, “You don’t need to ask about homework. Just tell him what he did well this week, even if it’s small. Then ask him one question about his day.” At first she sounded confused. “What has he done well?” she asked. So I wrote her a sample: “Lei passed out worksheets. He is careful. Ask him about the soccer game on Tuesday.” On the next call, she listened. I wasn’t there for it, but Lei came to school the next morning with his hair combed and a little less weight in his shoulders.
The practical advice here is not secret. Any teacher or parent can use it. When a child doesn’t finish homework, ask “What made it hard?” instead of “Why didn’t you do it?” The first question opens a door. The second one builds a wall. If a child has no quiet place to study, help them build a portable one—a clipboard, a hardcover book, a box of pencils. It doesn’t need to be beautiful. It just needs to be theirs. And if parents are far away, keep messages simple and specific. “I saw your worksheet. The last problem was hard, but you tried.” That does more than a ten-minute lecture about future exams.
After a month, Lei wasn’t a different child. He still forgot homework. He still fell asleep during silent reading sometimes. But he started to show me his paper instead of hiding it. Once, when I asked where his homework was, he said, “I did the first three. The last two were too hard.” That sentence was a win, even though the homework was still incomplete. He had learned to name the problem instead of pretending it didn’t exist.
I still think about the post I wrote: Please help this kid in China. I never got a clear answer. There isn’t one. The mother still works in Shenzhen. The grandma still sells vegetables. The house still has no desk. But now, at four o’clock, Lei leaves school with a blue clipboard and a little more understanding of what he can do.
Maybe the point isn’t to fix everything. Maybe the point is to notice where the weight is and help a child set it down for one afternoon. That’s not a miracle. But for Lei, it was a start.
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