Helping A Quiet Withdrawn Kid In A Chinese Primary School: Common Struggles And Small Actionable Steps
It’s 8:45 on a Tuesday morning, and I’m walking between rows of crammed desks collecting English homework, chalk dust sticking to the cuffs of my sweater. The classroom still smells like steamed buns left over from breakfast, and a fan whirs loudly in the corner above the blackboard. When I reach Xiao Ming’s desk in the last row, he doesn’t look up. He just stares at the scuffed toe of his white sneakers, hands folded tight in his lap. His exercise book isn’t on the desk. It’s not in his drawer, either. The Chinese homeroom teacher, who’s erasing yesterday’s math work from the board, sighs and calls over, “Just mark him absent again. He never does it. His parents don’t care anyway.”
I’d seen the homeroom teacher’s plea on the school’s volunteer notice board three weeks before that: “Please help this kid. He’s fallen too far behind, and we don’t have time for extra support.” I’m a part-time volunteer, an educator who’s been teaching English one afternoon a week at this public school in suburban Hangzhou for two years, so I wrote my name down. I didn’t expect a kid who’d already been written off by everyone before I even said hello.
I saw him after school that same week, lingering by the bike rack after all the other kids had left. He was sitting on a low wall, drawing on the back of an old math exercise book, his tongue stuck out a little at the corner of his mouth. When I walked over, he crumpled the page up and shoved it into his pocket so fast I almost didn’t see the huge, detailed T-Rex he’d drawn. I bought him a cold lemon tea from the school vending machine – it took me a minute to fumble out my phone for WeChat pay, and he stood there twisting the hem of his school uniform the whole time – and we sat on the wall for 20 minutes before he said anything.
Turns out he’d missed two and a half weeks of school at the start of the semester, when his grandma – who he lives with most days – had a stroke and his parents had to take her to the hospital in their hometown three hours away. By the time he came back, he was already far behind in math and Chinese, and no one had time to catch him up. His parents work 12-hour days at a textile factory an hour outside the city, and only come home on Saturday nights. Neither of them finished middle school, so they can’t help with his homework anyway. After he failed his midterm exams, the teacher moved him to the back row, stopped calling on him, and he stopped turning in homework at all. “If I turn it in all wrong, the other kids laugh,” he mumbled, staring at his lemon tea cup. “It’s easier to just not do it.”
That story isn’t rare for migrant kids in Chinese public schools, but it’s easy to forget when everyone’s focused on test scores and competition. The first thing I realized was that I couldn’t fix this with big tutoring sessions or yelling at anyone. I only see these kids once a week, and Xiao Ming already had enough people telling him he was doing everything wrong. All I could do was make small changes that fit what he needed, instead of making him fit what the school expected.
The first change I made was to his homework. Instead of asking him to do the full assignment everyone else did – 10 sentences for each new vocabulary word, that takes most kids 20 minutes – I told him he only had to do two sentences per word, and he could draw a little picture next to each one if he wanted. That’s it. No extra work, no catching up on 10 weeks of old assignments at first. If he finished that small bit, I marked it as complete and wrote a short comment on his drawing. That’s way more than he’d done in months, and after the first two weeks, he started turning it in every time. That small win built more confidence than any lecture about working harder ever could.
The second change was small, too. Every morning I stick a sticky note with one easy question on his desk – things like “What’s your favorite dinosaur?” or “Did you eat any fruit yesterday?” At first he just wrote the answer back to me on the note. After a month, he started answering out loud when I asked him about it after class. Last week, he answered it in front of the whole class when I called on him. No one laughed.
The third change was how I talked to his parents. Before I reached out, the only messages they got from school were complaints about missed homework and bad test scores. They stopped replying after a while, because they felt guilty and didn’t know what to do with the criticism anyway. I started sending one short text a week, just a single positive line: “Xiao Ming drew a really amazing stegosaurus in class today.” No requests, no long paragraphs asking for them to do more, just an update. After three weeks, his mom sent me a 10-second voice note thanking me, and said Xiao Ming talks about English class every night when she calls.
It’s been five months now. Xiao Ming still doesn’t turn in homework every single week. He’s still far behind grade level in math and Chinese. Next year he’ll take the entrance exam for middle school, and if his scores don’t meet the cut-off, he’ll have to go to a vocational school instead of an academic one, or even go back to his hometown to finish school. There’s no perfect happy ending here. But he doesn’t hide his drawings anymore when I walk by. He says hello to me in the hallway now, instead of staring at his feet. That’s more than anyone had gotten out of him in a year.
Most of the time, when we see a plea to help a kid like this, we think we need to solve all their problems at once. But the truth is, most of us don’t have the time or power to fix systemic gaps or change a whole family’s situation. What we can do is lower the bar a little, meet them where they are, and stop writing them off before we even ask what’s wrong. That’s enough to start with, anyway.
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