Helping A Struggling Elementary Student In China: Small, Low-Cost Shifts That Actually Work
The pink eraser in 10-year-old Hao’s pencil case had worn a half-inch hole through the page of his third-grade math workbook by the time I first sat down with him. It was a Tuesday afternoon in the after-school volunteer program I run out of a community center in my hometown in southern China, and he’d been pushed into a chair across from me by his mom, who kept her head bowed and her hands folded in front of her. “Please help this kid,” she said, her voice rough from 12-hour shifts on a garment factory line. “I don’t know what happened to him. He used to talk all the time about planes, now he won’t say a word to anyone.”
Hao hunched his shoulders, tucked his workbook under his arm, and stared at his scuffed sneakers the whole 15 minutes his mom talked to me. His grandma, who picks him up from school most days, had already told me the backstory: Hao missed two weeks of class the year before to get an emergency appendectomy. When he came back, the 52-student class had already moved past the foundational multiplication unit he’d missed, and no one had time to walk him through it again. By mid-year, he was failing every math test, and other kids started teasing him when he got called on and couldn’t answer. Now he just doesn’t answer at all.
His mom was this close to signing him up for a 2-hour nightly cram school that would have cost 1500 yuan a month – almost a third of her total monthly salary. I told her let’s try twice a week, 45 minutes here, first, before she spent that money.
The first week, Hao didn’t say a word. He just drew airplanes on the back of every worksheet I gave him, erasing so hard the paper almost tore if the lines weren’t perfect. I didn’t throw the drawings away. I just stacked them on the side of the table and didn’t push him to talk. One afternoon, I noticed he’d drawn a full diagram of a C919 airliner, with every little emergency door and antenna labeled correctly. I said, “I never noticed the tail fin is angled that much. That’s really accurate.” He looked up, nodded, and mumbled, “I watch every takeoff video on my grandma’s old phone.” That was the first time he spoke to me.
That’s when I realized the problem wasn’t that Hao was lazy or unmotivated, like his teacher had said. It was that all his schoolwork felt completely disconnected from anything he cared about, and every mistake he made felt like proof he was bad at school. I didn’t start with drilling multiplication facts to fill his gap. I started with planes.
The first problem I wrote down for him wasn’t from his textbook. It said: “A C919 carries 164 passengers. Each passenger brings 20 kilograms of luggage on average. What’s the total weight of all the luggage?” He stared at it for a minute, then picked up his pencil and worked through it. He messed up one step of the multiplication, but it was the first time he’d finished a problem in front of me in a week. This is the first trick anyone can use, even if you don’t have a teaching background or can’t do your kid’s homework yourself: rephrase practice problems to match their existing obsession. If your kid loves dinosaurs, calculate how much three T-Rexes weigh. If they love soccer, calculate how many points a team needs to win the league. It doesn’t take any extra time, and it turns meaningless drill into something they actually care enough to try for.
The second shift came from watching his eraser habit. He erased every answer before he even finished writing it, because he’d been conditioned to think any wrong answer was a failure that needed to be hidden. I made one simple rule for our sessions: 10 minutes of “messy work” every time, no erasing allowed. We write down any answer he thinks of, then we go through it together and talk through what worked and what didn’t, no big red X marks allowed. The first time we did this, he put his eraser to the page after writing a wrong answer, then remembered the rule and pulled it away. He kept his hand over the answer like he was covering it. I said, “OK, let’s see. You added 164 and 20 here instead of multiplying. That makes sense – the question asks for a total, and you add for totals most of the time. That’s not a stupid mistake, that’s a good guess.” After a few weeks, he stopped flinching when he got something wrong.
For his mom, the change was even simpler. She kept saying she was a bad mom because she couldn’t help him with homework, she worked too much, she didn’t finish school past fifth grade. I told her she didn’t need to help with math at all. I asked her to just swap one question when she got home at 9 PM every night: instead of asking “Did you finish your homework?” ask “What’s the coolest thing you learned about planes this week?” That’s it, it takes three minutes, she doesn’t need to know anything about math or airplanes to do it. A month later, she told me he started pulling his drawings out to show her before he shut himself in his room for the night. That small swap reminded him she cared about him, not just his test scores.
It’s been four months now. Hao got a 63 on his last math test, up from 26 when we started. He’s still failing, and the gap from those two weeks off hasn’t been fully closed yet. He still draws airplanes instead of doing homework some days, and there are sessions where we don’t do any math at all – we just watch plane takeoff videos and he points out details I’d never notice. His mom decided not to sign up for that expensive cram school, at least for now. Last week, his teacher told me he raised his hand in class to answer a question, and got it right.
Most of the struggling kids I work with here aren’t struggling because they’re not smart enough, or because their parents don’t care. They just fell a little behind once, and everyone panicked and pushed them harder instead of stopping to ask why they stopped trying. You don’t need a lot of money or a fancy education to turn that around. Most of the time, it just takes a few small shifts. It’s still too early to tell how it will go for Hao, but right now, that’s enough.
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