Helping A Struggling Kid In China: What I Learned As A Tutor That Every Parent Can Use
The last bell had rung 20 minutes earlier, the after-school tutoring center’s fluorescent lights were already half turned off, and I was shoving my lesson plans into my canvas bag when I saw him hovering by the door. Xiao Ming, 10, in a faded navy school uniform with a frayed cuff he’d worried a hole into the week before, twisted the hem of his shirt and wouldn’t meet my eye.
“Can you help me?” he said, so soft I almost missed it. “No one believes me when I say I don’t get it.”
I pulled the chair back out and sat down next to him, flipping open his crumpled math homework. His mom had told me at our first meeting two weeks prior that he was just lazy. He daydreams through cram school, skips half the problems on his homework, and will never get into a good middle school if he doesn’t get his act together. All the other kids in his 4th grade class are already halfway through 6th grade math, she said, and he’s still messing up 4th grade work.
Looking through his notebook that day, the pattern jumped right out. Pure calculation problems—12 x 11, 72 divided by 8—he got 8 out of 10 right. The word problems? Either a random answer scribbled in the blank or the whole page left empty. I asked him to walk me through one problem out loud. It read: “Li makes 15 dumplings for his neighbors. He gives 5 dumplings to each household. How many households get dumplings?”
He read it fast, his eyes skipping straight from 15 to 5, and wrote 15 + 5 = 20 before I could stop him. I asked him what the question was asking him to find. He blinked, then shrugged. “How many dumplings?”
That’s when it clicked. No one had ever stopped to teach him how to pull the actual question out of all the words. His class moved through word problems so fast to get to the advanced material that the teacher assumed every kid would just pick it up by osmosis. His mom assumed he already knew it, so when he got it wrong, it was laziness. No one checked.
I’ve been tutoring in Shanghai for five years, and I see this all the time. The pressure to stay ahead of other kids, to hit the next benchmark early, makes everyone move too fast. It’s easier to label a kid as unmotivated or slow than it is to pause and find the tiny, specific thing they missed. When I called Xiao Ming’s mom to talk about what I’d found, she was skeptical. If we slow down to work on basic 4th grade problems, she said, he’ll fall even further behind the rest of his class. All his classmates are already learning pre-algebra.
I convinced her to try one small change, no big overhauls. Cut the two hours of advanced cram homework he did every night down to one hour 40 minutes, and spend the extra 20 minutes on just two word problems, done our way. No more, no less. We worked out three simple steps for those 20 minutes, all easy enough for any parent to follow at home.
First, every problem gets read out loud twice, out loud, not just in your head. That forces a kid to slow down and process all the words, instead of just jumping to the biggest numbers on the page. Second, after reading, circle exactly what the question is asking for—not the numbers, the actual question phrase. In the dumpling problem, that means circling “how many households” so you don’t end up counting dumplings by accident. Third, if it still doesn’t make sense, draw it. Fifteen little circles for dumplings, draw boxes around groups of five, count the boxes. No fancy materials needed, just a pencil. I also gave her one specific phrase to swap out when he gets a problem wrong: instead of “Why can’t you get this right?”, she says “Which part is confusing you?”
It sounds too small to make a difference, I know. But small changes stick when big changes feel overwhelming, especially for a kid who’s already convinced he’s bad at math.
A month and a half later, I’m still seeing the shift. Last week, Xiao Ming turned in his homework with three out of four word problems correct. He still draws little fighter jets in the margins of every page, he still takes twice as long as the other kids in his cram class to finish his work. His mom still texts me once a week worrying that he won’t pass the entrance exam for the top public middle school in our district. She still occasionally slips up and calls him lazy when he moves too slow.
But he doesn’t hover by the door after class anymore, twisting his shirt and waiting for everyone to leave just to ask for help. Last week he walked up to me straight after the bell, pulled a lemon hard candy out of his pencil case, and handed it to me. He said he got a B on his last math test, his first B in over two years.
A lot of people talk about the pressure on kids in China like it’s some big, distant problem that only big policy changes can fix. But most of the time, the help a kid needs isn’t some big, expensive solution. It’s someone stopping long enough to ask what they actually don’t get, instead of assuming they’re not trying.
Xiao Ming is still behind the other kids in his accelerated class. He still struggles with long word problems on timed tests. His mom still worries about his future, some days more than others. But he doesn’t sit quiet anymore and pretend he understands when he doesn’t. That’s more than enough to start with.
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