How To Help A Kid Falling Behind After Missing School: Lessons From Working With A 10-Year-Old In China
The fluorescent lights hummed over the after-school tutoring room, and 10-year-old Hao pulled his gray school hood further over his ears. His third-grade math worksheet lay blank on the desk, and the pencil held loosely in his hand didn’t move as I walked over. I pulled a plastic chair next to him, and he flinched, yanking his arm off the table like he’d been burned.
I volunteer twice a week at this public primary school in Dongguan, where most students are children of migrant workers. Hao missed two and a half months of school last fall when his mom had emergency surgery back in their hometown in Hunan. His dad couldn’t quit his factory job cutting fabric, so Hao stayed back in Dongguan to watch his 4-year-old sister while their neighbors checked in on the pair. By the time he came back to school after his mom recovered, the class had moved through three whole units of math, and he couldn’t answer even the most basic questions. His homeroom teacher pulled me aside after the midterm: his score was 22 out of 100. “He’s just lazy now,” she said. “Won’t talk, won’t try. Can you see what you can do?”
The first week, I got nothing. I asked him what he’d done over the weekend, he stared at his scuffed black sneakers and mumbled so quiet I couldn’t make out the words. I brought extra practice worksheets, he left them just as blank as the ones from class. I started to wonder if the teacher was right, until I noticed he drew detailed little dinosaur sketches in the margin of his textbook. One afternoon I stopped by the corner shop before tutoring, grabbed a 1-yuan strawberry Popsicle (the kind all the kids buy after class) and brought it for him. He didn’t say thank you, just peeled it slow and ate it while we sat, and when I asked him about the T-Rex he’d drawn, he told me he’d seen it on his dad’s phone during a previous lockdown.
After that, he started talking a little, two or three sentences each session. That’s when I learned the real problem wasn’t laziness. It was shame. A week after he came back to school, the teacher called him up to the board to solve a fraction problem. He couldn’t even write the first number, and two boys in the back row laughed. After that, he decided it was better to not try at all than to look stupid in front of everyone. He already knew he was behind; he didn’t need the whole class reminding him every day.
That’s the mistake I see so many parents and teachers make when a kid is struggling like this. When they’re shut down, the first move isn’t to pile on extra work to catch up as fast as possible. I tried a different approach, and it’s worked far better than I expected. First, I cut all the cramming. We only meet for 40 minutes twice a week, and the first 10 minutes are never for math. We talk about his broken scooter he’s trying to fix, how his sister beat him at marble run last weekend, what new dinosaur he’s drawing that week. It doesn’t sound productive, but it builds enough trust that he doesn’t flinch when I pull out the worksheet. Any teacher or parent can do this: if your kid is shutting down about school, add 10 minutes of no-academic talk before you start homework or tutoring. It doesn’t cost anything, and it takes the pressure off immediately.
Second, I don’t make him do the same work as the rest of the class. Everyone else is working on multi-step fraction word problems, so we went all the way back to what a fraction even means. We use the hard candies I keep in my bag: if we have 10 candies and 3 are lemon, what fraction is lemon? That’s it for one session. I don’t assign hours of homework; the only “assignment” is to notice one fraction in his day, if he remembers. His parents work 12-hour factory shifts, so I never ask them to sit with him for an hour to go over work. I just asked them to ask him one question every night: “What’s one thing you learned today?” That takes 30 seconds, they can do it while they eat late dinner after their shift, and it keeps him engaged without adding work to their already full plates.
I also asked his homeroom teacher for one small change: instead of calling on him for hard questions he can’t answer, ask him one easy question once a week, something like “what’s the denominator of this fraction” that he can get right. She agreed, and the first time he answered correctly, she just nodded and moved on, no big fuss, but he sat up a little straighter that whole class.
Last week, he finished 8 out of 10 problems on his practice sheet, and he turned it around to show me before I even asked. His last test score was 52 out of 100 – still failing, but 30 points higher than the midterm.
It’s easy to look at a kid like Hao and point to the gaps in support for migrant children, or the pressure of test-focused schooling in China, and all of that is true. But I don’t work in policy; I just sit with him for 40 minutes twice a week. There’s still a lot that’s uncertain. His mom has to go back to Hunan for another checkup next month, and he might miss another week or two of school. He still won’t raise his hand on his own, and he still hides his paper when other kids walk by. But the worksheets don’t stay blank anymore. He talks when I ask him questions now. Small changes don’t fix every big systemic problem, but they help this kid, right now. We’re not going to get him caught up in a semester, and that’s okay. We’re just moving one small step at a time.
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