How To Help A Quiet Withdrawn Child At School: Lessons From A Volunteer Teacher In China
The ceiling fan above the third-grade classroom droned through another humid October afternoon, and half the class was already leaning into their group work, shouting English sentences over each other to get my attention. Xiao Ming sat in the back row, hunched so far over his notebook his nose almost touched the paper. He’d rubbed a gray hole right through the page with his eraser, and a crumpled pack of spicy sticks peeked out from the edge of his desk. When I stopped next to him and asked to see what he’d written, he mumbled something so quiet I couldn’t make out a single word, and his ears turned bright red.
A couple of the boys at the next table snickered. “He doesn’t talk, teacher. He’s stupid.” I shushed them, wrote a quick checkmark on the corner of his page, and moved on, but the interaction stuck with me. After class, I tracked down his homeroom teacher to ask about him, leaning against the brick wall outside the office while she smoked a cigarette. She shrugged. His parents left for a factory in Guangzhou when he was 6, he lives with his grandma who can’t read. Failed math last semester, stopped coming out to recess two years ago, turns in half his homework. Don’t waste too much energy on him, she said. He’s too far behind.
I didn’t have any grand plan to fix him, but I started stopping by his desk for 30 seconds every class. At first, I didn’t ask him to talk. I’d just leave a small star sticker on the corner of his notebook if he’d filled in even one line correctly. For the first two weeks, he never reacted—just left the sticker there, or sometimes tucked it into his pencil case without looking up. Then one day, I noticed he’d drawn a tiny T-Rex in the margin of his vocabulary worksheet. I pointed to it. “That T-Rex has really sharp teeth. Did you draw that?” He nodded, so fast his hair fell in his face. I didn’t push for more, just moved on.
A month later, he stayed behind after class when everyone else ran out for recess. He hovered by my desk for a full minute, shoving his hands in and out of his jeans pockets, before he pulled out a crumpled stack of paper and pushed it across the desk at me. They were all drawings: dinosaurs, mostly, every size, some with hand-drawn habitats made of pencil trees. A few had half-written Chinese characters, and one had the letters “T-R-E-X” scrawled awkwardly in the corner. I looked through every single one, and when I got to the end I said, “These are really good. Do you want to keep them in the top drawer of my desk here? They won’t get crumpled, and grandma won’t accidentally throw them away when she cleans your table.” He blinked at me, and that’s when he said his first full sentence to me: “Grandma throws them away all the time.”
That’s when I realized how wrong the common approach to helping kids like Xiao Ming is. So many people hear about kids growing up with migrant parents in rural China, and they jump to send textbooks or organize lectures about working hard to get into college. But Xiao Ming didn’t need a new textbook or a speech about ambition. He just needed one small thing that was his, that no one was going to take away or tell him was a waste of time.
The first change I made that any parent or teacher can copy, no extra time or money required, is I stopped forcing him to perform. I never made him stand up and answer a question in front of the class. If I needed to talk to him, I did it when no one else was around. If he didn’t want to talk, I just sat next to him and graded papers while he drew, no pressure to fill the silence. For a kid who’s learned that speaking up usually leads to teasing or disappointment, silence isn’t a problem to fix—it’s a safety zone.
Second, I connected with him through the thing he already cared about, not the thing I wanted him to be good at. When we started our unit on animals, I didn’t make him memorize a list of words first. I asked him to draw me one animal for each word, and I’d help him spell the name under it. By the end of the unit, he’d drawn 12 different dinosaurs, and he knew every English name by heart. He started turning in his homework every week after that, because it was his chance to add another drawing.
Third, I never talked about him like he wasn’t in the room. I heard so many teachers and volunteers list all his problems—bad grades, no parents, shy—right in front of him, like he couldn’t hear. That just confirms what he already believes: that he’s a problem, not a kid. If I needed to talk about his progress, I did it when he wasn’t there.
I left the school at the end of my volunteer term three months later, to take a job teaching in Chengdu. Last week, his homeroom teacher sent me a photo. It’s from the school’s annual art show, and Xiao Ming is standing next to a meter-wide drawing of a T-Rex, all the body parts labeled in English. He’s not grinning big for the camera, just has a small, tight smile. He still doesn’t raise his hand very often in class. His math grades are still just passing. His parents still only come home once a year for Spring Festival. But he has a shelf in the art room for his drawings now, and he turns in every single English assignment. It’s not a perfect, neat resolution, and there’s still a lot that’s hard for him. But it’s something, and that’s more than he had before.
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