How To Help Overburdened Kids In China: A Teacher’s Real, Small Tips That Work
Last Tuesday, I was stacking midterm workbooks by my 4th grade classroom door in Guangzhou, half the fluorescent lights already turned off for the day, when 9-year-old Hao pulled on my sleeve. He leaned in so close his nose almost touched my arm, and whispered, “Can you please tell my mom I didn’t fail the English quiz? Please help this kid.”
The hallway smelled like leftover tangerine peels from afternoon snack, and his backpack was slipping off one shoulder, the faded T-Rex print on the side peeling at the edges. I flipped open his quiz booklet—72 out of 100. The class average was 80, so it was below average, but it wasn’t failing by any measure. I nodded and tucked the quiz back into his folder, just as his mom rounded the corner.
She was still in her work blazer, holding a plastic tote of tutoring worksheets from her afternoon errand. When she saw the score, she crossed her arms and said, loud enough for the few remaining kids waiting by the door to turn and look, “72? That’s five points lower than last time. What do you even do during the 2 hours of English tutoring I pay for every Saturday?” Hao just stared at the scuffed toe of his white sneakers, his jaw clamped tight so he wouldn’t cry.
I’ve taught elementary school here for seven years, and I see this almost every week. Too many conversations about kids in China center on big, abstract pressure—gaokao competition, entrance exam cutoffs, generational pressure to succeed. But when a kid pulls you aside and asks for help, they’re not asking for systemic change. They’re asking for something small, right now.
What I did next, that I’ve started doing with all parents in this situation, is not call them out in front of the kid. That just makes everyone defensive, and the kid ends up feeling more guilty than they already do. I just smiled and suggested a 15-minute check-in the next afternoon, after class, when we could talk without rushing. That’s a concrete step any teacher or caregiver can take—don’t hash out bad scores in public, even if it’s just the school hallway.
When Hao’s mom and I sat down the next day, I didn’t start with “you’re putting too much pressure on your son.” That’s the first thing most people want to say, but it just makes parents shut down—most of them are working extra shifts to pay for tutoring, they’re just scared their kid will have fewer options than they did. Instead, I pulled out Hao’s sketchbook, the one he keeps tucked in his desk. He draws dinosaurs in the margins of every worksheet, and he spends half his recess drawing dinosaurs for his classmates. I flipped to a page where he’d drawn a full T-Rex skeleton, all the proportions perfect, and said, “Look at this. He can focus on this for 20 minutes straight, no fidgeting, no asking for a break. That kind of focus is something most kids his age don’t have. We just don’t score it on a quiz.”
She was quiet for a minute, then said she’d never seen his drawings before. He never brings his sketchbook home, because he thinks she’ll say it’s a waste of time. That’s when I suggested two small changes, nothing that required canceling all tutoring or upending their whole routine. First, instead of opening with “what was your score?” every day when she picks him up from school, ask “what was the coolest thing that happened today?” Second, give up one tutoring slot a month—just one weekend afternoon—and let Hao pick what they do together, no strings attached.
She hesitated, said she was scared he’d fall further behind, but agreed to try it for a month. A month later, Hao came bouncing up to me after class, holding his latest English quiz. It was a 78—still below average, still not the score his mom wants. But he was grinning, ear to ear, and said he didn’t freeze up this time. He finished all the writing questions, even the extra credit one. He told me they went to the provincial dinosaur museum on their free afternoon last weekend, and his mom didn’t ask him a single question about quizzes or tutoring the whole day.
I still check in with them every couple of weeks. Hao’s mom still texts me to ask about his latest scores, and she hasn’t canceled any of his regular tutoring slots. He still gets nervous before big tests, and last week he cried for five minutes after forgetting his math homework, convinced I’d call his mom and she’d be mad. I just told him to bring it tomorrow, that everyone forgets things sometimes, and he stopped crying and went back to drawing dinosaurs during recess.
No one’s fixed the big, systemic pressure that shapes school life here. No one’s wave of a hand made test scores less important for getting into good high schools and colleges. But when that kid pulled my sleeve and asked for help, he didn’t need a grand solution. He just needed someone to see he’s more than a number printed at the top of a quiz paper.
The small stuff works: asking a different question at the end of the day, carving out one afternoon a month of no plans, pointing out what a kid does well before you talk about what they got wrong. It doesn’t require extra money or extra time most weeks, and it doesn’t mean you’re letting your kid slack off. It just means you’re letting them be a person first. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t fix everything. But it’s something, right now, that any of us can do.
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