Please Help This Kid in China: Why a Struggling Student Needed Different Instructions, Not More Discipline
“Please help this kid in China.”
A mother showed me these words on her phone on a Tuesday afternoon in a bilingual school outside Shanghai. She had typed them in Chinese and run them through a translation app, and she held the screen up to me like a request form. Her son, Muchen, was sitting at the back of the classroom with his head down. I had been teaching him for six weeks, and this was the first time his mother had come to speak to me directly.
“Help him how?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. She just looked at Muchen, then back at me. Her English was limited, but her meaning was clear: help this kid. Not help him with English or math. Help him be okay in this classroom.
Muchen was nine. At recess he was quick and loud, always first to start a basketball game. In class he was a different person. He would stare at his worksheet, his pencil moving in tiny loops along the margin. When I gave instructions, he looked out the window. When I bent down to ask if he was ready, he nodded but didn’t move. His homeroom teacher had already sent home several messages that month: “Muchen did not listen during morning work.” “Muchen forgot to bring his book.” “Muchen is not following the lesson.”
His mother had tried what most parents try. She sat beside him every night. She removed his phone. She made a reward chart with stickers because a friend told her that worked. When the stickers didn’t help, she took away the reward chart. She even hired a tutor for math, but the tutor reported the same thing: “He listens for the first five minutes, then draws on the paper.”
This is the part that matters. I started paying attention to the moments when Muchen actually did the work. It wasn’t motivation. It was the way instructions were given.
One day I asked the class to take out their math workbooks, turn to page 42, read directions, answer questions 1 through 4, and put a box around each answer. I gave those instructions out loud while writing notes on the board. Most kids started right away. Muchen didn’t. Three minutes later, he was still drawing a spiral on his workbook cover.
But later that afternoon, we did a card-matching activity in pairs. Another boy explained the rules to him in Chinese, one step at a time, using the cards as a visual. Muchen understood and won the game. He wasn’t ignoring the lesson. He was being asked to hold onto too many steps at once, in a second language, through his ears alone.
That was the key insight: for many kids, “he isn’t listening” actually means “the instructions don’t match how his brain works.” There are plenty of kids who can follow a ten-item verbal list without any trouble. Muchen wasn’t one of them. And that wasn’t going to change with more discipline or another sticker chart.
So we changed the work, not just the child.
His mother agreed to a small experiment. We moved Muchen’s seat from the back row to the side of the room near the whiteboard. Not to keep an eye on him—to give him a better chance to see what we were doing. I printed one simple direction card for him each day: 1. Write name. 2. Do problem 1, 2, 3. 3. Bring card to teacher. The card had pictures next to each step. No giant block of text. No teacher talking for thirty seconds. Just one tiny task at a time.
I also started having him repeat instructions before starting. This was harder than it sounds because at first he would say “I don’t know” automatically. So I changed the question. Instead of “Do you understand?” I asked, “What are you going to do first?” If he couldn’t say it, I helped him say it. Then he could start.
The most useful phrase turned out to be the simplest: “First, finish this line. Then you can draw your spiral.” We didn’t say “if you finish, you can have a reward.” We said “first, then,” like a break in the middle of the sentence. It gave his brain a finish line that was close enough to reach.
His mother made changes too, but not huge ones. She stopped asking “Did you finish your homework?” every evening. Instead, she asked “Which problem was the hardest?” She stopped sitting through all twenty problems. She set a timer for seven minutes, and when the timer rang, Muchen could stand up, stretch, and get a glass of water. Then he did another seven minutes if he wanted to. Sometimes he didn’t want to. But sometimes he did.
We also started a small notebook that went home and came back. The homeroom teacher wrote one sentence. His mother wrote one sentence back. No grades, no complaints. “Muchen read directions by himself today.” “Muchen cried a little before math homework, but he finished question one.” It was boring and practical, and it worked better than any app or reward system they had tried.
I don’t want to make this sound like a clean solution. After the first month, Muchen still didn’t finish most worksheets. There were days when the directions card sat untouched under his pencil case. When I asked him what the first step was, he said “I don’t remember” and meant it. His mother had bad mornings when she wondered if she was failing him. In China, the pressure doesn’t disappear because you understand the reason behind a child’s struggle. The tests still come. The parents around you still talk about their children’s scores. The school system still expects every kid to move at the same speed.
But something changed in how people talked about Muchen. The homeroom teacher stopped saying “he doesn’t listen” and started saying “he needs fewer steps at once.” His mother stopped expecting the tutor to fix him and started saying “we are trying a different way this week.” That change in language made it easier to be patient on the hard days.
“Please help this kid in China” stayed with me because it didn’t ask for a diagnosis or a formula. It was a parent saying: look at my child and find a way. And eventually we did. Not the way of tests and discipline, but a smaller way: one direction at a time, one task visible, one clear pause before the next instruction. Muchen isn’t a problem to solve anymore. He’s just a kid who needs the right kind of help—and that help is still being figured out, one school day at a time. The finish line isn’t the score at the bottom of the page.
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