What Actually Helps Overwhelmed Struggling Kids In China: A Tutor’s Real Story
The first message I got from Hao’s mom on WeChat was short and urgent: “My son is 10, fourth grade. Grades dropping. Won’t listen to anyone. Please help this kid.” I showed up to their apartment 10 minutes early for our first session, and smelled stir-fried garlic drifting through the stairwell before I even knocked. The door cracked open, and Hao peeked out, a crumpled English workbook pressed to his chest, his hair falling over his eyes. His mom pulled the door open the rest of the way, apologizing for the mess, explaining he’d locked himself in his room for an hour after bringing home a B on his weekly quiz. He wouldn’t come out until she promised I wouldn’t yell at him.
He sat down at the wobbly foldable table pushed up against their living room window, and I counted 12 unopened supplementary workbooks stacked next to his insulated water bottle—math, English, science, all with crackly new covers. I pulled out my copy of the textbook we were supposed to use, asked him to read the first dialogue out loud. He stared at his shoes, didn’t say a word. Five minutes passed. Ten. His mom hovered in the kitchen doorway, starting to clear her throat like she was going to come over and scold him. I closed the textbook. I said, let’s put this away for today. What do you like to do when you’re not doing homework?
He didn’t answer for a minute, then slowly pulled the bottom drawer of his desk open an inch. Taped to the inside were half a dozen dinosaur drawings, smudged with pencil, all different sizes. “He likes dinosaurs,” his mom said from the doorway, rolling her eyes a little. “Wastes hours on that instead of studying.” I leaned in, asked him which one was his favorite. That’s when he started talking. For 22 minutes, I didn’t teach a single grammar rule. I just nodded while he explained why T-Rex had the sharpest teeth of any carnivore, how paleontologists found a new T-Rex fossil in Xinjiang the year before, how his little sister draws on his drawings when he leaves them out. I wrote down the words he tried to say in English but didn’t know: fossil, paleontologist, sharp. By the end of the hour, he’d written all three words at the bottom of his favorite drawing, all by himself, no one asked him to.
That’s the thing no one tells you when you get a plea like “please help this kid” in China. The problem is almost never that the kid isn’t smart enough, or doesn’t work hard enough. More often than not, it’s that they’ve shut down. Every time they get a question wrong, someone writes a big red X, someone sighs about wasted tutoring money, someone reminds them that if they don’t get into a good high school, they won’t get into a good college, and their whole future will be off track. After a while, it’s easier to just not try at all than to keep getting told you’re not good enough.
I’ve been tutoring kids here for four years, and the biggest mistake I see parents and teachers make is reaching for more work as soon as grades dip. More tutoring, more practice pages, more extra classes on weekends. That just makes the shutdown worse. What works is smaller, slower stuff that doesn’t cost any extra money or take any extra rearranging of your schedule.
For example, we start every session with 15 minutes of talk about anything but school. I don’t ask “how was school” – that always gets “fine.” I ask “what’s the dumbest rule your teacher has this week” or “what’s the best thing that happened to you this week” or “tell me more about that stray cat you feed by the gate.” That 15 minutes isn’t wasted time. It’s building back the trust that got beaten out of him when everyone around him only cared about his grades. After a month, he started talking before I even asked.
Another thing I do: I never lead with “what did you do wrong” when we look at a bad test. When he brought home a C on a midterm, I pulled it out, and instead of pointing to the wrong answers first, I said “which of these questions was the hardest for you?” He pointed to the reading passage about Chinese festivals, said he didn’t know what “ancestor” meant. We talked about that for two minutes, then went through the wrong answers one by one, just figuring out where he got confused, no scolding, no extra 100 practice sentences. His mom was shocked when I didn’t assign extra homework after that. But when he got his next test back, he got three fewer wrong answers, just like that.
Most of the advice you see online about this is vague, just “be more supportive,” but these small changes are easy to try, even if you’re a busy parent working long hours and juggling two kids. You don’t have to pull your kid out of all their extra classes, or throw away all their workbooks. You just have to add 10 minutes a day of no-grade talk, and stop leading with criticism when something goes wrong.
After three months with Hao, his English grade is up to a B+ from a B-. It’s not the A his mom wants, and she still texts me every other week asking if we can add an extra hour to get him there faster. He still hides his drawings in his desk drawer, because his mom still says drawing is a waste of time he should spend on homework. He still complains that supplementary math class is boring, and he’d rather be outside playing basketball with his friends.
Last week, he brought me a new drawing before our session started. It’s a T-Rex holding an English book, grinning. At the bottom, he wrote “My name is Hao. I like T-Rex.” No mistakes, no eraser smudges. That’s the progress that matters, I think. We didn’t fix everything. The pressure from school, from the gaokao, from all the unspoken expectations that come with growing up here isn’t going away just because we talk about dinosaurs for 15 minutes a week. But Hao’s not shutting down anymore. He’s talking, he’s trying, he’s still drawing his dinosaurs when no one’s looking. That’s enough for now.
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