Why quiet struggling kids in Chinese primary schools need more help than you notice
It’s 4:15 pm on a Tuesday at the after-school program I volunteer at in Suzhou, and the room smells like warm instant noodles and melted pencil eraser. I’m walking between rows of wobbly plastic desks checking math homework, and when I get to 10-year-old Xiao Ming’s seat, he yanks his workbook off the desk and shoves it into his lap, his elbows locked tight around the edges. The boys behind him snort. “He never does homework, miss. He’s just stupid.”
I’ve worked at this program for 18 months, and Xiao Ming’s been the quiet kid in the back the whole time. He never causes trouble, never raises his hand, never asks for anything. Most days he just stares out the window at the construction site down the road while the other kids work. The school’s homeroom teacher told me at the start of the semester not to waste too much time on him—his parents are migrant factory workers, they don’t care about his grades, he’s always been behind.
I didn’t push him that Tuesday, just tapped his desk and said I’d be back after I checked everyone else. When the other kids left for recess, he was still sitting there, twisting the end of his worn school uniform sleeve. I pulled a spare lollipop out of my bag (I keep them for shy kids) and pushed it across the desk. “Can you tell me why you don’t do your homework?” I asked.
It took him five minutes of picking at the lollipop wrapper before he mumbled it out. The homeroom teacher posts all homework on the class WeChat group. Only parents get the messages. His parents work 12-hour shifts at a garment factory an hour outside the city, they rent a room there and only come home once a month on weekends. He lives with his grandma, who can’t use a smartphone and can only read three characters: her own name. He doesn’t have his own phone, so he never sees the homework assignment. Some days he works up the nerve to ask a classmate on the way home, but most days they forget, or he’s too embarrassed to ask twice. When he shows up to school without homework, he gets a demerit, gets yelled at in front of the class, so he just started hiding his book entirely to avoid the hassle.
That’s the thing no one talks about much when we talk about struggling kids in Chinese schools. We default to two stories: either the kid is lazy, or the parents don’t care. But almost always, it’s just one small, invisible gap that everyone else takes for granted. Every kid in the class has a parent who checks WeChat, writes down homework, reminds them to bring their workbook to school. No one ever thought to check if Xiao Ming had that.
I talked to his homeroom teacher the next day, and asked if she could just print me an extra copy of the week’s homework every Monday morning. It takes her two minutes, tops, and she keeps a stack of extra paper by the printer anyway. I taped a big, simple checklist with large characters to the inside of Xiao Ming’s desk, so he can tick off each assignment as he finishes it, no memorization required. I asked the friendly boy who sits next to him to just repeat the homework out loud to Xiao Ming right after class every day, and told him I’d give him a pack of cartoon stickers every Friday for doing it. He jumped at the deal—it takes him 10 seconds, and he loves collecting stickers for his pencil case.
After that, I started staying 10 minutes late twice a week to go over the problems he got wrong. I don’t do the work for him, I just point to where he messed up and ask him to try again. When he gets something right, I don’t just say “good job”—I say “You remembered how to calculate the area of a rectangle on all three of these, that’s way better than last week.” Specific, small, he knows exactly what he did well.
I ran into his grandma outside the school gate a month after we started this. She was waiting for him, holding a crinkly plastic bag of hot steamed buns for his after-school snack. She pulled me aside and apologized, said she’s useless, can’t help him with anything, she knows he’s a bad kid. I told her he’s not bad, he just didn’t know what his homework was. She teared up a little, said he always tells her he has no homework when she asks, she guesses he was too ashamed to tell her he didn’t know.
This isn’t just a problem for migrant kids, either. I’ve seen the same gap with kids whose parents are busy executives, kids who are too shy to ask for help even when their parents are home, kids who have poor memory and can’t keep track of assignments that are only posted online. The first thing any of us can do, if we notice a kid who’s always falling behind, is stop assuming the worst. Don’t yell, don’t call the parents to complain, don’t write the kid off. Spend 15 minutes alone with them, ask specific questions: Who writes down your homework for you? Do you know what you’re supposed to do every night? Is there anything that makes doing homework hard that you haven’t told anyone? Most kids won’t speak up if you just ask “what’s wrong” because they’re embarrassed. Specific questions get answers.
The second thing is look for small fixes, not big overhauls. You don’t need to become the kid’s full-time tutor, you don’t need to fix the entire education system to help one kid. An extra printed sheet once a week, a 10-second check-in from a classmate, that’s all it took for Xiao Ming. It’s low effort for everyone involved, but it closes that invisible gap that was holding him back.
It’s been three months now. Xiao Ming still doesn’t raise his hand in class. He still gets more than half his math problems wrong. But he doesn’t yank his workbook off the desk when I walk by anymore. Last week he showed me a drawing of an orange cat he taped to the inside of his desk, done on the back of an old homework sheet. His test grade last month went from 32 out of 100 to 58. It’s still failing, but it’s 26 points higher than last time. I gave him an extra red bean bun from my lunch to celebrate, he ate it on the playground while playing tag with the other boys. I don’t know what will happen next year when he moves to middle school. I don’t know if his parents will ever be able to move back home to stay with him, or if he’ll ever make it to college. But for now, he knows what his homework is every day. That’s enough for right now.
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