Why Quiet Underperforming Kids in Chinese Classrooms Need More Than Discipline: A Teacher’s Story
Third period English last week, I was passing out pop quizzes when the homeroom teacher, Li Laoshi, leaned in the doorway and nodded at the back row. “Xiao Ming again. Head down all period, hasn’t turned in homework in two weeks. If he doesn’t care, just send him to the office.” The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and the smell of fried dough from the morning break still lingered by the door. All the other kids hunched lower over their papers, not wanting to be noticed. I walked back to Xiao Ming’s desk, and yeah, his head was on his arms, his uniform shirt stretched a little across his shoulders, his scuffed white sneakers propped on the leg of the desk next to him. I didn’t yell, just tapped his shoulder lightly. He jolted up, eyes bleary, and didn’t meet my gaze.
After class I asked him to stay back, not for punishment, just to grab a drink from the fountain by my office. I had an extra apple in my bag from lunch and gave it to him. He stood there twisting the hem of his shirt for five minutes, staring at his shoes, before he said anything. Turned out his parents work at an electronics factory an hour bus ride from the city, they only come home on the first of every month. He lives with his 72-year-old grandma, who has bad knees and can’t read a single character of middle school text, let alone English. Every night after dinner, grandma goes to sell fruit at the night market until 11, so Xiao Ming has to watch his 5-year-old cousin, get him fed, get him to bed. By the time the cousin’s asleep, it’s almost 11:30, and the bulb in the room they share burned out three weeks ago. He didn’t ask grandma for a new one because he knows she spends almost all her money on the cousin’s milk and asthma medicine, so he does his homework by the light of his old beat-up phone, that dies halfway through most nights. He falls asleep in class because he doesn’t get to bed until midnight and has to be up at 6 for school. When I asked why he didn’t tell anyone, he just shrugged and said “Everyone already says I’m lazy. What’s the point of saying anything?”
I’ve been volunteering at this public school for a year and a half, and this isn’t the first time this has happened. We talk a lot about exam scores and high school acceptance rates here, and when a kid isn’t hitting the marks, the first label we reach for is lazy, or unmotivated, or doesn’t respect the rules. Most of the time, it’s not that at all. It’s just a small, boring problem that no one bothered to ask about. I told Li Laoshi what I found out after class, and she sighed and said she has 52 kids in this class, she doesn’t have time to ask every kid who sleeps through class about their light bulb. That’s fair, honestly. Teachers here are overworked, parents are overworked, everyone’s just trying to get through the day. But there are small things that don’t take a lot of extra time that make a huge difference.
I got an extra light bulb from the janitor that afternoon—they keep spares in the supply closet for free, no one even asked me to pay for it. I walked home with Xiao Ming after school, changed the bulb in five minutes. It didn’t cost me anything, didn’t throw off my whole afternoon. Then we made a small deal: instead of turning in a full 10-sentence paragraph for homework every night, he just has to turn in three complete sentences. That’s it. If he gets his cousin to bed early and has more time, he can do more, but if he doesn’t, three is fine.
This is the thing I tell other teachers and parents who ask me about working with quiet kids who fall behind. First, don’t ask open questions like “is everything okay at home?” Most kids, especially kids who are used to being labeled as bad, won’t answer that. It feels like an invitation to get in trouble, or to admit something that makes them ashamed. Ask specific, small questions that don’t feel intrusive. “Do you have enough light to do homework at night?” “Is there enough space at your house to study after dinner?” “Do you have to take care of younger siblings after school?” Those are easy to answer with a yes or no, and they don’t put kids on the spot.
Second, adjust expectations in small ways instead of punishing. If a kid falls asleep in first period, don’t send them to the office to get a demerit that goes on their record. Let them stand in the back of the room for 10 minutes to wake up. If they can’t finish a full homework assignment because they don’t have time, cut the assignment in half. It’s not coddling, it’s meeting them where they are. Third, don’t assume that small problems are easy for families to fix. A 10 yuan light bulb is nothing to me, but for a grandma living on 2000 yuan a month taking care of two kids, that’s 10 yuan that would have gone to the cousin’s cold medicine that month. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they have to pick what to pay for.
It’s been a month and a half since we changed the bulb. Xiao Ming still sleeps in third period sometimes, especially if the cousin was fussy the night before. He still doesn’t get above a C on most quizzes, and his parents still haven’t come to a single parent-teacher conference. I don’t have some big happy ending where he gets into the top high school and wins a full scholarship. That’s not how this works, most of the time. But last week he turned in a full paragraph for homework, about how he went hiking with his cousin last weekend and saw a wild rabbit. A couple days ago he stayed after class to ask me how to pronounce the names of the members of his favorite boy band, and he told me he changed the burnt out bulb in the hallway of his building for the old lady who lives next door, because she can’t reach the socket. That’s enough, for now. A lot of these kids don’t need some grand intervention. They just need someone to ask the right small question, and fix the small thing no one else bothered to notice.
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