Why Some Kids In China Disengage From School: Practical Tips For Teachers And Parents
The fluorescent light above our back table buzzed so loud it made my teeth itch last October, when I bent down to collect math homework from my after-school tutoring class in this small county north of Guilin. One crumpled, empty notebook stayed on Xiao Ming’s desk. I tapped the cover. “Where’s your homework?” He pulled his gray school sweater sleeves over his knuckles and stared at the scuffed toe of his sneakers, same as he always did. No answer, no excuse, nothing.
His homeroom teacher had already warned me he was just another lazy left-behind kid. His parents worked in an electronics factory in Shenzhen, came home once a year for Spring Festival. Grandma raised him and his little sister, couldn’t read enough to check homework. “He’ll drop out as soon as he’s old enough to work,” she told me at the first parent meeting, twisting her worn knit scarf between her hands. I believed it for a month too. I tried staying after class to walk him through problems, I offered extra snack points for turned-in work, nothing stuck. He just shrugged and looked at the floor, same as always.
It was a rainy Wednesday in November, and all the early buses got canceled. Most kids got picked up by grandparents, but Xiao Ming hung around by the door, kicking a broken cinder block, because his grandma couldn’t walk the two miles here in the rain. I was packing up my stuff, and he spotted the photo on my lock screen: my uncle’s old motorcycle I’d had repaired the month before. “My great-uncle let me fix a broken engine last week,” he mumbled, so quiet I almost missed it.
I pulled out a chair and asked him to tell me more. He pulled a crumpled photo out of his textbook, taped to the back cover: a beat-up blue mountain bike with an Ultraman sticker on the handlebar. He’d found it dumped by the side of the road, spent three weekends fixing it up, now he rides it to the market to get groceries for his grandma. He told me he spends every Saturday helping his great-uncle at his bike repair stall by the bus station. I’d been talking to him for a full month and never asked what he did outside of my classroom. That’s the mistake most of us make, I realized. We see the kid who doesn’t turn in homework, label him lazy or unmotivated, and never think to ask what he’s already good at, what he cares about outside of our grades checklist.
I stopped asking him to do the exact same homework as everyone else first, at least for the first couple months. This didn’t take hours of extra planning, just five minutes of my evening prep. I wrote his word problems on the back of scrap paper, all tied to what he cared about: If you need to buy 2 inner tubes that cost 15 yuan each, and you charge 40 yuan to fix a flat tire, how many flats do you need to fix to pay for them? If you want that 380 yuan suspension fork you pointed out in the shop window, and you save 60 yuan a month, how many months do you need? He did every single one that first week, no mistakes. Then I found a tattered bike repair manual at a second-hand shop in the city, gave it to him. I asked him to just read one paragraph out loud to me every day before he left, instead of the textbook reading we did with the other kids. His reading was halting at first, but he never said no.
This is the practical trick that works for almost any disengaged kid, not just those in small towns in China. Instead of starting with “you need to get your grades up,” start with one question: What do you do when no one is telling you what to do? Whatever the answer is, that’s your hook. If your kid spends all their free time tending to a vegetable patch behind your apartment, practice math by counting how many seeds you need for a row, how much profit you’d make if you sold extra at the market. If they spend every weekend watching car reviews online, practice writing by having them write a short review of their favorite car for the family. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it doesn’t require extra tuition or fancy materials. It just has to belong to them, not just the school’s checklist.
I also stopped pushing him to be more outgoing. Everyone from his grandma to his homeroom teacher kept saying he needed to learn to speak up more to get a good job someday. But he’s just quiet. He’ll talk for 20 minutes straight about the difference between mountain bike tires and road bike tires when it’s just the two of us. There’s no unwritten rule that says every kid has to be the one raising their hand in front of 40 classmates to be successful. We waste so much time trying to fix kids’ personalities instead of helping them build the skills they need on their own terms.
It’s been almost six months now. Xiao Ming still doesn’t turn in every piece of homework. His latest math test was a 61, the first passing grade he’s gotten since third grade. He still doesn’t raise his hand in homeroom, and he still forgets his pencil half the time. Last week he brought me a bright blue bike bell he’d fixed, fitted it to my old bicycle I ride to tutoring every day. It rings so loud it scares the chickens that wander along the road into town.
I don’t know what’s going to happen with him. His parents mentioned last month they might bring him to Shenzhen to live with them next year, which would mean a new school, new everything. He might drop out to fix bikes full time in a few years, or he might go to vocational school to learn auto mechanics. Either way, he’s already better at something most adults I know never master: fixing broken things that other people throw away. We don’t have to fix him. We just have to meet him where he already is.
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