Why This Quiet 10-Year-Old In China Was Labeled A Problem Student: Tips For Parents And Teachers
The fluorescent lights in the after-school program hummed so loud I could barely hear the homeroom teacher leaning in to me last October. “Please help this kid,” she said, nodding toward the back of the room where a 10-year-old named Hao slouched in his chair, hood pulled up over his black hair, a half-sticky lollipop melting into the edge of his desk. “He won’t do work, won’t talk, disrupts the whole class. We all think he’s just lazy.”
I volunteer one afternoon a week at this free program for migrant kids in downtown Guangzhou. Most of the parents work 12-hour shifts in the nearby clothing markets, so the program gives kids a safe place to do homework after school until their shifts end. I’d seen Hao around before, always alone, always doodling in the margins of whatever paper he had in front of him. I pulled a chair next to him and sat down, didn’t yank his workbook out right away. I pointed to the half-drawn sports car in his notebook margin. “That side mirror looks better than the one I drew when I was your age,” I said. He didn’t look up, but his pencil stopped moving for a second.
Over the next couple weeks, we fell into a slow rhythm. I didn’t push him to do hours of homework right off the bat. We’d do 10 minutes of work, then 10 minutes of talking about cars—his favorite thing, he collects die-cast models and watches race clips on his dad’s old phone when he’s done with chores. Turned out he’d moved from a small village in Hunan two years prior, when his parents got factory work here. He’d missed seven months of school waiting for his residency paperwork to go through, so he could enroll in the public school. By the time he got in, the class was already a full grade ahead in reading and math. The village school he attended mostly taught in the local dialect, so he still struggles to read simplified Mandarin textbook characters fast enough to keep up. He’s embarrassed by his accent when he speaks in front of the class, so he just doesn’t speak at all. His parents work until 9pm every night, and can’t read enough of the advanced textbook to help him with homework anyway. So he checks out. Doodles. Slouches. Gets labeled lazy.
I realized pretty fast that the problem wasn’t that Hao didn’t care. It was that no one had stopped to ask why he wasn’t participating. All the default moves that teachers and parents use—yelling, taking away recess, sending notes home—just made him hide more. What worked for us didn’t take extra money or a lot of extra time, just a few small shifts anyone can make.
First, I gave him a low-stakes way to tell me what he didn’t know, no embarrassment involved. I told him every time we work through a problem, just circle any character you aren’t 100% sure of, no matter how small or easy you think it is. No raising your hand, no asking out loud, just circle it. I don’t make him explain why he doesn’t know it, I just tell him what it means and we move on. Before that, he’d just skip whole problems instead of admitting he couldn’t read the question. That one small change doubled the amount of work he finished in the first week.
Then, instead of trying to get him caught up on two years of work in a month, we do 15 minutes of targeted work per session, max. We pick three new characters he sees all the time in word problems, and one basic math concept he missed. That’s it. Anything more, and he checks out. I tie all the practice to his cars, too. Instead of word problems about apples and oranges, we do them about how many tires a fleet of race cars needs, how long it takes to finish a 200km lap if a car goes 50km an hour. He doesn’t even realize he’s practicing math half the time.
I also talked to his homeroom teacher about one small change to the classroom: instead of calling on him randomly to answer questions in front of the whole class (which makes him freeze up), give him a small daily job that doesn’t require public speaking. She agreed to let him pass out the math workbooks every morning. It’s a tiny thing, but it makes him feel like he’s part of the class, not just the kid in the back who doesn’t do anything. When I talked to his dad a few weeks back, I told him one small swap for their nightly check-in: instead of opening with “why is your grade so low,” open with “what cool thing did you draw today?” He told me last week that Hao actually talks for five minutes now before he goes to wash up for bed, which he never did before.
It’s been four months now. Hao still isn’t a top student. He still doodles through most of his regular classes, and he still leaves half his homework unfinished some weeks. Some of his teachers still roll their eyes when his name comes up, and say he’ll never catch up. But last week, he raised his hand in our program’s group math activity to answer a question before I even got to ask. The question was about how many wheels 7 race cars have, and he got it right. He grinned when we clapped, and ducked his head back down to his doodle. He got a 6/10 on his last math quiz, which is the first passing score he’s had since he moved to Guangzhou.
There are thousands of kids like Hao all across China, kids who fall through the cracks because of a move, or paperwork, or a pace that’s too fast for them. They get labeled difficult or unmotivated before anyone asks what’s actually going on. Most of the time, it’s not that they don’t want to learn. It’s just that no one’s given them a small, low-shame way to start catching up. We’re still working on it, one 15-minute session and one car-themed word problem at a time.
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