Why This Struggling 4th Grader In China Was Acting Out: Practical Tips For Caregivers
Last October, I was covering recess duty at the public primary school where I volunteer as a teacher’s assistant in suburban Hangzhou, when I spotted 10-year-old Xiao Ming hiding behind the bike rack, methodically tearing pages out of his math workbook. The campus osmanthus tree was blooming that week, sweet enough to smell all the way across the playground, where most kids were yelling over a game of jump rope. Xiao Ming’s shoulders were hunched, and his sneakers were scuffed at the toes, the same pair he’d worn since the start of the semester. I walked over slowly, not wanting to startle him, and sat down on the cracked cement curb next to him. He didn’t look up, just kept tearing the paper into tiny pieces.
I pulled a half-crushed pack of osmanthus candies out of my jacket pocket—one of the parents had dropped them off for the class that morning—and pushed one across the curb between us. After a minute, he picked it up, peeled the wrapper off, and stuffed it in his mouth. “If I fail the midterm, my dad’s sending me back to Anhui,” he said, so quiet I almost missed it.
His homeroom teacher had already told me he’d been acting up for two months. He didn’t turn in homework, hid his textbook during class, and had pushed a boy who called him a name in the hallway the week before. Xiao Ming’s parents are migrant workers from a small village in Anhui, they rent a 15-square-meter room a 10-minute walk from school, and work 12-hour shifts at the garment factory down the road. They leave at 6 a.m. and get back after 8 p.m., so they rarely have time to check his homework or talk to his teachers. When the school told them Xiao Ming was falling two months behind grade level, they panicked. They’d moved him from his village school to the city so he could have a better education, and were already stretching their budget to pay the extra rental and school fees. If he was too slow to keep up, they figured sending him back to live with his grandma was the only option.
I met his mom and dad during their 20-minute dinner break a few days later, sitting on plastic stools outside the factory gate, splitting a bowl of instant noodles with pickled radish. They kept apologizing, said they knew they weren’t doing enough, but they just couldn’t leave work early to help with homework. “We just want him to study hard so he doesn’t have to do this kind of work later,” his mom said, wiping grease off her sleeve. They’d been so focused on making enough money to keep him in the city that they didn’t realize he’d stopped telling them anything about school at all.
A lot of people hear “help a kid like this” and immediately think of big donations, after-school tutoring, or expensive programs. But over the past few months working with Xiao Ming, his teacher, and his parents, we’ve changed just three small, low-effort things that have made a bigger difference than anyone expected. None of them cost any money, and none of them require anyone to add hours of extra work to their already full days.
First, we talked his math teacher into cutting Xiao Ming’s nightly homework from 20 problems to 5, all of them aligned with the level he’s actually at, not the grade level the rest of the class is on. Before, the homework was all questions he couldn’t answer without help, so he’d just crumple the whole worksheet up rather than admit he couldn’t do it. Five problems take him 10 minutes to finish alone, and if he gets all of them right, he gets a sticker on his pencil case. After 10 stickers, he gets the cheap rubber basketball he’s been eyeing at the stationery shop down the street. It’s a small change, but it means he’s actually finishing homework now, instead of skipping it entirely.
Second, we got his parents to swap one question they ask him every night when they get home. Before, they’d always ask “Did you get good grades on your test today?” which would make him clam up and go hide in the corner. Now, we had them ask just one different question: “What was the silliest thing that happened at school today?” It takes 30 seconds, doesn’t require a long conversation, and it doesn’t feel like an interrogation. At first, he just shrugged and said “nothing.” But after a week, he started telling them about the time the teacher accidentally called the principal the wrong name, or how one of his classmates brought a pet hamster into class. It didn’t fix his grades overnight, but it got him talking again, instead of shutting down every time his parents talked to him about school.
Third, the homeroom teacher gave him a small, specific job in the class: he’s the one who carries the basketball and jump rope baskets out to the playground before PE every day. Xiao Ming is fast and good at ball, something no one had ever highlighted before—everyone only ever talked about how bad he was at math. Within two weeks, other kids started asking him to join their basketball team during recess, and the name calling slowed way down. He has a role in the class now that doesn’t have anything to do with test scores.
The thing that sticks with me most about this whole experience is how easy it is to label a kid like Xiao Ming as lazy, or slow, or a troublemaker. In China’s crowded public schools, where teachers have 45 kids in a class and a million administrative tasks to finish, there’s not a lot of time to unpack why a kid is acting out. For migrant kids especially, who are already navigating the stress of being away from extended family and fitting into a new city, it’s even easier to fall through the cracks.
Xiao Ming still isn’t caught up to grade level. His parents still work 12-hour days, and he still gets frustrated when he can’t understand a new math concept. Last week, I saw him crumple a quiz after he got 4 out of 10 wrong, but this time he came to find me after recess instead of hiding behind the bike rack. We smoothed the paper out together, and I walked him through the first two problems. He got the rest right on his own.
Last month, I watched him during recess, dribbling a basketball down the playground, laughing with three other boys. His pencil case has 8 stickers on it now, and he turned in his homework every single week for the past month. We don’t know what will happen with his midterms next month, or if he’ll be able to stay in the city with his parents through middle school. But right now, he’s not hiding anymore. That’s enough to start with.
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