Why Won’t the New Migrant Kid Speak Up In Class? A Teacher’s Real Experience And Tips
The osmanthus outside my 4th grade classroom was heavy with bloom that mid-September afternoon, and the sweet scent drifted in through the open windows while my kids worked on their autumn harvest poster projects. Glue sticks gunked up the edges of desks, and three groups were arguing over who got the only pack of metallic gold crayons. I wandered over to the back corner, where 10-year-old Xiao Ming sat alone on the edge of his group’s circle, folding tiny paper cranes out of scrap paper. The group leader, a bubbly girl named Lina, leaned in and asked again if he could draw the tree for their poster. Xiao Ming tucked his chin all the way down to his chest, his black bangs falling over his eyes, and didn’t make a sound.
He’d transferred to my public school in suburban Hangzhou two weeks prior, moving from a small village in Anhui with his parents, who both worked at the clothing factory 15 minutes from the school. His registration form had a note that he’d missed the first two weeks of fourth grade because they were waiting for their residence permit to go through. I’d already tried a dozen times to get him to talk, asking about his favorite shows, if he liked the school lunch, if he missed his grandma back in the village. Nothing. All I got was silence or a tiny head shake.
At first, I bought into the common assumption that he was just shy, that he needed time to adjust, that if I told the whole class to be extra nice to him, he’d warm up. That backfired. After I made that announcement, a handful of kids followed him around the playground at recess, asking him questions nonstop, and he ended up hiding in the bathroom until the bell rang. I called his mom the first Friday after he started, and she picked up on her 10-minute lunch break, the hum of sewing machines loud in the background. She apologized over and over, said she worked 12-hour shifts, couldn’t help with his homework because she’d only finished sixth grade herself, didn’t know how to help him fit in. “I just want him to stay in school, not have to work in the factory like me,” she said, and then had to hang up because her break was over.
I first got a crack of understanding a week later, when I stayed late grading math quizzes and heard a soft knock on my office door. It was Xiao Ming, he’d forgotten his beat-up plastic water bottle by his desk. I pulled a pack of saltine crackers out of my drawer (I kept them for kids who forgot their lunch) and offered him one. He hovered in the doorway for a full minute before stepping forward to take it, and I noticed the hole in the toe of his canvas sneaker, and the neat stitch work along the edge of his sock where it had been mended. I’d seen the small ink dragon he’d drawn in the margin of his notebook a few days before, so I said, “I saw your dragon drawing. That’s really good.” He mumbled something so quiet I almost missed it: “I draw when mom works night shift.” That was the first full sentence he’d said to me.
That’s when I realized this wasn’t shyness. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to participate. It was that every part of this school was unfamiliar. All the other kids in my class had grown up here, gone to preschool together, knew how group work worked, talked about cartoon movies and weekend trips to the lake that Xiao Ming had never experienced. His previous village school had 12 kids in his whole grade, no group projects, no requirement to speak up in front of the class. Asking him to jump in and be just like everyone else was like asking someone who’d never ridden a bike to join a race.
What I did instead was small, low-pressure changes that fit our daily routine, no big gestures required. First, I stopped putting him on the spot with open-ended requests like “join your group.” Instead, I gave him one small, specific, low-talk job to start. I told his group that every project needed a material manager, and I asked Xiao Ming if he’d be willing to do that. His job was just to count out the paper, pass out the crayons, and clean up the scraps when they were done. No need to share ideas, no need to talk more than he wanted. That worked for him, because it gave him a clear place in the group without forcing him out of his comfort zone all at once.
Second, I adjusted expectations for homework instead of pushing him or shaming his mom for not being able to help. I told him for the first two months, he only needed to write each new character 5 times instead of the required 10. I set aside 10 minutes after lunch every other day to go over his homework with him, and connected him with a 6th grade volunteer who comes to the school after classes to help kids catch up, so he gets 15 minutes of extra help with reading every day. I didn’t ask his mom to do anything different, because I knew she couldn’t.
Third, I stopped drawing attention to him being the “new kid who needs help.” Instead of making a big announcement to the class, I found small, natural ways to let him share what he knows. When we talked about autumn harvest in social studies, I mentioned that Xiao Ming had helped his grandma harvest rice the summer before, and asked if he’d be willing to show the class the photo his mom took. He didn’t want to talk about it, just held up his mom’s old phone for 10 seconds so the class could see. But after that, three different kids asked him what it was like to cut rice by hand, and he nodded and answered a couple of their questions, no pressure from me.
It’s been three months now. Xiao Ming still doesn’t raise his hand to answer questions. He still brings a steamed bun from home for lunch most days, instead of buying the school meal. But last week, when a kid in his group asked for a blue crayon, Xiao Ming handed it to him and said “here” clear enough for the whole table to hear. Last week, he drew a little osmanthus flower on the corner of his homework, next to the characters he’d written. He doesn’t hide in the bathroom at recess anymore; he stands against the wall and watches the other kids play jump rope, and sometimes he takes a turn when they offer.
I still don’t have it all figured out. There are days I worry that I’m not doing enough, that the gap between what he has and what the other kids have is too big to fix with small daily adjustments. His mom still can’t make parent-teacher meetings because she can’t get time off work, and I have to talk to her on her 10-minute break once a month. But I’ve learned that when people say “please help this kid,” most of the time you don’t need to do something big. You don’t need to organize a big drive or force a big change overnight. You just need to give him a job that fits where he is, lower the pressure to be “normal” right away, and wait. It’s slow, but it’s working, one small “here” and one little drawn flower at a time.
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