I spend my Sunday mornings with frenetic kindergartners. On the first day of the week, the only thing that motivates me to get up before 9 AM is my volunteering position as a teacher’s assistant in Bridgewater Chinese School. The day before I must submerge myself into the sea of high schoolers, I choose to step into the chaos of elementary school.
About a quarter of the way through the school year, as I entered the list of red As and Bs into the gradebook, I noticed that one student, Chloe, was getting grades significantly lower than her classmates. Chloe was the smallest kindergartner, the one who carefully positioned her Ariel and Belle princess figurines on her desk before getting out her books, the one who spent most of class undoing and redoing her curly hazel pigtails, and often the last one to toddle up to my desk to hand in the weekly quiz, when the…