Too Small a Thing

Every Tuesday for eleven years, a retired schoolteacher named Dorothy sat in the back room of a church in Decatur, Georgia, tutoring refugee children in English. She taught them phonics with flashcards she'd laminated herself. She corrected their grammar over animal crackers and juice boxes. Most weeks, she drove home wondering if any of it mattered. Then one of those children — a girl from Eritrea named Semhar — graduated valedictorian from her high school.…