Living Museum of Learning
The Girl They Had Given Up On
One year ago, a famous New York Times writer introduced me to Enning's father.
One month ago, he contacted me again—not to help Enning, but to help her three-years-younger sister, Tianjing. Enning had been unable to enter Grade 9 at the local high school, while Tianjing was preparing to return to school.
Three days after I began tutoring Tianjing, I learned about Enning's situation and asked:
“Can I also give her sister some help?”
That question began one of the most unexpected months of my teaching life.
We didn't begin by trying to “fix” Enning.
We simply gave her things to do.
She learned touch typing. She rebuilt her mathematics foundation through Khan Academy Grades 2–5. She learned Swift and built an iOS version of 24. She drew a Chinese chessboard, carefully calculating the locations of full and half stars.
Then she learned p5.js.
She moved from 2D to 3D and created Circle Girl, an unexpected piece of art so personal that her mother immediately said:
“It's me.”
She also performed well in the Waterloo Beaver computing contest, providing evidence that her logical reasoning was far stronger than the label she had carried.
The month ended with seven lines of code that took Enning one and a half hours.
There were missing or mismatched curly brackets and parentheses, indentation problems, spaces, blank lines, optional semicolons, and logical mistakes. The compiler kept forcing her to slow down and fix what she had skipped.
Her teacher stayed with her through it all.
Three days later, Enning wrote:
“Sometimes, the problem isn’t that something is too difficult. It’s that I don’t slow down enough to understand it properly.”
By then, she had learned far more than programming.
She had learned to type.
To rebuild mathematics.
To write Swift.
To make an iOS app.
To draw with code.
To explore 2D and 3D.
To create something that made her mother say, “It's me.”
To solve problems in the Waterloo Beaver contest.
And, perhaps most importantly, to look at her own thinking and ask what she could change.
Then came September 3—the first day back at school.
For the entire month, her teacher in Toronto had been waking up around 4:00 a.m. to prepare for Enning's 10:20 a.m. class in England.
This morning, there was no class.
He woke up before 4:00 anyway.
At 3:45 a.m., he sent:
“Good job Enning. 👍”
Then a quote about loneliness and being unwanted, followed by:
“Good 2026.09.03 morning 👣”
A few minutes later:
“Today is the first day you go back to school. Have a wonderful day and see when you come back. 🤝”
Enning replied:
“good morningthank you”
One month ago, she was the girl whose future seemed to have narrowed.
Today, she walked back into school carrying a month of new evidence about herself.
And somewhere in Toronto, before dawn, someone was already awake—not because he had to teach her that morning, but simply because he was used to being there.
A month earlier, Enning was the girl who had not been able to enter Grade 9.
A month later, she had accumulated something much more important than a repaired transcript:
evidence.
Evidence that she can learn.
Evidence that she can create.
Evidence that she can reason.
Evidence that she can make mistakes, debug them, and keep going.
Evidence that what looks like a lack of ability may sometimes be a lack of confidence, practice, attention, opportunity, or simply enough time.
Today is her first day back at school.
She doesn't walk in as a completely different person.
She walks in carrying one month of experiences that make a different story about who she might become.
A student who has been underestimated may reveal abilities that were never given enough room to emerge.
Start with trust, give the student meaningful things to do, stay through the mistakes, and let evidence—not labels—reshape the story.
Because sometimes the most important thing education can give a student is not another answer, but the experience of discovering: “I can figure this out.”
Someone believed there was still a story to be written.
And today, Enning went back to school with the first chapter of that new story already written. 👣