Parent-teacher conferences move fast. You get a folding chair, a glance at their school projects, and about twelve minutes before the next family is up next. In this limited time, most of us ask what we can measure: How’s her reading? Is he keeping up in math? Anything I should know about? These are all good questions, but they don’t address the part of school I care about most, which is whether my kid is learning to live well among people whose lives look nothing like hers.

Here’s the sentence I’d tape to every family’s fridge and every teacher’s desk: fifteen minutes a day, every day, outlasts a themed activity or month every single time. Why? It's the power of compounding.

A “Countries of the World” week in April is a lovely photo op. What actually shapes a kid’s intercultural being is the small, repeated practice, the map that stays up, the question that comes back around, the habit that becomes a reflex.