Dear Ms. Macumber,
You once spent an entire Sunday organizing a seating chart so perfectly it could silence the whispering, nix the note passing and prevent the paper airplanes.
You laminated things for fun.
You believed in standards. Not just because you had to, but because you saw them as anchors across Adventist institutions, keeping children within the margins of acceptability.
Benchmarks meant progress. Assessments meant data.
Data meant safety—and even job security.
You learned to survive on color coded, sticky noted lesson plans.
And a lot of caffeine.
You became fluent in acronyms:
Never Eat Shredded Wheat.
Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally.
Your lesson plans were detailed enough to pass as a report from the United Nations.
They had to be—your performance paid the mortgage.
You know what it means to be evaluated, observed, assessed.
To have your worth debated in meetings you weren’t invited to.
You’ve had your competence questioned, your words misinterpreted, your choices dissected.
You spent a decade in a system designed to manage thirty tiny humans, with two broken pencil sharpeners and one Costco sized tub of hand sanitizer.
Now you’re sitting on the floor surrounded by library books and snack wrappers wondering if you can homeschool your son—
and whether it’s possible to build something softer.
Something cleaner.
Something sweeter.
Dear Ollie’s Mom,
You don’t want to build a little soldier,
marching through the formula for a “contributing member of society.”
You want to raise a boy who notices the moon—and the fragrance of a flower.
You want piano lessons to feel like discovery, not drudgery.
You want coding to feel like magic.
You want wonder to be part of every lesson.
What if you traded your standards for sidewalk chalk?
Your whiteboard for wildflowers?
I know you worry.
What if he doesn’t make the mark?
How will he integrate back into traditional school—and into society?
But just know:
He won’t remember the objectives you posted on the wall.
He’ll remember the time Percy Jackson came alive—
and your obnoxious imitations of the gods and the monsters.
Dear Ollie,
Maybe it’s okay to trade some certainty for curiosity.
To let the worksheets wait while you follow the wonder.
Maybe falling behind isn’t falling at all—
if you’re falling into something beautiful.
Still Learning,
Amanda Lynn
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