Homeschool Biography

Edited May 2019: We were a part of a wonderful Classical Conversations community for the first eight years of our home education journey. Now, due to poor state leadership and questionable corporate business practices, our family has elected to “consciously uncouple” from our association with the organization and we cannot recommend any others get involved at this time. 

I’m at a training meeting for Classical Conversations. As you know, I love the program and think it’s been amazingly effective for our family – and this training has been consistently thought-provoking and encouraging.

Our assignment tonight was to write a short biography for ourselves that could eventually be posted on the CC website. If you’ve never written your own introduction, you should know it’s about as much fun as trying to thread a needle by moonlight or talk a two-year-old into not swallowing their chewing gum. It’s much easier to write about other people than yourself!

A few of us got together, and, as creative inspiration, decided to write a spoof-bio utilizing home school misperceptions while also using our most horrible writing. The result had me rolling on the floor, laughing, with tears streaming down my face. There’s a chance this won’t be funny to you at all if you’re not a home educator (or you don’t have a pulse), but I’m going to take a risk and share it with you tonight:

“I love homeschooling! It’s so awesome to stay in my pajamas, not shower, and eat bon-bons all day while teaching my kids quantum physics.  Every night I brush my floor-length hair with at least 100 strokes, sometimes 104 strokes if I took a bicycle ride with the children during the day. My preferred attire is a denim jumper, which has also always inspired my husband, as evidenced by our 15 children aged 10 and under (which I dress in matching clothes). I discovered CC through a magalog left at my local Rod and Gun club. One day, while swapping stories about birthing goats, I learned my favorite 4H friend also attended CC and decided to check it out. The rest is history!

I find the repetition that CC offers to be repetitive. We love repeating the memory work repetitiously. If I had it to do all over again, I would do it all over again. CC rocks!

People have always wanted to follow in my footsteps. I am humble enough to know that I am a natural-born leader. I have a vision of creating a “cult-like” following of Leigh Bortins in the region through one-day and eventually three-day Leigh-a-thons. CC was our family’s Polish Rambo*.”

I do hope you have a smile on your face. I promise I don’t have flowing locks I’m busy brushing.

*The Polish Rambo reference should be confusing to you. It is from a story we learned last night regarding the Global Home Education Conference held in Germany in 2012. One of the attendees shared the story of a child being placed in foster care because the parents were choosing to home school. The lawyer for the family described the refuge status and said there was a Polish Rambo available for hire to steal the child away if they could only raise enough money to pay for the helicopter. It was a sobering story – and highlighted the freedom we take for granted in the U.S.! Thank you to the Home school Legal Defense Association for protecting our freedom of educational choice!