"We set the bar high for you, then we help you individually to reach the bar. We make biblical excellence in labor achievable through a grace-centered process, without lowering the bar to get there."

The Potter's School (or "TPS," as we are commonly known) is committed to helping families achieve academic excellence in home education. However, excellence in academics is best achieved within the larger context of training children to do all things—school, chores, service, outreach, and all other labor, considered as an integrated process rather than as competing items—in excellence as unto the Lord. Furthermore, home education is not fundamentally about taking classes at home instead of in a school building—the value of homeschooling is actually its role in the greater process of discipleship. Therefore, The Potter's School partners with families to provide a wide range of training and resources for family discipleship and home education.

Why Choose TPS?

TPS was the first and remains the most complete on-line school option. As other on-line and distance learning options have flashed and faded, we have stayed in the front, because we keep our focus on content, standards, and character, pursuing "excellence through grace" in all of these areas together.

• Live instruction and discussion - Most of us have tried self-study, recorded courses, and even forum or chat-based classes. While they all have their place, we all realize that the best instruction is live, where we can both listen and question. Audio + visual + interactivity has been the best way to learn since human learning began. TPS uses all of these mediums and more in small interactive classes to maximize your learning opportunity.
• Feedback and standards - How important is detailed personal feedback to the learning process? Imagine getting to college and realizing that the straight-A's you got as a homeschooler prepared you to get low B's or C's in college, but you didn't know because you didn't take rigorous courses or get good feedback. In The Potter's School, we provide you academically rigorous courses from a biblical worldview, taught by live mentoring teachers who provide plenty of timely thorough feedback. We set the bar high for you, then we help you individually to reach the bar. As you go to college, you will know that you are ready to excel there and beyond.
• Character and spiritual preparation - We train students to see their schoolwork, extracurriculars (sports, music, debate), family life (chores, family time and events), and church life (community and ministry) as an integrated process of labor that is all to be done in excellence as unto the Lord. We plan and adjust the workload in our courses to support this approach, maintaining high academic and biblical standards. We make biblical excellence in labor achievable through a grace-centered process, without lowering the bar to get there.

2012-2013 Highlights

We have exciting things to offer you, including:

• Registration - Check out our Courses! We have the usual great courses, plus some great new ones, like: Two-day math courses. More Advanced Placement courses. More college credit courses. More worldview courses to prepare you for specific subjects in college. More Art courses, with a path to the Art Advanced Placement exams. More communication courses. And more. :) We're also adding a feature that allows you to search for courses you want by keywords, because we have so many great ones it is sometimes hard to find them all. :) New courses will be posted early March, schedule mid-March, and registration opens late March.
• Get to college with 24 credits already completed - Would you like to earn 24 college credits in Literature, Composition, and History from Belhaven University for the same courses you use to complete English and History in high school? What if those courses were integrated with a comprehensive biblical worldviews curriculum that wove them all together? How about if they were taught by a dedicated team of teachers who were committed not just to teaching, but mentoring their students over two years in a small-class setting? You could add Science, Math and your Foreign Language, and be way ahead when you got to college, in worldview preparation and credits. This would allow your student to take a gap year, finish college early, take a lighter load while working a job in college, or maybe get that minor degree or emphasis he wouldn't be able to fit in otherwise.
• Moody Bible College credit - Take a Bible course with TPS and, in many of our classes, have the option of receiving transferable credit from Moody Bible College.
• More Advanced Placement™ courses - Have you tried to find courses that focus on preparing you individually for an Advanced Placement exam without compromising a biblical worldview? Not easy, right? We are building our AP-certified courses with both standards in view, and we're pleased to begin offering them to you this year. Look for us to add more and more of them in future years. For now, please take a look at our 2011-2012 AP-certified courses.
• Complete Classical Program - A classical education is not just logic, Latin and a series of literature and history lectures. It should be an integrated comprehensive rigorous approach to all the major disciplines, taught in a highly interactive small-class setting, with abundant feedback and evaluation opportunities. It should also be a mentoring relationship that weaves spiritual and worldview preparation into the academic progression from Grammar through Rhetoric. If that is what you want in a classical education, take a look at TPS Classical.
• Two-day math courses, starting in 2012 - Our math courses are known for their solid emphasis on providing a solid foundation in math concepts and problem-solving. We offer a optional problem-solving second teaching session each week in all of our math classes. Starting in 2012-2013, we also offer our acclaimed math program in a dedicated two-day-per-week format, providing more instruction to make it accessible to more students.
• Science that strengthens your student's biblical faith while covering all the science, including a new coordinated multi-year lab instruction program. - Secular science courses ignore or oppose faith, and popular faith-based science courses tend to leave out some of the science. TPS covers all the science, while proclaiming the literal truth of Scripture. TPS also raises the on-line science standards by providing dedicated teaching in labs and lab reporting in a coherent program that spans junior high science through advanced sciences, ensuring your student is prepared not only for SAT 2 or AP exams, but also for college labs and lab reports.
• Language conversation - Learning a language is not just vocabulary and grammar. All of our spoken language courses now offer a second session each week to focus on conversation skills. Our language courses teach you not only to read and write and pass tests, but to speak comfortably and effectively.
• Summer courses - In the summer of 2012, your student can take courses that strengthen his skills in literature, composition, and math. He can take a course to help him prepare for the SAT's, or prepare for college. We also offer fun and educational classes that just don't fit into the regular school year. Check out our TPS Summer courses.

Get to Know Us

First, get to know us a bit. Read our Mission Overview page to get the big picture of who we are and what we offer your family and your students. Then get a feel for how a course is conducted by reading our Course Format page. Then consider whether you want a complete curriculum with our comprehensive integrated TPS Classical program, or you want to use our Curriculum Planner to build your own curriculum from our 200+ core and elective grade 6-12 courses.

Read the Details

After you get to know us and look over our academic offerings, read the details on the pages: 2011-2012 Calendar; Fees & Tuition; Payment Schedule; Technical Expectations; Software Requirements; Communication; and Withdrawals & Refunds. When you're done looking those over, look at our Commitments page to get the summary of what we commit to you and what we expect from you.

Register for Classes

We are excited about the great courses we offer your family! If you haven't been there yet, please take some time to look over the Courses pages. Do you need help picking courses or planning your curriculum? Our academic staff members have years of diverse experience homeschooling their kids to top performance in top universities, and we are here to help TPS families with curriculum planning.

Registration and schedule information, plus a lot of other great information, is on our TPS News site. If you want to stay in the loop with key announcements and dates, including registration information, please subscribe to our newsletter updates. When you're ready to register, go to our Registration page.

Faith, Family and Service

Remember that our foundational premise is that excellence in academics is best achieved within the larger context of training children to do all things—school, chores, service, outreach, and all other labor, considered as an integrated process rather than as competing items—in excellence as unto the Lord. This means that we offer families and students much more than classes. For example, check out the Jericho International Honor Society, a true "honor" society where academic excellence is a prerequisite and the focus is on service and character development. Take a look at our student-run ezine, The Cracked Pot. Then consider our annual international service trips to Thailand, Honduras and other locations, where we interact with families and students from these cultures, and work alongside and in support of the faith workers who serve them.

Before you go, don't forget to review our statement of faith (pretty important, right?) and consider how you can support TPS. We look forward to serving your family!

One of Cathy Duffy's 100 Top Picks

for Homeschool Curriculum

Reported in World Magazine August 18, 2007