WHAT A WEEK LOOKS LIKE
 

In 1854, Nobody Knew What Was Killing Them
 

Cholera was tearing through Soho. The prevailing theory was bad air (mala+aria, which is where we get the word malaria). A physician named John Snow doubted it, so he did something unfashionable. He counted. He mapped every death against the nearest water pump, and the dots piled up around one pump on Broad Street while houses that drew their water elsewhere were mostly spared. He talked the parish into taking the pump handle off, and the outbreak eased.
 

He never saw the germ. Nobody could, for another thirty years. He just refused to stop counting.
 

That's the week. It opens five centuries earlier, with a physician in Avignon in 1348 describing the plague accurately and then blaming the planets, and it works forward to Snow, and your student does the counting themselves the whole way.
 

Real records, so real problems. One parish logged 92 burials and 6 baptisms in a single year, and before anyone trusts a number off that page they have to say what might be wrong with it. Four parishes, four death rates: average them and you get 34.2 percent, pool the raw numbers instead and you get 35.9. Both are honest. The student has to decide which one actually describes what happened, and say why. And every answer sheet has one box at the bottom that has to be filled in before they stop: what would change my mind about this?
 

Look at what that parish register is doing. To get a death rate at all, the student has to read a document written in 1348. To decide whether the rate means anything, they have to ask who kept the record and what a priest in a plague year was likely to miss. The arithmetic can't be finished without the history. And nothing moves forward without evolving reading comprehension skills.

Elsewhere in the week there's Semmelweis, who had the evidence and got ignored anyway, and a hard look at what fear does when it picks a target before the evidence arrives.
 

Students are not 'covering' the scientific method. They are doing it, on a real street, with real numbers that do not resolve cleanly, which is the whole point.
 

There are thirty-six weeks like this, built across six themed arcs. That's 180 days, with a typical student spending a few diligent hours a day on it. Not mindless worksheets. Not 'covering' skills and concepts, but actually using what they learn, right then, right there, every day.
 

This is TPA. This is The Promontory. And there is so much more.