The Promontory Academy.
We Are Makers.
Everything We've Built.
And What We Are In The Process of Building.
Most websites tell you just enough to make you pick up the phone and ask. We would rather not do that. Education is too important to hide behind minimal text and promotional language.
WHAT WE HAVE SEEN
Thirty-three years in classrooms on four continents, and the same thing happens nearly everywhere. Content gets covered. Boxes get ticked. Students move forward on the calendar rather than on anything they can actually do. They learn the shape of an answer without the thinking that produces one, and by the following week most of it is gone.
Nobody working in those buildings wants this. It is what happens when subjects are taught as separate boxes that never speak to each other, when pace is set by a syllabus instead of by understanding, and when the thing being measured is recall of material nobody was ever asked to use.
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We built the opposite, deliberately, from the ground up. Four subjects working on one real problem at a time. Nothing taught twice, so what a student learned in week two has to be pulled back out of memory in week twenty with no reminder. Difficulty that rises inside every task rather than being handed out by age. And a Friday that asks not what you remember, but what you think, why, and what would change your mind.
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Memorizing facts is not enough. Racing through content is not enough. A list of subjects is not enough.
HOW WE BUILD OUR PRODUCTS & SERVICES
We do not start from a framework. Every part of TPA was designed from direct classroom experience and a great deal of hard thinking about what actually happens when a student sits in front of a difficult page. We decided what was true first, and built the thing that followed from it. Only afterward did we go looking for the research, half expecting to find where we had gone wrong.
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We keep finding the opposite. E.D. Hirsch showed that comprehension depends on knowledge a reader already carries. Daniel Willingham put it more bluntly: memory is the residue of thought. Barbara Oakley's work on retrieval and spaced practice describes exactly why we never teach anything twice, and Robert Bjork gave the reason difficulty in the right place is not an obstacle but the mechanism. Ted Sizer built graduation around a student defending real work in front of people who ask hard questions, which is our Defense of Learning arrived at forty years before we thought of it. And David Perkins argued that students should play the whole game rather than drill its parts, which is the shortest description of a TPA week anyone has written.
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So the research did not build TPA. It agreed with it. Every product below is that same set of convictions, made for a different room.
Five years (and counting). Thousands of hours of dreaming and designing, remembering what never worked and reviving what always did. Observing learning across the globe, from the US to South Korea, from Myanmar to Kazakhstan, from the Republic of Georgia to the south side of Los Angeles and the valleys of Appalachia. Our founder has worked in them all, in the classroom and in leadership. That is gravitas. That is TPA.
WHERE WE STANDÂ
Homeschool Curriculum.
A complete four-subject program built around one real problem a week, for students ages 8 to 14. Both divisions, Lower and Upper, ship with every arc, so siblings of different ages work the same theme at different demand. Mathematics supplement and full answer key in every week. Trial the first two weeks for $29 to start.
Available now.
Materials for Teachers and Tutors of English.
Twenty-four packets (and counting), roughly twelve to sixteen hours of teaching each. Real academic content carried in English rather than exercises about English. Buy once, yours permanently. Free tutor guide, whether you buy anything or not.
Available now.
The NEW ROUTE Program.
The whole of TPA licensed to small independent schools: units, mathematics, assessment framework, standards crosswalk and the training to run it. Not a textbook adoption. A rebuild of the academic core.
In development. Inquiries welcome.
Professional Development
Advanced work for practicing and aspiring educators on curriculum, task design, student work and feedback. Not the recycled in-service day. This is NOT your run-of-the-mill educator refresh.
In development. Inquiries welccome.
Student Advancement for ages 8 to 14.
Two tracks in development. One is for small virtual cohorts. The other is for in-person small cohorts. Location(s) TBD. Management and teaching opportunities are coming.
In development for school year '27-'28.
Math Mandala.
A strategy game played on a coordinate grid, four kingdoms holding the quadrants and the Bridge of Questions at the center. The mathematics is how you win, not a worksheet with dice bolted on.
In development.
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Join Us. Just Imagine
What We Might Build Together.
