About the creator of Progressive Rulingä Products
Ms. Phoebe Hoffman received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in geology from the University of South Carolina. She is certified in developmental mathematics and geology at the community college level and recently retired from teaching full-time.
Ms. Hoffman taught middle and high school chemistry, physics, mathematics, life science and earth science in the public school systems in North and South Carolina for a total of 27 years. Additionally, she was an Adult Education instructor in South Carolina for five (5) years.
Before retiring, Ms. Hoffman taught full-time as a GED instructor at the Tohono O’odham Community College (TOCC) for four (4) years, where she continues to teach as an adjunct instructor.
Additionally, Ms. Hoffman worked for the U.S. Geological Survey for 7-1/2 years as a Technical Editor and as a Geologic Map Editor and was classified as a Geologist.
The seeds of the Progressive Rulingä project began when Ms. Hoffman was a college student. She always wondered why her physics professor did not give the students enough example problems to work with a formula until the students were proficient with it before going on to problems that required rewriting the formula, recalculating the measurements, or some other differentiation of the problem.
As Ms. Hoffman taught through the years, she began to realize that many of her students also needed the same kind of practice. Therefore, she would create more practice problems of a similar nature whenever a student did not seem to grasp the concept, because she discovered that repetition before variation of the problem was needed. She practiced this method whether the course was physics, chemistry, or math.
In the very first math course that she taught, Ms. Hoffman realized that her students were not fully cognizant of fraction concepts or fraction computations; that inhibiting condition did not improve as the years went by. She finally associated the students’ lack of understanding of fractions with the absence of rulers that could be used to construct tables and charts in all courses.
Ms. Hoffman’s insightfulness led her to improvise by creating paper rulers. This hands-on approach helped her students visualize fractions. She worked with a set of rulers that she designed, engaging her students to understand and learn fractions while observing their success. When used as she suggests, Ms. Hoffman is certain the Progressive Rulingä products will improve the success of your students in learning fractions, as it improved the success of those whom she taught, relieving much of the anxiety, frustration, and resistance to this aspect of learning mathematics.
