Virginia Pong

Times and Time Again Virginia Pong

During her years as a teacher in the California public school system, Virginia watched as students struggled with math homework made unnecessarily difficult by insufficient mastery of the basic facts in multiplication and division. To address this wide spread and growing problem, Virginia developed her program Times and Time Again based on her childhood timed practices with her siblings. The flood of objection from the teaching community, schooled in more modern educational theory, was shrill and derogatory. They called it drill-and-kill. They said it was out of date and that it would never work because the students would hate it. However, Times and Time Again did work. Times and Time Again proved itself in greatly decreased homework time and a spectacular increase in accuracy. Not only did the students not hate it, but they complained when an occasional school wide schedule required skipping their "times facts" practice. Year after year every student, no matter what the beginning score, always made dramatic improvement in the Times and Time Again program.