About the Creator

Julie Kotoff has been an educator for 30 years. She has been a classroom teacher, an administrator for 12 of those 30 years, and is now an educational consultant.

As an administrator, her chief tasks were mentoring new teachers and coordinating curriculum from kindergarten through sixth grade. As a mentor teacher, she had the opportunity to experience each grade level. Of them all, her love is third grade.

As a third grade teacher, she developed and perfected Mad Dog Math. She knew the importance of her students memorizing their multiplication and division facts. If not, she knew they would limp through math at best from then on. She has succeeded in developing an exciting, motivating, and challenging program to help students commit their facts to memory for future success in math.

As an administrator, she went on to develop addition and subtraction Mad Dog Math using the same successful principles. Many kindergarten teachers wanted to use it in their classrooms as well, thus, Puppy Dog Math was born!

She has taught in public and private schools and has worked with all ages of children. She volunteered to teach ESL to adults, and loved that as well. She has been happily married to her husband Dan since 1982 and lives with two dogs, Rudy and Libby, and three cats, Oscar and B.W., and Sadie.

Her Mad Dog Math program is named after her beloved Ruff, a one-of-a-kind Golden Retriever, whom she lost in 2004. Although he was not a “mad dog”, his name and image will live on through the Mad Dog Math program.