I made a public quiz, no login, no account, no ads, that's been used 70,000 times. For homework, I add my own videos so kids don't just check if they're right, they learn how.

Barry Hoffman has taught 6th-grade math and science for 25 years and is the creator of Hoffkids.com, a math and science resource site that's had over 641,000 visits since 2003.

He works with approximately 100 students daily and has spent his career reimagining what homework and assessment can look like when the right tools are in a teacher's hands.

He pays for ProProfs out of his own pocket. Not because the district told him to. Because the product earns it.

Homework, for as long as anyone can remember, has meant the same thing. Go home. Do the work. Have no idea if you got it right. Find out tomorrow in class.

Barry thought that was absurd. He wanted to break that loop entirely. But first, he needed a platform that would actually let a teacher be a teacher: control the accounts, set the passwords, own the experience. In 2013, that ruled out 99% of everything available.

The core problems:

• No platform gave teachers control over student accounts, usernames, or passwords
• Homework offered zero feedback until the next day in class
• District tools kept getting swapped out, wiping years of built content overnight
• No math editor had the actual symbols a 6th-grade math teacher needs every day

As Barry put it: "That ruled out like 99% of all the programs. None of the programs at that time let the teacher have control."

Barry did not just use ProProfs. He used it to reinvent what homework could be.

He asked if he could embed a video inside the answer feedback field. ProProfs said yes. So he recorded himself solving every single question. Now when a kid sits at the dinner table at 9pm and gets something wrong, Mr. Hoffman shows up on the screen to show them exactly how to fix it. Barry's words, not ours: "Mr. Hoffman is popping up in their dining room. They can't get rid of me."

He also spotted when a student figured out how to game the system, running through questions to see the answers, then restarting to score perfectly in four minutes. Barry flagged it. ProProfs fixed it. That kind of back and forth, a teacher and a company actually talking to each other, is what 13 years of loyalty is built on.

What ProProfs made possible:

• Full control over student accounts, usernames, and passwords from day one
• Video inside answer feedback so Mr. Hoffman could show up in students' homes when they needed him
• A math editor with every symbol a 6th grade teacher actually needs: fraction bars, square roots, division signs
• Unlimited retakes so students could keep going until they genuinely got it
• A support team that fixed a student loophole within days of Barry flagging it

On what kept him loyal for 13 years, Barry says: "They make you feel like you're part of the program, not that you're using their product. It's like that restaurant on the corner that's always there. Solid. Reliable. And those are the ones that are going to last."

13 years. 100 students a day. And a pricing plan Barry describes as: "I think $49 is a joke. I spent more than that on lunch yesterday."

But the result he is most proud of has nothing to do with his classroom. He built a public times-table practice tool on ProProfs, no login, no ads, no fluff, and called it the 121 Challenge. Teachers across the United States found it on their own. Some nights, it gets completed hundreds of times in a single day, kids racing to beat their own scores, voluntarily, at home, for no grade.

It has been used over 70,000 times. Barry says it is the greatest thing he has ever made. And he could not have made it without ProProfs.

He is retiring in 2030. He already told the team to keep a spot for him.

What that looks like in practice:

• The 121 Challenge has 70,000+ uses from teachers and students Barry has never met, across the United States
• Some nights, a single assignment gets completed 185 times by 90 kids, voluntarily, trying to beat themselves
• He owns 13 years of content independently of his district. Nothing gets wiped when procurement changes its mind
• Feature requests he made a decade ago have shipped. He kept the emails.
• He is retiring in 2030. ProProfs will be the last tool standing.

Looking back, Barry says: "It's in my top three or four major things that I've used throughout my career. It'll be with me to the end."