Brett Kopf, CEO and co-founder of Remind, is a living success story of how “Focus on, Focus off, Repeat” stimulates deep learning. He tells the story of how he struggled in grade school. “I was fine if I could move around,” he recalls. “But sitting at a desk for me was torture. A forty-minute math lesson felt like an eternity. I was the kid who was always messing with my neighbor or blowing spitballs. I just wasn’t engaged.” He would eventually be diagnosed as having both ADHD and dyslexia.
He goes on, “I was working my butt off, but my grades kept sinking and my confidence with them. It only got worse in high school. When other kids called me ‘stupid,’ I believed them.”
But in his junior year, everything changed. A teacher named Denise Whitefield began working with him one-on-one. She began each day by simply asking, “What do you have to do today?” He’d list all of his assignments. Then she’d say, “Okay, let’s pick one and just talk about it.” In this way, she got him to focus on one thing at a time. When his mind began to wander, she’d say something like, “Don’t worry, you’ll get it. Take all day if you like.”
Eventually, he began to believe in himself. His grades improved to the point where he was ready to take his college ACT exam. He describes the ordeal of answering six hundred questions and not moving for four hours as “a horror movie.” But he persisted and was admitted to Michigan State University.
He went on to start and grow his education software company, Remind, around a simple premise: “When people try to crack the country’s massive problems in education, they usually start with curriculum or ‘accountability,’ which is code for ‘test scores.’ What gets lost are the human connections. That’s what Remind is all about…”
– excerpted from “Focus: The Remind Story,” in John Doerr, Measure What Matters (2018)
