Chess for Girls and Girls Only

It sure is different teaching girls. I loaned my digital camera out for the fifth grade girls to take pictures of the class, and the camera came back to me in one piece; they had shared it with each other without incident.

The girls are prompting me to communicate differently to the class: instead of me broadcasting to all, I found out that I can speak quietly to the class leaders, and have them spread my message by example. I passed by a group in which the girls were talking a lot about killing: "If you kill my piece here, then I can kill you back there and then..." I whispered to one fifth grader, "You might try the word "capture" instead of 'kill'." When I walked by a few minutes later, I heard the new vocabulary beginning to take hold.

It is interesting the behavior that can happen when I inform the older girls that they are my teachers -- I need them to help teach me how to teach chess to girls. Soon after I made that introductory speech, Brianna stopped by to say, "I got an idea. Can I have a pencil and paper?" With pencil and paper in hand, I saw her interviewing all the students, asking, "Who are you friends with in the class?" After collecting this data, she retreated to a table to write. A little while later, she came to me a seating plan of who should play against whom, and exactly where in the room each student was to sit. Students were paired up with others who they weren't "friends with." I told Brianna that we would implement her plan at 3:05, and at 3:05, we did. She told everyone where to sit, and to get playing. When the children played it was remarkably quiet, and so Brianna did remark, "See? I told you it would be a lot quieter."

Another fifth grader gently challenged me after I told them that they were my teachers, that I looked to them to tell me what works in teaching them,

I had taught all the girls how Pawns and Queens move, and asked them to play a simple game using just those two pieces. But Marta politely raised her hand and said, "I want you to show me how all the pieces move," though that wasn't at all part of my prepared plan. ("Be careful what you wish for...") I trusted her, and announced to no one in particular that that's what she and I would be doing at one table, and if anyone else wanted to learn how all the pieces moved, they were free to join us. Five students came, and it only took a few minutes to explain -- everyone seemed to know how at least one or two of the pieces moved. I don't know exactly what they did next, but I do know that Marta led the group, and they were quite absorbed for the next twenty minutes in the made-up game that they were playing, and they did learn how to move the pieces correctly and confidently.

Some of the fifth graders forewarned me that they will be away this Thursday on a field trip, and after the first adventures with some of them, I don't know how I'm going to get by without them.

And then, there's the Victory March. The first week, when Elizabeth triumphantly placed her Pawn down for her final move, she stood up, spontaneous and unrehearsed, declared "To the throne!" and began marching around the room. I happened to have an accordion lying nearby, so I assisted the march by improvising an accompaniment One aspect of the march that I didn't understand at first is that the students march with the actual piece that was used in their final move, so that the march has the aspect of a primitive totemistic ritual. My only contribution, aside from playing accordion, was to reinforce that all girls, winners and losers, can take part in the Victory March. . I have no idea where this is all going, but I did know they would demand a Victory March the second week, and I had my accordion at the ready.

Strategy, Tactics, and Fate

Once day the foolish White King had a new idea for how he could protect himself. He built a wall in front of himself, and the Pawns couldn't get past the wall to attack the King. The powerful Bishops, which can move all the way across the board on the diagonal, couldn't get past the King's wall...nor could the Rooks ... nor even the Queen. ... The Black King was jealous of the White King, so he foolishly had a wall built to protect himself too, a wall just like the White King's wall. ... But there was one piece that could attack the King by leaping over the wall. ... the Knight. ... And so the two Kings decided to play a game with just Kings, Knights, and their two walls.

So began a recent lesson with the youngest students. I use this story to practice how the Knight moves, but also to introduce an aspect of checkmate and a Kindergartener's dose of strategy. This is our opening board position for the Knight’s Game.

The Knight’s Game is a good fit for very beginners; a “real game” is much too much for them. If they are to learn to look ahead, very beginning players need simpler, more condensed variants of chess to play, because in a regular game a beginner faces a vast number of possibilities and little direction in how to choose. Since young children are not yet capable of strategy with a regular chess game, their solution when confronted with such a game is to move pieces more or less randomly and occasionally to pounce on an opportunistic capture: "Oh wow, I just noticed that my Pawn can capture her Queen.! Pow!" A similar effect can happen when chance is used too early in Kindergarten and lower grade mathematics classes. The children learn to rely on the magic of chance, just as some adults rely on winning the lottery as their "strategy" to wealth. By playing a more condensed game that allows child-sized strategies, the younger students form realistic plans, and carry them out one patient move at a time.

The skill of planning is rarely taught explicitly in school. Sometimes a high school teacher methodically leads students through the steps of doing a term paper rather than letting to cram it the night before; sometimes time management is taught in upper grades. But I’ve seen parents of middle or high school children at their wit's end when they observe their own children's obliviousness to planning, oblivious to the relation between present action and future circumstances. Skill at chess is nothing but skill at planning: in the Knight's game, I walk the students through some simple strategy: "If I want to get my knight to this square to get checkmate, I can't just jump there right away. I will first have to move my Kinght here, then there, then..." For absolute beginners, the first games are merely races as each goes after their own goals as fast as they can. After they've played out that idea, the next games teach children to overcome obstacles to their original plan. "...But if I move my Knight to that square, my opponent could capture me. What should I do instead?"

(There is a variant of the Knights game that I’ve created for more experienced students. It uses the same basic position plus Bishops for both sides.)

When the children begin to analyze a chess position in a simple game they may begin to see the future that lies two or three moves ahead. Sometimes that future may look bleak. When a position is hopeless, experienced chess players prefer to resign, but beginning children invariably prefer to play the game out to its foregone conclusion. I find that I lose interest in a game after it has tipped one way or the other, but the children, expectant winners and presumed losers both, delight in playing the game through, just as audiences still flocked to Greek dramas even when they knew anyway how the story would end. Playing simple games with the beginners, we frequently come to positions where it seems inevitable that one side would win in a few moves, and I can hear the wheel of Fate turning and creaking as the winning side excitedly carries out its plan, move by move, and the losing side looks for ways to escape, all in vain. This is a moment of great drama for the children. It is as if fate isn't just an intellectual concept but something to be felt, to be experienced, and the children need to experience fate a number of times before they can believe that it really works, and believe that they can trust their judgment. Then they slowly learn to predict and even count on the future.

With the older children, the Fates take their time. Recently, we've been playing through a game that is now taking three class sessions to finish. When the older students arrived for the second class, I had set up several boards, all showing the same mid-game position from a game in the previous week. We began together by analyzing that position for a whole ten minutes, which for them is a triumph of planning and forethought over immediate impulse. The temptation is so great to just start pushing pieces and seeing what happens, but instead they were able to imagine with their minds and not simply move with their hands.

After our analysis, the students broke up to play out their individual games from our common position. At one point in the analysis, I had mentioned that it would be a good strategy for White to put pressure on the Pawn at f7, so one student blindly captured that Pawn right away, to his demise. (Perhaps he trusted that my advice would magically help him to win.) When I noticed that all the students lacked an understanding of the distinction between strategy and tactics, I decided to introduce this in the last ten minutes of class.

We gathered back together over a board that repeated our mid-game position at the beginning of the period and we remembered our earlier analysis. To continue the game this time, I played against all of them. (They enjoy the camaraderie of ganging up on me.) I told them that my strategy would be exactly what we had talked about before. Among other things, I would put pressure on the Pawn at f7, and force them to tie up their Rooks to defend that Pawn. As we played the game, I explained how each of my moves fit into my overall strategy. This way of thinking is hazy and new for them, so it didn't hurt my chances much to explain my motives aloud. By the end of the period, we arrived at this position.

We'll finish the game next week. I will continue to tell them my strategy as we play, much like the Greek oracles that openly foretold the future which no one could change anyway.

Questions for the students:

Strategy questions for White:

Right now, both Knights are in bad positions. Where do you wish you could put your knights?
What are you going to do about your bad Bishop? (A 'bad Bishop’ is blocked and doesn't have many squares to go to.)
Which White Pawn do you think has the best chance of being promoted to a Queen?

Strategy questions for Black:

Should Black be playing more offensively or more defensively right now?
What are you going to do about your bad Bishop?

Tactics questions for White:

Although there are no pins going on right now, what pins do you wish you could do, pins involving Rooks?
What Knight fork do you wish you could do (not right away, but maybe later)?

Chess Goes to the Opera
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For the more advanced students, I introduced a famous game of the American chess prodigy Paul Morphey. Morphey played this game in 1872 against an English Duke in the Duke’s private box at the Paris Opera. He won in just seventeen moves without missing too much of the opera.

Morphey won this game by staying focused on the development of his pieces and not falling into the common trap of greed, of merely capturing and hoarding his opponent’s pieces. On the contrary, Morphey sacrificed even his Queen in order to win the game. Too often the children follow the example of the Greek god Atlanta who lost a race when in her greed she paused to pick up the three golden apples. Morphey provides a vivid counterexample to follow.

Morphey also won this game with creative and rule-breaking moves. While it is helpful to give children rules of thumb, too often they try to mechanically follow the rules without understanding why: “Control the center … don’t move the queen too early … a bishop is worth three points…” A good player can violate any of these rules. Rather than only teaching rules, I prefer to teach through stories, which the children take in at a deeper level. Morphy’s game is a story with tension, plot twists, and dramatic turns of fortune. It also has a nice structure: after several routine and somewhat obvious moves, there is a dramatic draw-dropping move that redefines the game. Three times, in fact. In class today there were indeed some jaws dropping and eyes popping, and perhaps a sense of wonderment at Morphey’s artistic creativity and imagination.

In class we discussed each move in detail and next week we will try all together to replay the moves of this game. The following week, smaller groups of children will try to replay the game again. For the same reasons that I memorized Hamlet’s soliloquy in high school, it’s sometimes good to have students memorize an exemplary game.


Little Red Riding Hood Promotes Pawns
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At this point in the class, the younger students have a feel for the character of each piece, but they don’t yet have a solid feel for what checkmate means. They’ve done many simplified games in which the object is to be the first to bring a pawn to opposite end of the board. Yesterday they formally learned about “pawn promotion,” the rule that if a player can slowly advance a pawn to the opposite end, that pawn can transform into any other piece, typically into a queen. I taught this as the folktale of the Frog Prince – that after a perilous journey, it is possible for the lowly frog/pawn to be transformed into a prince/queen.

The younger children now have the elements to be able to venture out into the chess world; there was definitely a feeling of “going forth” that I wanted to emphasize in the lesson. And so was introduced Little Red Riding Hood. I warned the younger children that the more experienced players were like the Big Bad Wolf. If they saw a Bishop or Rook left behind unprotected and subject to attack, they were sure to pounce on that piece and gobble it up. So the little children had better watch very very carefully for the Wolf.

We then played a modified game: the Kings exited the board, leaving no issue of checkmate, the object was once again to be the first to promote a pawn using all the other pieces. Two or three Red Riding Hoods played together against a single Big Bad Wolf, although once when I gave a hint to some of the younger students, the older student complained: although he was in fourth grade, he complained that the three second grade girls he was playing against added up (2 + 2 + 2) to be the same as a sixth grader! The logic of a true Wolf.

These fairy tale metaphors were very strong for all the children, youngest to oldest. When I introduced the setting, many of the Wolves began making wolf noises and licking their chops, while some of the younger children huddled together. When I announced during the games, “On this board, the Wolf has just pounced upon a Rook which the Little Red Riding Hoods have lost” there were either shrieks of distress or grunts of satisfaction from the other players.

Although chess is considered a coolly rational game, it isn’t that only. When playing tournament chess in high school, I remember my heart pounding at times – “What if he … Should I …? Yes, I got him now! … Oh no, I forgot…” In yesterday’s lesson, which was unusually loud, we externalized those emotions. This is the opposite of the usual situation with beginning children players, in which they move too impulsively, perhaps because they don’t have an emotional involvement in the game. Here all had some sense of vigilance and even of fear.

At two of the boards, the younger girls slowed down their playing dramatically as they noticed the dangers of particular squares, so much so that some of the older boys complained. I was reminded of research on girls and boys answering questions in math class. All too typically when the teacher asks a question, boys raise their hands the fastest and want to blurt out an answer; girls want longer to mull over the question and perhaps give a more thoughtful answer. Here the girls got a chance to take their time.