Chess with The Kid
Issues
Originally uploaded by corey_porter.
I played chess with The Kid the other night (photo set). It was pretty fun.
Apparently he’s been playing at school and doing pretty well. Some of the other kids go to an after school program called “Chess Masters” where they are taught how to play a simplified variant of chess. The Kid’s dad, however, is a jerk and doesn’t believe that learning a simplified variant of the game is a good thing, so he doesn’t go.
I won when we played, and he was rather put out. How uncool is it to lose to your dad? It took me explaining and actually producing evidence that I did in fact use to play a lot of chess for him to not feel bad about the loss. Not that he’s competitive or anything.
October 24th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
The simplified variant of the game thing might not be such a bad idea. We used to argue about that a lot in education grad school. I took this weird class in Vygotsky learning theory and game playing which purported that people need to learn from someone else at a level just a bit higher than where they are at. Too easy or too difficult= no optimal learning. We experimented on each other with board games and created our own games. That said, I do feel uncomfortable with dumbing it down too much for the kids and not exposing them to the complexity and messiness of real hard thinking. I guess it would depend how simplified the “Chess Masters” game they teach at The Kid’s school program.
More about Vygotsky here (to overcome the gross oversimplification): http://tip.psychology.org/vygotsky.html
October 24th, 2005 at 9:47 pm
Interesting. I can see how that would help kids stay interested in things longer, and that would definitely be helpful. I’ll see if he enjoys playing with just a few of the pieces — maybe just play pretty equally-matched endgames or something.
Most of the other games we play fall in to that category. Once he gets his head around some of the German games that he has, for example, we’re fairly evenly matched and he has a lot of fun. I’ll not mention that he almost beat my entire family at poker this last weekend. In fact he would have if we all didn’t spend the entire game stealing his chips while he wasn’t looking ;)