Schools Chess Club is Very Relative.

The Tampa Tribune

Published: April 4, 2008

LAND O’ LAKES – For the Levisons, an after-school chess club at Pine View Elementary is a family affair.

The club got its start when 7-year-old Josh was looking for an activity after a hip disease put him in a wheelchair and left his dream of playing youth soccer in a holding pattern. His 8-year-old sister, Bree, also participates.

So do about 20 other children who meet each Friday to challenge each other across a chessboard and to learn tips from instructors from a chess club that is based in Temple Terrace.

For Josh, it started with a half-day chess camp last summer.

“When I came to pick him up, he said he wanted to stay the whole day,” said his mother, Lisa Levison. “He just loves it.”

Levison, who volunteers at the school, thought Pine View could use an after-school chess club, and the principal agreed with her. On a recent Friday, 10 games were in progress in the school’s media center as instructors Jeff York and James Barber monitored the action and offered advice.

To view a photo gallery of Pine View’s chess club, go to TBO.com, Keyword: Chess.

Ronnie Blair

Even in Tough Times, School Chess Program Has Right Moves.

From Amanda Gordon, The N.Y. Sun

A champion of giving, Lewis Cullman, acknowledged Tuesday night at the Chess-in-the-Schools benefit that the economy is making it more difficult for organizations to raise money.

However, Chess-in-the-Schools, which last year taught chess and improved the academic prospects for 20,000 students in the public schools, hasn’t felt the pinch.

“We’ve done it again this year: We’ve raised more than $1 million, in a year when people are very concerned, when people are suddenly giving excuses. Our donors do not.”

Perhaps they can’t say no to Mr. Cullman or the other persuasive board members, such as Cody Smith and Muffy Flouret. Or perhaps Chess-in-the-Schools supporters can’t say no because the gala is so successful at conveying the benefits of the program.

The organization gets its message across by inviting students not only to attend the event, but to make their presence, and their stories, known.

Tony Thompson, 18, has been involved with Chess-in-the-Schools since he was 8. He attended the event in a new suit purchased for the occasion at Access Men’s Clothing in the Kings Plaza mall. The Brooklyn Technical High School senior has been accepted into 10 colleges and wants to be a doctor. By the time he talked to me at the end of the cocktail hour, he’d already told about a dozen other guests his story. He had also played some chess (his favorite opening moves: Queen’s Gambit for white, Sicilian Defense for black).

“Playing chess has been a confidence boost. You learn how to think ahead. I’m glad I stuck with it because it helped me get into college,” Mr. Thompson said.

Chess also teaches valuable life lessons.

“I’ve lost a lot of games, and every loss gives you a burning desire to do better,” a junior at Stuyvesant High School, Mahfuzer Miah, said. “It’s how well you play at the moment. People don’t worry about their past defeats.”

The program provides chess lessons and weekly tournament experience, as well as academic tutoring, mentoring, college counseling, and travel opportunities. In addition to deploying its own instructors, last year the organization launched a program to train public school teachers to become chess instructors, which was funded by a grant from the City Council.

“Players continually must face new positions and new problems. They cannot solve these by using a simple formula or relying on memorized answers,” the executive director of Chess-in-the-Schools, Marley Kaplan said. “Instead, they must analyze and calculate while relying on a dose of creativity — skills that increasingly mirror what students must confront in their schoolwork and life.”

Robin MacNeil presented $3,500 checks from Chess-in-the-Schools to three seniors, to help them with college expenses: Mr. Thompson, Khalid Francis and Akil Griffiths.

Mr. MacNeil also confessed his personal deficiencies at chess, dating back to a match he played in college, against his girlfriend’s 6-year-old brother. He lost. “And the girlfriend didn’t last either — her choice,” Mr. MacNeil said.

agordon@nysun.com

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UTD Chess Program.

Brief interviews with top world players studying at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Youtube video from Littlepeasant .

Amazing Mind Over Matter.

Bel Air High teen manages disability with guts, brains

By Cassandra A. Fortin

Special to The Sun
March 30, 2008

Cohen leaves a lasting impression on people.

A junior at Bel Air High School, the 16-year-old has a 3.8 grade point average and was recently inducted into the National Honor Society. After graduation, he wants to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Although he excels academically, he does it from an electric wheelchair, with the assistance of an entourage of caregivers and teachers.

“I’m not able to do much on my own,” Ofek said with a shrug. “I’m very weak. I can’t walk or write or pick things up. I need help doing everything.”

But Ofek has never let his physical limitations hold him back. He was diagnosed with Type II spinal muscular atrophy, a hereditary disease of the muscles that affects 1 in 6,000 children.

The disorder causes a loss of motor neurons in the spinal cord that results in weakness and wasting of muscles used for crawling, walking, standing and sitting up. There is no cure for SMA, and treatment consists of managing the symptoms.

Tom Crawford, a pediatric neurologist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center who met Ofek about 15 years ago, said he hasn’t changed much since then.

“Ofek is almost the same, as far as what he can do for himself, as he was when I met him,” Crawford said. “He is profoundly weak. He can’t do something as simple as bringing his hands up to his face.”

However, Ofek doesn’t dwell on what he can’t do, said his mother, Michelle Cohen-Hammond. Instead, he focuses on what he can do, she said.

“Ofek is like a little Michelangelo,” said Cohen-Hammond. “He’s self-taught. He has an amazing mind. Some kids with SMA grow up with parents who bring the world to them. But when Ofek was little, I took him out into the world.”

On one occasion, she wanted Ofek to know what it would feel like to stand up, so she put him in a standing frame and took him to the mall, she said.

Perhaps his biggest asset is his memory, which comes in handy when he engages in one of his favorite pastimes — chess.

Unable to participate in high school sports, Ofek wanted to do something competitive, he said. He had taught himself how to play chess, but he wanted to take it to the next level.

He helped start a chess club at Bel Air High, but it was short-lived because the teacher who sponsored the club became ill. However, last year a chess tournament was started in the county, Ofek said. He won the first tournament, and then won again this year.

To help give his game a little boost, Ofek said he received tutoring in chess last year from Dan Heisman, who is a U.S. Chess Federation National Master.

Ofek believes his opponents have an advantage over him when he plays chess. But Ofek has overcome that advantage by thinking multiple steps ahead when he plays, said Bill Wardle, the teacher who sponsored the chess tournament.

“Ofek is good at analyzing the situation when he plays chess,” said Wardle, who teaches math at Aberdeen High. “He rarely makes a mistake.”

Because of his illness, Ofek said he has to have his opponent move his chess pieces.

“It sounds like I may have an advantage, but the truth is, it makes it easier for my opponents to estimate my moves,” said Ofek, who was born in Israel but moved to Maryland when he was a young boy. He and his family now live in Abingdon.

Although Ofek doesn’t share a lot about what he goes through with his peers, he has used his story to help raise money for the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, has been a guest speaker at public engagements, and has served as a state ambassador for the muscular dystrophy association, he said.

“I try to do whatever I can,” Ofek said. “But thinking is really all I can do. I’m really proud of my ability to think.”

Ofek has come a long way since his diagnosis, his mother said. Originally, she was told his prognosis was death by age one.

Unwilling to accept a death sentence for her son, his mother began researching the disease. She brought him to Maryland, where he was treated by doctors at Johns Hopkins and the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

“Since then, we have looked at his disease as a birth defect that he has to live with,” she said. “Not something he has to die from.”

Ofek has adjusted to his illness, but some days it can be depressing, he said.

“I can’t go anywhere or do anything,” he said. “I have to rely on other people for everything I do.”

Richard Kelley, the director of the division of metabolism at Kennedy Krieger, became acquainted with Ofek when he received a call from Ofek’s mother, who was living in California at the time, he said.

Kelley helped Ofek through a metabolic crisis, he said. He created a special formula for him that included corn starch, to shorten his overnight fasting period from 10 to 4 hours, he said.

“A healthy person fasts at night and part of their muscle mass is broken down and turned into sugar,” he said. “The problem comes with a child who has 20 percent of the muscle mass his peers have. He still has to produce the same amount of glucose.”

Although he will never lead the life of a normal teenager, Ofek has a great personality and outlook on life, Kelley said.

“Ofek is very verbal, knowledgeable and articulate,” Kelley said. “He charms you.”

His 7-year-old sister, Orly, said she has learned to be more compassionate because of her brother.

“Ofek is very fragile,” Orly said. “He’s different from other people who can walk and other stuff.”

Orly gave an account of an incident at school where she joined the children who had to sit at a special table in the cafeteria.

“We have a table that is called the red zone in the cafeteria at school,” Orly said. “The kids who sit at the table are allergic to peanuts. I went over and sat with them. I try to be nice to people who are different.”

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Idaho Turns to Chess as Education Strategy.

By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN – N.Y. Times

Once a week, Deborah McCoy, a third-grade teacher in Donnelly, Idaho, unpacks chessboards and pieces and spends an hour teaching her 20 students how to play the game.

Mrs. McCoy does not do this because she is passionate about chess; she barely knew how to play before this school year. But she began teaching it as part of an unusual pilot program under way in more than 100 second- and third-grade classrooms across Idaho.

On Thursday, state officials will announce in Boise that the program will be extended in the fall to all second and third graders — making Idaho the first state to offer a statewide chess curriculum.

The state’s $1.5 billion education budget, passed two weeks ago, includes a guarantee to finance the instruction. Tom Luna, the state’s superintendent of education, said participation by teachers would be voluntary, but if reaction to the pilot program is any measure, interest will be great.

There are no studies showing that teaching chess has benefits for children, but there is anecdotal evidence, Mr. Luna said.

“One of the things that we hear is that too much of what we do is based on rote memorization,” Mr. Luna said. “The part I really like about this program is that kids are thinking ahead.”

Mrs. McCoy said she has been pleased with the results.

“So many kids spend their time plugged into video games, iPods, television and so they are more isolated,” she said. “They learn give and take in chess. There are courtesies that you follow. It has been really beneficial for them.”

Idaho has 40,000 second and third graders, and Mr. Luna estimated the instruction will cost about $200,000 to $250,000 a year, although it could run as much as $600,000 “if everybody jumped on it the first year,” he said. The money is expected to come from reducing administrative expenses in the school system, though state officials said they had not yet identified where the savings would be made.

Idaho is using a curriculum called First Move, which was developed by America’s Foundation for Chess, a nonprofit, Seattle-based organization that promotes teaching chess in school. First Move is now taught to 25,000 students in 18 states, according to Wendi Fischer, the vice president of the foundation.

Rourke O’Brien, the foundation’s president, said the idea to introduce chess into Idaho’s school system arose out of a discussion between Erik Anderson, the foundation’s founder, and Roy Lewis Eiguren, a lawyer and lobbyist who lives in Idaho.

Mr. Anderson and Mr. Eiguren sit on the board of the Avista Corporation, an energy company based in neighboring Washington. After hearing about the benefits of teaching chess, Mr. Eiguren set up a dinner early last year and invited Mr. Luna, Karen McGee, an education-policy adviser to the governor, and three Republican state lawmakers — Representatives Eric Anderson (no relation to Erik Anderson) and Bob Nonini, and Senator John W. Goedde.

The dinner participants agreed to create the pilot program, and Mr. Nonini volunteered to provide $600 of his own money to pay for one of the classrooms in his district for a year, Mr. O’Brien said. The rest of the cost, about $60,000, was paid by the state.

First Move differs from some other chess-in-school programs in that it is taught by classroom teachers and is intended as a curriculum enhancement for second and third graders. It incorporates elements of math, history and vocabulary.

Teachers who wish to use it do not need to know chess. They are trained at seminars over a day or two before the school year starts, and are provided with an instructional DVD, a DVD player, chess sets, boards, online resources and a manual. Every other week, an experienced player is available to answer questions.

Mrs. McCoy said her town was so remote — Donnelly is about a two-hour drive from Boise — that the expert player, Mark Morales, was available only online, but she had found that was adequate. She said it was good for her students to be exposed to a sophisticated game like chess.

“Donnelly is approximately 250 people,” she said. “We are right smack dab in the mountains. Most of our kids live on ranches or in small towns.”

Read story in it’s entirety here.

Wenatchee Scholastic Chess.

Youtube video from Wenatcheeworld.

The Wenatchee World Website.

Teacher Uses Chess to Motivate.

From The Monterey County Herald

By CLAUDIA MELÉNDEZ SALINAS

When Alberto Murillo was 9 years old, soon after he and his family came to Salinas to escape the violent streets of Compton, he found his first love. “All I wanted was chess,” the 31-year-old says, the light of remembrance shining in his eyes as if he were going back in time and reliving those feelings. “All I could think of was chess.”He was in fourth grade at Sanborn Elementary School, now Jesse Sanchez Elementary. He concentrated on his homework and did everything he was asked as long as he could play chess at the end of the day.”Before that, nothing really mattered. I knew I had to go to school, but I didn’t feel there was a purpose,” he says. “But after learning chess, I started thinking about my purpose.”Now Murillo has re-encountered his childhood love.The former real estate agent and pre-med student has reconsidered his mission in life and returned to the Alisal Union School District to teach the game of royalty and strategy.And he’s not just thinking about chess as entertainment: He wants his students to become inspired and to learn that if they can conquer chess, they can conquer the world.”I’m not just teaching the kids chess,” Murillo says. “I’m motivating them. I’m inspiring them to go into higher education. We’re all pawns, but if you make it to the other side, the chess pawns become anything you want. Your dreams can become true.”Last month, the Alisal Union School District approved a $12,000 grant to teach chess to its
students, and so far about 200 children have enrolled in the program to learn from Murillo and his mentor, Gary Jones, who taught him in elementary school.

Judging by the reaction at Cesar Chavez Elementary, parents and students are falling in love, too. “You can move here or here,” second-grader Brian Gomez tells his chess partner, first-grader Jocelyn Reyes. “Did you move yet?”

“Not yet,” Jocelyn answers, as she tries to move her queen forward.

“You can’t move it here,” Brian says, gently instructing her in the intricacies of the game. “You can move it right here.”

Jocelyn decides the piece to move is her king, so she and Brian engage in a quick challenge of advancing monarchs. It’s hard to tell if they understand what they’re doing, but they are both so self-assured, neither correcting the other, that it’s easy to believe they’re competing for the crown.

Their game is interrupted by Murillo, who announces he’s going to play a game with the rest of the class.

“If you guys beat me, I’ll give each of you two dollars,” he says.

All students drop their games and turn their faces to the vertical chess board hanging from the blackboard. Soon they’re suggesting out loud what their next move should be against their teacher.

After Murillo moved from elementary to middle school, he stopped playing chess. When he started North Salinas High School, his parents noticed he was falling in with the wrong crowd, so they moved him to Alisal High. There, he re-connected with his elementary school friends, those who had piqued his desire to do better, and he began getting good grades again. He graduated with honors from Alisal, and began the pre-med program at the University of California-Davis.

Murillo confesses with candor that his social life got in the way of school, and he had to abandon his goal of becoming a doctor. But he graduated with a degree in psychology and a minor in economics.

He wanted to be a teacher, but the profession paid so little that he grew disenchanted. He jumped into the real estate frenzy earlier this decade, became a Realtor and bought a couple of properties.

With a lucrative career ahead of him, he felt he could dedicate some time to chess and called his old teacher, Gary Jones, to revive the program that had so inspired Murillo.

“He brought more enthusiasm, which got me ignited also,” says Jones, who has been teaching for 31 years and runs chess classes at three schools in the Alisal district. “He accelerated it by taking it to all the schools. He said ‘Let’s try it, let’s see what we can do.’”

Jones and Murillo have taught chess mostly to fourth-graders at 11 of the 12 schools in the Alisal Union School District. Because parents at Cesar Chavez Elementary have shown such support and enthusiasm for the classes, Murillo is allowing younger kids to participate.

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Johnny Bravo Plays Chess Against the Super Computer.

Youtube video from BamiHoofd.

Jeff Sarwer in Gdansk, Poland.

Who is Jeff Sarwer, you ask? Jeff was portrayed as Jonathan Poe, Josh Waitzkin’s  childhood chess rival in the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer“. Near the end of the movie, he refuses a draw offer by Josh, and went on to lose the match.

Below is a video of Jeff in Gdansk, Poland. He also has a very nice web site, where he has a page of his score sheets from the 80’s.

250,000 Chess Sets for Schools in England.

From inloughborough.com.

Andy Reed MP today announced the giving away of chess sets to schools. The chess sets are available for schools as part of a scheme to provide a quarter of a million chess sets into the school network. Negotiations with manufacturers and distributors means that ten sets and boards can be presented to every school in England.

At a recent meeting in the House of Commons Holloid Plastics Ltd made a big-hearted offer to encourage interest in chess. They agreed to sponsor 250,000 chess sets to be distributed to schools throughout England. The allocation will be made in packages of 10 chess sets on a “first come first served” basis.

The offer give schools the opportunity to receive free of charge 10 chess sets for use to encourage more chess to be played in schools. The offer made in conjunction with the English Chess Federation is to encourage more young people to play chess.

The Loughborough MP told inLoughborough: “This offer is a great opportunity for school to receive chess sets and revive interest in chess. I encourage and call on all schools in the Loughborough area to apply for these sets.

I hope that chess can be taken up by a new generation of school children and this offer is a great way for schools to encourage chess to be played. I hope that school in Loughborough will make use of this opportunity.”

Chess in the form we know it today started in Southern Europe in the 15th Century. It has been shown relatively recently that stronger players start playing chess early in life, their is a greater probability that they are left handed and were born in the winter months or early spring.

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