Chess (Part 1?)

My dad taught me how to play chess when I was, say, 10-years old. It was fun and interesting. I played him and my brother a handful of times, though it by no means defined my childhood. That was reserved for soccer and tackle football in the house. Decades later, chess is back in my life. I love it and I hate it but mostly I love it (because I hate it).

The Queen’s Gambit did the impossible and made chess cool and popular. It’s like if spoken word were featured at the Super Bowl. Wait, it was?! I digress. I’m sure through some roundabout way, that brought it back into my life. I saw the show. It was fine but nothing special. A month or two later, a good friend of mine shared a chess.com app with me and another buddy. I’m assuming he or someone in his life became interested in it through the show, but I don’t really care to ask (probably because I don’t care about the show to begin with). The fact is, chess is back, and that’s all that really matters.

I run an elementary school, and my job is to regularly reinforce the message that learning is hard, and it is rewarding because it is hard. Those aha moments? The aha lives in the struggle preceding the exclamation. Very regularly, I reference how math is hard for me still (it is) or how I know nothing about spreadsheets and how to use them to their full potential (text wrapping is as far as I go) or how I make a bunch of mistakes everyday (super easy to own that, actually). Very rarely in my adult life, though, have I been face to face with the type of struggle that I see students experience everyday.

Philosophizing about growth mindset and working hard and you’ll get there soon, just wait is one thing. Pulling out some examples that kids know are real but still don’t really understand–sure, good work making a connection and building trust. Living it, though, is another thing all together, and that is what chess is doing to me now.

I’m playing and trying to learn how to get better. The worst part is, chess encompasses several of my many, many areas of growth. It is spatial reasoning, mathematical thinking, iterative thinking beyond one or two steps, reading and reacting, and oh yeah all of that at the exact same time. Let’s throw in a timer just for some good, old-fashioned stress just to really exacerbate my sense of incompetence.

Chess is not like exercise. The more I play it, the more I feel like maybe I’m getting better but also maybe I’m not? If I workout for three straight weeks (go me!), I will definitely feel better and healthier. In the last two weeks, I have managed to play too many hours of chess, and though I am a bit improved from those first few games, I feel largely just as incompetent. My mistakes are similarly obvious. My novice strategy looks very novice and not very strategy. In general, I haven’t gotten better and I’m not digging the art of patience, largely because I can’t see significant growth, and significant is even relative here.

And that’s it. In most games I play, I experience a feeling of incompetence several times at the very least. I play the computer, I play strangers who are not too far more advanced than I, I do chess puzzles. Over and over again I make similar mistakes that show how I struggle with spatial reasoning and mathematical thinking and all of those things. I feel like I’m in a holding pattern of chess growth. It honestly feels defeating, and part of it is because I don’t know how to get better. Watch some chess videos? Cool, but I forget it all when I actually play a game. Read some chess theory (ultra nerd over here)? Cool, but I forget it all when someone does a different opening than what I just read about.

It is a game of multitudes and I feel so singular.

I hate that feeling. But as an educator, I also appreciate it. I haven’t felt it in a long time, not as pronounced as this. And in the low-stakes world of online chess with strangers or bots, it’s a pretty good place to be. I feel like I am not good at something and I don’t know how to get better. I am reminded of what that used to feel like in algebra class, and I see what it feels like in the students I am in charge of everyday. Some things are just overwhelming, and kids don’t have the perspective that I have–that it does get better, that you do learn. I will get better at chess and I will win some matches. That will feel good. It will feel good not because of the winning, but because I will be able to see my learning and growth.

The truth is, I know I am getting better. I am just wanting to see it much more pronouncedly than it is presenting. I want the leaps and bounds, not the skips and stumbles. Having recently picked up a game that my father introduced me to long ago, I am now in a world of challenge and growth that I have not experienced in years. It’s a new experience. It’s damn frustrating. And somehow because of that, I love it and can’t put it down.