Looks at Books
Teaching Chess in the Schools By C.K. Damrosch
Former U.S. women’s champion Dr. Alexey Root’s chess curriculum series now stands at five books. But is adhering to state
and national curriculum guidelines the best way to teach chess?
It’s not Dr. Alexey root’s fAult. I first started teaching chess in the pub-
lic schools in 1990, and in 20+ years if I had a nickel for each principal who asked me to “align your lesson to state stan- dards,” well I’d have a diabetes-inducing bag of penny candy. for those of you not forced to deal with the changing fads in education, first off you don’t need these books. still, the excellences and flaws of this five-book series are a fine launching point for a discussion of what exactly is the best way to teach chess to children.
12 Chess Life — August 2011
state standards sounds like a simple
enough requirement. A lesson should be applicable to the broader goals of an insti- tution. However, its important to realize that standards themselves have some- times been used as an attempt to break teacher’s unions. the idea was if we could somehow quantify teaching, reduce it to a matrix of numbers, we could root out “bad” teachers. this business based approach to edu-
cation appears to finally be reaching its high water mark. Here in new york City,
the business trained school chancellor has recently been chased from office, replaced by the now radical notion to have education in the city run by an edu- cational professional. the first volume of Dr. root’s books
have the doubly problematic issue of being aligned to the state standards of root’s home state of texas. texas is the home to the great majority of the nation’s text- book publishers, who unfortunately often cater to this state’s educational system. In a way of dismissing a regional preju-
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