Those That Can't Do....

Alright, so in my employment experience, I've worked industrial shop labor, block ice manufacture, and university store cashier. As summer rolled past its midway point (by my academic calender at least), I was still looking for gainful employment to finance my expenses the next term. Enter my wonderful community college.

Tarrant County Community College (or TCC for short) has held a summer youth education program since 1986, called College for Kids. Now before leaving my first summer session of spanish (alliteration is an odd grammatical phenomenon), our professor had mentioned that the program needed some replacement adjunct teachers for the upcoming three week term. We already had a classmate involved in the program, but not many of us were interested in investing more time in education, especially when it wasn't our education. "Geology, Computer Graphics and Chess need teachers." We were only half-listening. "How much does the job pay, Adrienne?" Pay? This position paid? "Uh, I don't know. I'm only a teaching assistant, but I make about $12 an hour."

---------> Huh-wha? Twelve bucks an hour? What were these jobs again?

"Geology, Computer Graphics, and Chess."

Chess. I knew how to play chess. How hard can teaching a game be?

I and two other students quickly made tracks to the office of Continuing Education across campus. There, the woman known as Miss Jackie laid it out for us. "So are ya'll teachers?" Well, we're not licensed educators, no. "No, but you're interested in teaching?" Yeah. "Okay. Follow me."

The classes ranged from 3rd graders to 8th graders, with six regular chess classes, and two advanced chess classes. Among the three of us, we could handle teaching eight classes. And that was the key. "Can you teach?" The last person they'd had was a 19-year-old chess champion, and while finding an experienced player as replacement wasn't difficult, someone who could impart knowledge without being a bore was.

So, myself and two other young students took it upon ourselves to apply for the job, which we all received what with the need for enough teachers to handle the classes. I was the one who was listed as responsible for the room key (and thus, the security of all our supplies and materials), and the head teacher for the two advanced classes (our most experienced member declined because he needed the extra time to study for his MCAT). It was a minor thing that was buzzing around the back of our minds, but one of our number bravely asked: "So, just how much will we be making?" "Um, I'm not sure, but bare minimum...sixteen dollars an hour."

$16 an hour x 8 hours a day x 4 days a week x 3 weeks = More money than I've ever made in my life.

Oh yeah, I had to contain the smile.

Of course, we'd soon learn the setup wasn't as simple as you'd first imagine. Knowing the rules of chess is easy enough, and teaching those rules is also easy. But defining chess tactics and strategy is much more complicated. It was easy enough for Vincent, the med student, to work up basic powerpoints for the beginner classes, but it took me half of the first week to come up with stuff for tournament players to learn from. Again, ask and Wikipedia shall deliver. While Vincent talked about piece movement, I discussed that crazy language known as algebraic notation ("Knight to e4"). I picked easy concepts from a chess lexicon to present as "words of the day." It was about as clichéd as you'd imagine. You stand up, present the words and ideas with pictures, ask questions in a really condescending manner, and then you move on to practical application of material.

I'd say our lectures were fairly good, but I think we failed in controlling the play afterwards. Most of the beginning classes had so few students as to allow us to micromanage every game, giving tips, buffering bad habits, and lending a hand in disputes. In the two advanced classes, myself and Nick, the third teacher, were a bit out of our element. To start with, 11:00 became synonymous with "ah, hell." It was our largest class (23 students) and we had the littlest content available to keep them occupied. Most of our classes came in asking for boards and pieces immediately. I mean literally. They didn't believe they were there to do anything but PLAY CHESS. That's easy enough to temper and control in a group of six to eight, but fifteen or twenty-three kids grabbing supplies, starting games and yelling, throwing, and generally starting their own freetime gets a bit hard to handle.

I've always been a stickler for silence when a teacher's speaking, but I took it to a new level in this situation. I don't think "power trip" actually conveys how much I enjoyed this part of the job. It's one thing when you're a classmate telling your peers to be quiet, it's another when you RUN the class, and are threatening a dead silence edict with no chess sets for nearly an hour if there's misbehavior. It's intoxicating.

Overall, 11:00 was a babysitting job for us after we trudged through whatever textbook stuff I pulled out. Playing was largely what the students were there for. And we let them. About two-thirds of every class were play sessions, because we only had so much content (and we preferred them to learn by playing their peers).

The job was a dichotomy because seeing students win or fail and learn by that was exciting, while dealing with their egos and hyperactive behavior was not. In the end we all agreed the job was stressful but worth it (I say worth it for the pay, the others for their own reasons). Of course, since most of the class was coasting (only one of us needed to lecture at a time, and games didn't need constant arbitration) you wouldn't have your attention occupied all the time, but you could be distracted enough not to be able spend all your time studying or working on something else. This mixture of boredom and stress quickly tired us out each day.

Some saving graces for us: 1) The film Searching for Bobby Fischer 2) The computer game Battle Chess, which features such enticing animations as a "rock monster Rook" swallowing the Queen whole, a Knight severing another Knight's limbs one-by-one, ala Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the King using flails, revolvers and bombs to repel his attackers 3) A large, outdoor chessboard with pieces ranging from sixteen to approx. twenty-seven inches high for eventual tournament play.

A highlight of this past job was the actual opportunity to teach. I just love watching people grasp a concept and apply it. While many of our students were already adept players, we had several who came to us with little to no previous experience with the game. A key example was a pair of twin brothers who knew more about checkers than chess, but eventually made it through half their class's tournament in the last week.

Believe it or not, chess is something that's actually easier to teach than to play. I'll probably never look at an 8x8 checkered board without trepidation ever again, but hey, it's only a game, right?