How Children Succeed

Suddenly a bit of a smile crept onto Sebastian’s face. “I could win the queen,” he said.

“Show me,” Spiegel said, and Sebastian made the moves, demonstrating how one more check would have not only saved his bishop but also sent white into a tailspin, forcing the Ohio boy to choose between losing his queen and losing the game.

“This is the thing,” Spiegel said evenly, moving the pieces back to where they were when Sebastian had gone for the easy pawn. “Think back on this moment. When you made this move”—she captured the white pawn, as Sebastian had done—“you lost the game. If you had made this move”—she put the white king in check—“you would have won the game.” She leaned back in her chair, her gaze fixed on Sebastian. “It’s okay if the loss hurts you a little,” she said. “You should feel bad. You’re a talented player, but you have to slow down and think more. Because now you have”—she checked her watch—“four hours until the next game, which means that you have four hours to think about the fact that you got beat by this kid.” She tapped the board. “All because of this one time when you could have slowed down but you didn’t.”

2. IQ and Chess

On May 11, 1997, at the Equitable Center in midtown Manhattan, Garry Kasparov, who since 1985 had been the world chess champion, resigned after just nineteen moves in the last game of his six-game match against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer program designed by engineers at IBM. It was Kasparov’s second defeat in the match—he had won one game; three others were draws—meaning he had lost the match and, more important, his unofficial title as the “finest chess playing entity on the planet,” in the words of the New York Times reporter on the scene. There was, in the chess world and beyond it, great consternation over Kasparov’s defeat and much anxious discussion about what it meant for the rest of us mortals. (Newsweek had run a story about the match a few days earlier; the magazine’s cover had proclaimed it “The Brain’s Last Stand.”) In a mournful postgame news conference, Kasparov said he was ashamed of his loss and mystified by Deep Blue’s towering ability. “I’m a human being,” he lamented. “When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I’m afraid.”

To many people, Deep Blue’s triumph represented not just a challenge to humanity’s mastery of chess but an existential threat to our species’ unique intelligence; it was as if a school of dolphins had just composed a perfect symphony. Indeed, chess ability has long been considered a simple shorthand for smartness: the more intelligent you are, the better you can play chess, and vice versa. In his 1997 book Genius in Chess, the British grand master Jonathan Levitt proposed a precise mathematical relationship between IQ and chess prowess in what he called the Levitt equation :

Elo ~ (10 ? IQ) + 1000.

Elo refers to a player’s tournament rating—and in his equation, Levitt explained, he was referring to the highest rating that a player could achieve “after many years of tournament play or study.” (That funny squiggle after Elo means “is approximately equal to.”) So if you had a run-of- the-mill IQ of 100, by Levitt’s calculation, the highest rating you could ever hope for was 2000. An IQ of 120 could potentially get you to 2200. And so on. Chess grand masters are usually rated at 2500 or above; according to Levitt’s formula, that means they each possess an IQ of at least 150, which is considered genius level.

But not everyone accepts the premise that chess skill is closely and directly related to pure IQ. Jonathan Rowson, a young Scottish grand master who has written a few provocative books about chess, calls the Levitt equation “completely misguided.” Rowson has argued that the most important talents in chess are not intellectual at all; they are psychological and emotional. “Most of the major academic studies of chess miss much that is essential to the ways that a chess-player thinks and feels,” Rowson wrote in his book The Seven Deadly Chess Sins. “They are guilty of thinking of chess as an almost exclusively cognitive pursuit, where moves are chosen and positions understood only on the basis of mental patterns and inferences.” In reality, he wrote, if you want to become a great chess player, or even a good one, “your ability to recognize and utilize your emotions is every bit as important as the way you think.”

In her chess classes at IS 318 and in her postgame debriefings with students at tournaments like the National Junior High Championships, Spiegel often conveys specific chess knowledge: how to spot the difference between the exchange Slav opening and the semi-Slav; how to weigh the comparative value of your light-square bishop and your dark-square bishop. But most of the time, it struck me whenever I watched her at work, what she was really doing was far simpler, and also far more complicated: she was teaching her students a new way to think. Her methodology was closely related to the metacognitive strategies that Martin Seligman studied and that Angela Duckworth taught. And, to me, anyway, her system seemed inextricably linked to the research neuroscientists have been doing on executive functions—those higher-order mental capacities that some scientists compare to an air traffic control center for the brain.

Two of the most important executive functions are cognitive flexibility and cognitive self-control. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to see alternative solutions to problems, to think outside the box, to negotiate unfamiliar situations. Cognitive self-control is the ability to inhibit an instinctive or habitual response and substitute a more effective, less obvious one. Both skills are central to the training Spiegel gives to her students. To prevail at chess, she says, you need a heightened ability to see new and different ideas: Which especially creative winning move have you overlooked? And which potentially lethal move of your opponent’s are you blindly ignoring? She also teaches them to resist the temptation to pursue an immediately attractive move, since that type of move (as Sebastian Garcia found out) often leads to trouble down the road. “Teaching chess is really about teaching the habits that go along with thinking,” Spiegel explained to me one morning when I visited her classroom. “Like how to understand your mistakes and how to be more aware of your thought processes.”

Before she was a full-time chess teacher at IS 318, Spiegel taught an eighth-grade honors English class at the school, and as an English teacher she was, she says, a bit of a disaster. She taught composition the way she analyzed Sebastian’s chess game: When students turned in writing assignments, she went through each assignment sentence by sentence with each student, asking, Well, are you sure that’s the best way to say what you want to say? “They looked at me like I was insane,” she told me. “I would write them these long letters about what they’d written. It would take me the whole evening to do six or seven of them.”

Although Spiegel’s teaching style might not have been the right fit with an English class, her experience teaching English did help her understand better what she wanted to do in chess class. Rather than follow a set chess curriculum over the course of the year, she decided she would construct her academic calendar as she went, planning lessons based entirely on what her students knew and, more important, on what they didn’t know. For instance, she would take her students to a weekend tournament and notice that many of them were hanging pieces, meaning they were leaving pieces undefended, which made them easy targets. The following Monday, she would organize the whole class around how not to hang pieces, reconstructing the students’ flawed games on the green felt practice boards hung on hooks at the front of her classroom. Again and again, she would go over her students’ games, both individually and as a class, analyzing exactly where a player had gone wrong, what he could have done differently, what might have happened if he had made the better move, and playing out these counterfactual scenarios for several moves before returning to the moment of error.

Sensible though this process might sound, it’s actually a pretty unusual way to teach chess, or to learn it. “It’s uncomfortable to focus so intensely on what you’re bad at,” Spiegel told me. “So the way people usually study chess is they read a book about chess, which can be fun and often intellectually amusing, but it doesn’t actually translate into skill. If you really want to get better at chess, you have to look at your games and figure out what you’re doing wrong.”

It’s a little like what people ideally get out of psychotherapy, Spiegel says. You go over the mistakes you made—or the mistakes you keep making—and you try to get to the bottom of why you made them. And just like the best therapists, Spiegel tries to lead her students down a narrow and difficult path: to have them take responsibility for their mistakes and learn from them without obsessing over them or beating themselves up for them. “Very rarely do kids have an experience in life of losing when it was entirely in their control,” she told me. “But when they lose a chess game, they know that they have no one to blame but themselves. They had everything they needed to win, and they lost. If that happens to you once, you can usually find some excuse, or just never think about it again.