When it’s part of your life, when it happens to you every single weekend, you have to find a way to separate yourself from your mistakes or your losses. I try to teach my students that losing is something you do, not something you are.”
3. Chess Fever
Of course, it’s easy to tell kids they should put their losses in perspective and keep their confidence intact despite setbacks. It’s harder when you’re the person doing the losing. Spiegel plays chess at a very high level herself; although her rating has slipped a bit over the past few years, as she has dedicated more of her time to teaching, she is still one of the top thirty female chess players in the country. But like all great chess players, she loses a lot, and when she does, she often takes to her blog—a popular if offbeat source of news and opinion in the chess world—and castigates herself for everyone to see. “I am such a stupid retarded disgusting mindless child,” she wrote in 2007 after losing to a Russian master. “Am I really incapable of calculating simple captures? I officially hate myself.”
Spiegel’s father taught her the basic chess moves when she was just four years old, but she didn’t play chess competitively until she got to sixth grade and signed up for an afterschool chess program at her junior high school in Raleigh, North Carolina. She loved it—not just the chess, which she excelled at, but also the unfamiliar sense of belonging that chess gave her. A socially awkward child before finding chess, she suddenly had a place where she fit in. “I remember feeling so happy and relieved,” she told me. “Kids were nice to me because I was good. Adults treated me like I had real opinions. For the first time, I felt like life was getting better.” Her chess rating quickly soared above that of the teacher who ran the chess program, and she realized, to her amazement, that she didn’t need his help to continue to improve; she could just study chess on her own. And if she could teach herself chess, she figured, she could teach herself math, too, or anything else. Her ability to master new subjects on her own, a skill she learned entirely from chess, carried her through her years at what she describes as “a terrible American high school” and into college, first Duke and then Columbia, where she started off majoring in math and then after a couple of years switched to English literature.
After graduating, Spiegel stayed in New York and signed up as a teacher with a nonprofit called Chess-in- the-Schools, an organization that since 1986 has been arranging for chess experts like Spiegel to spend a few hours a week teaching chess in the city’s low-income public schools. For a few years, Spiegel rotated among a group of four schools, a day here, a day there, but she liked IS 318 the best, and finally, in 2006, the principal hired her as a full-time chess teacher and as the coach of the school’s traveling chess team.
In the summer of 2005, after several years of playing chess only halfheartedly, she entered, on a whim, a high-level open tournament in Phoenix. And to her surprise, she did very well, scoring the highest of any woman at the tournament, which meant that she automatically qualified for the U.S. national championship the following spring. She was out of her depth, and she knew it; sixty-four men and women had qualified for the tournament, the finest chess players in the country, and she was one of the lowest rated. So she poured herself into chess, studying three or more hours a day, five days a week, staying up all night going over an opening or playing for hours online on the Internet Chess Club website. She improved enough that she did reasonably well at the tournament—not top ten, but respectably—and afterward, she kept playing with the same fervor. Just as it had in junior high, chess took over her life. She taught chess all day and played every night. She lost touch with her friends who didn’t play chess, and other commitments and connections began to slip away. Playing chess, she wrote on her blog, had become “pretty much the only time I ever feel anything. The rest of the time, with just a couple exceptions, I am almost completely numb.”
Spiegel became more and more cut off from the non-chess world. She has a tendency toward both melancholy and a certain eccentricity, and her increasing social isolation allowed those traits to metastasize. One day, on her blog, she announced bashfully to her readers that she had been on a date the previous Friday. “At some point,” she wrote, “he put his arm around me, and I thought,
Then, over Christmas vacation in 2009, she took an impulsive, romantic trip to the Caribbean with the art teacher from IS 318, a tall, good-looking guy named Jonathan with Mediterranean features and long dark hair, whom she had admired from afar in the teachers’ lounge but had considered out of her league. By the time they got back from their week in the Bahamas, they were in love. Four months later, they moved in together, and by the fall of 2010, they were engaged.
Jonathan didn’t play chess at all, and as she spent more time with him, Spiegel found her chess fever starting to dissipate. It wasn’t that she abandoned chess altogether—she was still teaching it all day at school and coaching her students on Saturdays at scholastic tournaments—but now her free time was spent doing things like riding bikes and eating good food and exploring new neighborhoods and talking about the future, not playing chess online. To me, a non?chess player, this seemed like a positive development. It seemed clear that playing chess all the time didn’t make Spiegel very happy, and hanging out with Jonathan did. From her perspective, though, the cost-benefit analysis wasn’t so simple. Her official chess rating peaked at 2170, but after Spiegel started dating Jonathan, it slipped down below 2100. She often talked about her desire to get serious about chess again, to play more, to get her rating back up. Rationally, she knew that she was happier than she had been when she was playing chess all the time, but still, she told me, she missed those unhappy, obsessive days all the same.
4. Calibrated Meanness
At the heart of Spiegel’s job was a complex balancing act. She wanted to build up her students’ confidence, to make them believe in their own ability to overcome stronger rivals and master an impossibly complicated game. But the exigencies of her job—and the particularities of her personality—meant that she spent most of her time telling her students how they were messing up. It’s the basic narrative of all postgame chess analysis, in fact:
“I struggle with it all the time,” she told me one day when I visited her class. “Every day. It’s very high on my list of anxieties as a teacher. I feel like I’m very mean to the kids. It kills me sometimes, like I go home and I play through everything I said to every kid and I’m like, ‘What am I doing? I’m damaging the children.’”
After the 2010 girls’ national tournament (which IS 318 won), Spiegel wrote on her blog:
The first day and a half was pretty bad.
I was on a complete rampage, going over every game and being a huge bitch all the time: saying things like “THAT IS COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE!!!” to 11-year-olds for hanging pieces or not having a reason for a move. I said some amazing things to kids, including “You can count to two, right? Then you should have seen that!!” and “If you are not going to pay more attention, you should quit chess, because you are wasting everyone’s time.”
By the end of round three I was starting to feel like an abusive jerk and was about to give up and be fake nice instead. But then in round four everyone took more than an hour and started playing well. And I really believe that’s why we seem to win girls’ nationals sections pretty easily every year: most people won’t tell teenage girls (especially the together, articulate ones) that they are lazy and the quality of their work is unacceptable. And sometimes kids need to hear that, or they have no reason to step up.
Spiegel often defied my stereotype of how a good teacher, especially a good inner-city teacher, should interact with her students. I confess that before meeting her, I had a vision of the ideal inner-city chess teacher that bore a close resemblance to the character played by Ted Danson in
