chess club

In perhaps a fit of madness, I agreed last month to start and lead a chess club at Nova Bastille Free Public Library.

 

Chess is one of those games I wish more people played. One of the reasons we had children is so we could have new people to play, ourselves. So when I was asked if I would consider running such a club, I knew I was going to say yes even though I asked for time to think about it.

 

We had our second session today, and it went well overall, I think. I am a little stymied by Rachel's attendance, as she is convinced that she can do anything her older sister can, even when it's patently obvious that she is hopelessly out of her depth, such as when she insists she can play chess without knowing even how to move the pieces correctly. I'm trying to teach her, but it takes time and she's only 4½.

 

It was a bit hectic for a while because I had three other small kids who wanted to learn to play, and one of the tenets of the club is that anyone who doesn't know how to play can be taught. I walked them through a few of the pieces -- the pawns, the bishops and the rooks -- and was relieved when they decided to play checkers instead.

 

I'm hoping to build the club up into some sort of tournament arrangement, where the kids can play one another and jockey for position on a pyramid, but so far that's largely imaginary because only five kids have shown up both weeks, and the range of skills isn't that wide. Two of them basically have no idea what they're doing, and all of them keep forgetting that you don't actually capture the king -- you have to announce when the king is in check and force the other person to get the king to safety.

 

Today we actually had a game where one of the players had three queens on the board at a time, had his opponent on the ropes, and then she managed to take out all his queens in less than four moves -- including one she eliminated with a pawn and another she captured with her king (!) -- and then had no idea how to get him in checkmate with two queens of her own. The game actually ended in a stalemate, with his king not in check but unable to move anywhere. As I wryly remarked afterward, they each managed to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.

 

I matched Evangeline up with a much older boy, and she nearly beat him. He remarked afterward that if she hadn't started to lose interest in the game and let her attention wander, he would have lost. So I was duly impressed with her, and very proud.

 

I have to figure out how to make this work better, though. The less skilled players need some coaching to help them get better, yet it's hard to give them that coaching if all my effort is spent working with kids who are too young to learn to play the game in a library setting.

 

Keeping the kid's brain engaged during the summer shutdown

Evangeline last week received recognition from the Nova Bastille Free Public Library that she is a skilled writer.

As part of its summer program, the library solicited essays from city children on the subject of how to take their pets with them on a trip to colonize the moon. Essays had to show an understanding of a pet's needs, and ways that a zero-gravity environment would differ from the Earth.

I helped her engage her thought processes, but Evangeline on her own wrote how her dog Sandy could eat, drink, sleep, exercise and go to the bathroom in space. (She neglected to mention that Sandy died last year.)

Her innovations: a food dish with a small hole so the food gets out in small amounts only, a dog-size water bottle, a cage with heavy padding so Sandy doesn't get hurt when she floats during her sleep, magnetic shoes so she sticks to the floor, and a vacuum cleaner to clean up everything.

As a sci-fi sort, I was proud that she suggested saving Sandy's waste to terraform the lunar soil -- and even prouder as an organic gardener that she stipulated the waste was not for soil where crops are raised.

But as an award-winning writer, I was prouder still that she received recognition for her own writing. Just shy of second grade, she wrote a better essay than I was accustomed to getting from many of my seventh- and eighth-graders for much of the school year back when I was a teacher.

In other education and learning news, Evangeline also has been busy reading reams of poetry by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and a few others, including some poems from my Norton Anthology of English Literature, such as Lewis Carroll and even William Shakespeare. She's been learning folk songs and mastering the rest of the multiplication table.

She's also been learning to ride a bike (with training wheels), play baseball, and jump rope.

Her theology continues to develop, as she notices disparities between her own experiences with God and the way the Bible depicts other people's experiences.

On Saturday night she asked me if God speaks to people like he did in the Tanakh, and when I explained that the direct quotes in the Bible most likely are a literary device intended to represent the more standard prayer experience of hearing God speak to our hearts, she asked me how we can recognize when he's talking to us and when we're just imagining it. She also wanted to know if I had ever heard God speak out loud.

That was the night we read the chapter in 2 Samuel where David decides he wants to build God a Temple instead of leaving the Ark of the Covenant inside a tent all the time. I tried to explain, without getting into the priesthood of Melchizedek or anything deep like that, that the Temple system was a shadow of what was to come in Christ, when the Holy Spirit would live in our hearts. And that prompted her to ask when the Holy Spirit comes into people, if tongues of fire still appeared on their heads when he did and so on.

I think she's intrigued by the admittedly dramatic image of people with flames dancing on their heads, speaking in unknown tongues, and she wanted to know if I had ever seen that happen. (Nope. Not even in the Assemblies of God.)

So I had to explain not only about biblical inspiration, but about the Abramic covenant and Mosaic law being forerunners and types of the relationship we now have with God in Christ, the difference between the indwelling and baptism of the Holy Spirit, and then I had to note that the day of Pentecost was the only time in the Bible when tongues of fire appeared on people's heads as they began to speak in tongues. (And she amazed me with the amount of detail she remembered about that story, that the Christians were speaking all sorts of languages they didn't know but everyone else did, that people thought they were drunk or crazy, and that thousands of people became Christians as a result.)

I can only imagine how late we would have been up if I had started talking about Melchizedek. (And let me note that when we read that chapter of Genesis a few weeks ago, she noticed that Melchizedek and Abram ate the same stuff that we use to celebrate the Last Supper.)

I love it when she asks these questions, because it jolts me out of my own complacency, and forces me to rethink some of my own suppositions about God. How do we know when it's really God speaking to us, and we're not just imagining it? If God's quotes in the Bible are a literary device, what other things could be literary devices that I'm not recognizing as such? As is usual, she left me with weighty questions to ponder while I left her to consider my own inadequate answer to her question.

And lastly, Evangeline is asking for a little brother. She is not just asking us, I have heard her asking for one during bedtime prayers.

Balloonmania at the public library

We just got back from a library event where Evangeline was happily occupied for about one-and-a-half hours, learning to tie her own balloons, along with about 25 other screaming children. (The only downside was when the balloon lady made only one Spider-Man balloon and didn't have time to make them for other children.)

Rachel and I stayed out in the children's section of the library and played with dolls, did puzzles and read a couple books. About 20 minutes before the balloon class ended, the librarian asked if Rachel would be interested in coloring a dragon scale for some sort of thematic display they have. She gave me a dragon scale too, because they really needed to get all the scales colored and illustrated, and all the children were busy with the balloons.

So for the next 20 minutes or so, I drew pictures of Violet and the other Incredibles, Superman, Spider-Man, Batman and Green Lantern. And of course I helped Rachel draw pictures on her scale too.

Still, it was kind of fun. I looked around for the finished collection of dragon scales when we left, to see if I could spot our artwork, but no look. Maybe when we go back.