Large chess boards rested on stands in front of a group of bright-eyed and eager children at Fairview Elementary School.
Bloomington native Michael May and several other volunteers, teach chess to children who participate in the after-school program sponsored by the Parks and Recreation Department every Tuesday. These lessons include the basics of chess strategies: where the best and worst squares are, how to attack and how to defend the king.
“Can anyone show me where the weakest spaces on the board are?” May said.
To this question many students raised their hands excitedly, but all of their answers resulted a response of “Good guess” from May. Eventually May showed them the two weakest points on the chessboard.
“Now, can someone show me the strongest points on the chess board?” May said.
Again, many hands rose into the air, but this time the first student correctly identified the four strongest spaces.
These lessons are not only about the best and worst spaces or how to circumvent an opponent’s knight. There is much more about these lessons than just chess, May said.
“Chess is not about chess,” May said. “Chess is a metaphor for life and we have no interest in chess. We have an interest in teaching life skills and teaching life skills over a chess board.”
Apart from chess, May teaches applied contemporary mythology.
“By the fourth move of the game, there are now 315 billion possible board positions, which, for me at least, is unthinkable,” May said. “So by the fourth move of this chess game, this child, who’s 10 years old, is thinking about the unthinkable. They’re looking into the deep abyss, and from those 315 billion possibilities they have to choose one, just like life.”
There were six tables positioned around the room with chess boards on which the children were able to practice.
Bloomington High School North freshman Ben Foley has been playing chess for about two and a half years and has recently started giving private lessons in addition to volunteering at Fairview.
Foley was the opposition to a group game of chess. May would ask the children where to move their piece. Foley would then call out, from behind the children, the piece he would like to move and the position he would like to move it to in order to counter them.
After doing so, May would ask the children where they would like to move in response, critique their choices and explain Foley’s.
“I love teaching and teaching chess and working with kids and adults,” Foley said.
Each child was paired with a volunteer.
“If I move my piece here, what would you do then?” volunteer Patricia Lopes said to one student she was playing against.
Lopes has been volunteering for this program since last October.
“I get to connect with children and try to understand how I can impact their lives as much as they’ve impacted mine,” Lopes said.
