How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (20 page)

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:
You thought you had a good idea here, but you were wrong.

“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
Knights of the South Bronx,
an inspirational 2005 A&E original movie in which Danson leads a ragtag band of kids from the ghetto to victory over a bunch of stuck-up private-school students, handing out hugs and motivational speeches and life lessons along the way. Spiegel is not like this. She does not hug. She clearly is devoted to her students and cares about them deeply, but when a student gets upset after a loss, Spiegel is rarely the one to go over and offer comfort. John Galvin, the vice principal at IS 318, who often came to tournaments as Spiegel’s co-coach, was better at that sort of thing, she said; he had more “emotional intelligence.”

“I definitely have a warm relationship with a lot of the kids,” Spiegel told me at one tournament. “But I think my job as a teacher is to be more like a mirror, to talk about what they did on the chessboard and help them think about it. It’s a big thing to offer a kid. They put a lot of work into something, and you really look at it with them on a non-condescending level. That’s something that kids don’t often get, and in my experience, they really want it. But it’s not like I love them and mother them. I’m not that kind of person.”

Researchers, including Michael Meaney and Clancy Blair, have demonstrated that for infants to develop qualities like perseverance and focus, they need a high level of warmth and nurturance from their caregivers. What Spiegel’s success suggests, though, is that when children reach early adolescence, what motivates them most effectively isn’t licking and grooming–style care but a very different kind of attention. Perhaps what pushes middle-school students to concentrate and practice as maniacally as Spiegel’s chess players do is the unexpected experience of someone taking them seriously, believing in their abilities, and challenging them to improve themselves.

During the months when I was most actively reporting at IS 318, watching the team prepare for the tournament in Columbus, I was also spending a lot of time at KIPP Infinity, tracking the development of the character report card. And as I shuttled back and forth on the subway between West Harlem and South Williamsburg, I had plenty of time to contemplate the parallels between Spiegel’s methods of training her students in chess and the way that teachers and administrators at KIPP talked to their students about day-to-day emotional crises or behavioral lapses. You may recall that KIPP’s dean, Tom Brunzell, said he considered his approach to be a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy. When his students were flailing, lost in moments of stress and emotional turmoil, he would encourage them to do the kind of big-picture thinking—the metacognition, as many psychologists call it—that takes place in the prefrontal cortex: slowing down, examining their impulses, and considering more productive solutions to their problems than, say, yelling at a teacher or shoving another kid on the playground. In her postgame chess analyses, Spiegel had simply developed a more formalized way to do this. Like students at KIPP, IS 318 students were being challenged to look deeply at their own mistakes, examine why they had made them, and think hard about what they might have done differently. And whether you call that approach cognitive therapy or just plain good teaching, it seemed remarkably effective in producing change in middle-school students.

This technique, though, is actually quite rare in contemporary American schools. If you believe that your school’s mission or your job as a teacher is simply to convey information, then it probably doesn’t seem necessary to subject your students to that kind of rigorous self-analysis. But if you’re trying to help them change their character, then conveying information isn’t enough. And while Spiegel didn’t use the word
character
to describe what she was teaching, there was a remarkable amount of overlap between the strengths David Levin and Dominic Randolph emphasized and the skills that Spiegel tried to inculcate in her students. Every day, in the classroom and at tournaments, I saw Spiegel trying to teach her students grit, curiosity, self-control, and optimism.

On a couple of occasions, I even saw her use her analytical techniques to teach social intelligence. One day in September, I went with Spiegel and the IS 318 team to a big outdoor chess tournament in Central Park run by Chess-in-the-Schools. It was a hot day, and while I was sitting with Spiegel on the stone steps that led down to Bethesda Fountain, a student came up to us, looking upset, wanting to talk to Spiegel. It was A.J., a student in the seventh grade who had dark skin, short hair, and big, thick Elvis Costello glasses. A.J., I knew, had difficulty in social situations, often losing his way amid the middle-school joking and jockeying, frequently misinterpreting what was going on around him. His story that day came out in a jumble: another IS 318 kid, a recent graduate named Rawn, was threatening to slap A.J., and A.J. wanted Spiegel to do something about it.

“Why does he want to slap you?” Spiegel asked.

A.J. haltingly explained that he had brought his football to the park, and between matches, he and a few of the other boys were tossing it around. A.J. felt hot, and when he went to get a drink, he decided he needed to take his football with him. When he grabbed it and headed off to the drinking fountain, he thought he heard one of the boys call him a bitch. He accused Rawn. Rawn denied it.

“He said, ‘Don’t you talk to me like that,’” A.J. told Spiegel, sounding aggrieved. “He tells me, ‘I will slap you in the mouth.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you try it?’ And then he tried to come over to me and slap my face, but everybody backed him off.” It was, in other words, a classic quarrel between boys on the cusp of adolescence: impulsive, awash in hormones, intensely moralistic, somewhat nonsensical.

But rather than take sides or offer some vague bromides about getting along, Spiegel started to break it down like a chess game.

“So, let me see if I understand,” Spiegel said, shielding her eyes from the sun and looking up at A.J. “He tried to hit you after you told him to try to hit you?”

“Yeah,” A.J. said, a little uncertainly.

“Well, you know, if Rawn didn’t say anything to you, and then you were saying stuff back to him? Then he’s going to be upset. Does that make sense?”

A.J. stared at her, silent, looking a little like Sebastian Garcia being chastised for losing his bishop.

“My other question would be about the football,” Spiegel went on. “You have to understand that people aren’t going to like that you’re taking your football when they’re playing with it. Do you think it would be okay if they used it when you weren’t there?”

“No.”

“Well, you have to understand, though, that if you’re not going to trust them, they’re probably not going to be your friends.”

A.J. looked frustrated. “Forget it,” he said and walked away.

I had actually observed a similar conversation a few months earlier between A.J. and Spiegel. I was sitting in Spiegel’s classroom with her, talking chess, and A.J. had come in with a complaint: he’d said something about another kid’s mother, and the other kid had called him a name.

At first, I assumed that A.J. was coming to Spiegel for recourse or revenge, so that she would discipline the other student. But after observing the Central Park conversation, it struck me that he was really coming to her for the same reason he came to her for help after a game when he had squandered a lead or hung a queen. He wanted to know how to quit making boneheaded mistakes. He wanted advice on how to get better at what was, to A.J., another incredibly complex game with way too many moving pieces: surviving middle school and getting other kids to like you.

5. Justus and James

When I first saw Spiegel in Columbus, the afternoon before the opening day of the tournament, she looked happy and well rested; she was wearing a crisp white dress shirt and pinstriped tailored pants, eating tangerines and sipping chai tea and going over last-minute chess worksheets with a couple dozen students crammed into her hotel room high above the convention center. Once the competition began, though, her crispness began to fray, and each day her hair grew a little wilder, her eyes a little more glazed. For her, the junior high tournament was the most important competition of the year. “I feel like it’s a judgment on my work,” she told me that first afternoon. “Everything I do all year comes down to how well we do here.” And so she sat in Union B all day, drinking coffee and eating takeout from the food court and worrying.

IS 318 had teams competing in five divisions, and the two that Spiegel took most seriously were K−8 Open and K−9 Open. (
Open
means that there is no upper limit on the ratings of players.) K−9 Open included students up to ninth grade, but it was considered by many coaches to be a less competitive section than K−8 Open (which allowed students only up to eighth grade), since fewer junior high teams competed in K−9. Spiegel thought her team had at least a decent shot at winning both sections, even though no school had ever won K−8 and K−9 in the same year—and even though IS 318 didn’t have a ninth grade.

One of the reasons that Spiegel’s teams had always done so well in tournaments was that she had what basketball coaches call a deep bench. At most private schools and selective exam schools, you could find a small handful of very good chess players, prodigies from well-off families who had been getting individual coaching since they were quite young. IS 318 didn’t attract those privileged kids, but because chess was such an integral part of the school day and the school’s culture, Spiegel was instead able to draw dozens of new students each year to chess club, kids who had little or no chess knowledge but who were eager to learn more. She had designed her program to capitalize on that, and after almost a decade at the school, she had built a teaching system that could reliably turn the two dozen or so novices who showed up for chess club in their first week of sixth grade into a collection of 1500s and 1600s, with a few 1800s and 1900s, by the time they finished eighth grade.

Only rarely had an IS 318 student topped 2000, which meant that the school didn’t win many individual championships. But Spiegel’s approach was the perfect strategy for
team
championships, which were won in each tournament by the school whose top four players together had the most wins. In a team competition, Spiegel knew, it was not the ability of your best player that made the real difference; it was the ability of your fourth-best player. And at IS 318, on any given day, there were ten or more students who could each be the team’s fourth-best player.