by Paul Tough
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. 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
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bsp; 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, Wow, I have absolutely no physical contact with human beings anymore. Ultimately, though, I am proud of myself, because I did not say this to my date, despite the fact that I thought about it for a long time. I realized in time that it is not the sort of thing you say on a date.”
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 hu
gs 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.
