How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

by Paul Tough

  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.

  But in the fall of 2009, Justus Williams arrived at IS 318, and the composition of the team began to change. Justus, who lived in the Bronx, was a cool kid, pensive and rugged, tall and dark-skinned and solidly built. He spoke quietly, and he could be shy around strangers, but he moved with a smooth confidence through the halls of IS 318, one of the few middle schools in the country where being a chess champion earned you respect rather than wedgies. Justus had started playing chess in third grade at PS 70 in the South Bronx, through Chess-in-the-Schools, and his teachers had recognized early on that he was a player of great promise, eager to learn and unusually able to focus and concentrate. Chess-in-the-Schools paid for chess tutors to work with him privately, and his mother, who believed that Justus was destined for greatness, did everything she could to help him improve. By the time Justus started sixth grade at IS 318, his rating was above 2000, hundreds of points higher than any previous incoming student Spiegel had taught and quite close, in fact, to Spiegel’s own rating. And while Justus was clearly the best player in sixth grade, there were two other students who arrived with him at IS 318 who also had substantial chess experience: Isaac Barayev, a son of Russian immigrants from Queens who entered sixth grade with a rating of 1500, and James Black Jr., an African American boy from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant who had graduated from his local public school with a rating of 1700.

  Spiegel had an especially warm relationship with James Black. She had met him when he was still in elementary school, and although his chess ability now rivaled hers, he recognized that she had helped him improve his rating during his time at the school from 1700 to over 2100, a significant leap. James was slight and handsome, with close-shorn hair, a chipped front tooth, and wide, expressive eyes. He was intensely social and loved joking with his classmates. When I visited Spiegel’s class, I often found James at the back of the room playing one game and loudly kibitzing the game next to him, telling the other players what moves they should make and occasionally reaching over and making them himself.

  Like Justus, James learned how to play chess in third grade when a Chess-in-the-Schools tutor visited his school. At home, he would practice with his father, who had bought James a chess set from Kmart at the first sign of James’s interest in the game. James Black Sr. was intensely devoted to his son. He once told me that he had made up his mind, even before James was conceived, that his first child, whether a boy or a girl, would be named James Black Jr.

  James Sr. grew up in the Bronx and did well in high school, but he dropped out of college after two years. His dream had always been to join the Marines, but when he left school, he landed a well-paying job behind the deli counter at D’Agostino, the New York City supermarket chain, and he never enlisted. Almost twenty-five years later, Black was still at D’Agostino, still a deli clerk. In his mid-thirties, he’d fallen in love with Tonya Coles, a woman with three children, and together with their baby, James, they formed a blended family. James Sr. told me that he had hoped that his stepchildren would provide good examples for James Jr., but it hadn’t worked out that way. One of James’s half brothers was convicted of selling drugs when James was a boy and spent almost three years in prison; the other is still in prison for murder, serving twenty years to life. Their problems only increased James Sr.’s focus on his son and his determination that he would succeed. “I tell James, ‘I can only say so much to them,’” he told me early in the school year. “‘But I can say a lot to you. My job is to guide you to the future.’”

  James was an inconsistent student at IS 318. His grades were mostly good, but on the statewide achievement tests in sixth grade, he scored a 2, on a scale of 1 to 4, in both math and reading, which meant he was below grade level and in the lowest third of students in the city as a whole. At school, he had a reputation as a troublemaker, and in sixth grade he was often sent to the principal’s office for goofing around in class or saying inappropriate things to his female classmates. Despite his occasional problems in school, though, he was an exceptional student of chess, studying as much as six hours a day, one whole wall of his bedroom filled with thick books of strategy.

  6. The Marshall

  Six months before the Columbus tournament, I spent a day with James, Spiegel, and half a dozen other IS 318 students at the Marshall Chess Club, which occupies two floors of a beautiful old town house on a tree-lined street in Greenwich Village. The club, considered by many chess players to be the most prestigious in the United States, was founded in 1915 by Frank Marshall, a chess champion of the day, and it has counted some of the best American players among its members. It is an imposing place, especially to young chess aspirants: the ceilings are high, the fireplaces grand, the wood tables polished to a lustrous shine, the walls lined with framed black-and-white photos of legendary players bent over chessboards and sepia-toned group shots of black-tie club dinners from the 1930s.

  When Spiegel arrived in New York in her late teens, after transferring from Duke to Columbia, the Marshall was where she hung out, playing in weekend tournaments and soaking up the atmosphere. Now the Marshall offers a few free memberships each year to IS 318, and once a month or so, Spiegel brings a small group of students to play. It is a very different kind of chess experience than what they are used to. Regular scholastic weekend tournaments in New York City are pretty chaotic, hundreds of players and parents stuffed into a public school, moms serving up baked ziti for lunch. Games last only an hour, and IS 318 players usually win or at least do quite well. When students go to the Marshall, though, they generally play in games that last four hours against opponents whose ratings vastly exceeds theirs. It is an intimidating situation for the students, but Spiegel reminds them that the best way to improve your chess is to play against the best, even if they take you apart.

  On the fall day I watched James play at the Marshall, he was paired with Yuri Lapshun, a Ukrainian-born international master who was (and is) one of the thirty or forty best players in the United States. In 2000 and 2001, Lapshun was the Marshall club champion, and on the grand wooden plaque on the wall that lists every club champion since 1917, his name is embossed on two consecutive brass plates. Chess games, especially at the Marshall, often offer odd-looking pairings—the moody Goth teenage girl against the bearded and bespectacled math nerd; the aging tweed-clad Village lunatic against the diminutive young Chinese boy—but Black versus Lapshun was one of the odder ones. Lapshun, in his late thirties, was not only three times James’s age but also at least a hundred pounds heavier than him. For most of the four-hour game, Lapshun sat scowling at the board, leaning back in his chair and stroking his thick, retro-Soviet mustache, his big, meaty arms folded over his sizable belly. James sat forward, his chin propped in his hands, threatening to disappear inside his big gray hoodie and oversize jeans, occasionally looking around the room and then back at the board, blinking his long, dark eyelashes. James has a hard time sitting still, and during games he frequently gets up and walks around, checking out other boards, much to the consternation of his teachers and coaches. At one point during his match with Lapshun, James wandered all the way up to the second floor, where Spiegel and I were talking. She yelled at him to get back down to the tournament room and told him that if he didn’t stay in his seat for the rest of the game, she’d call his father.

  Lapshun was rated 2546 that day, and James was rated 2068. James was, in every way, outmatched—except, somehow, on the board. As early as the sixth move, James surprised Lapshun with some savvy tactics, and by move thirty, it was clear to the
various experts and masters observing the game that James was in a dominant position. He had established a suffocating line of defense across the middle of the board, cutting off one move after another for Lapshun, trapping him in an uncomfortable stasis where almost any move he made would lose him a piece or a positional advantage. On the fifty-ninth move, Lapshun resigned.

  Afterward, on the upper floor, James went over his game with Spiegel, and Lapshun was gracious enough to analyze the game with them, occasionally adding some dark, fatalistic observations that were made somehow darker by his heavy Eastern-bloc accent: “Eet ees hopeless,” he would say, indicating the board. And then, a few moves later, with a mournful shake of his head, “Here I am feenished.” James demonstrated, move by move, how he had blocked off every chance Lapshun had to escape the paralyzing traps he had set for him, and Spiegel was impressed. He had done more than beat an international master; he had outplayed him from start to finish. It was, she told him, “exceptionally deep chess.”

  With the victory over Lapshun and some other strong games that fall, James’s rating soared past 2150. His short-term goal was to reach 2200, which is a crucial marker for chess players. When you hit 2200, you are certified by the U.S. Chess Federation as a national master. Justus had become a national master in September, a month before James beat Lapshun. In fact, Justus was the youngest African American ever to make master. It looked for a while as though James, who was five months younger than Justus, would beat Justus’s youngest-black-master record with ease. But then James’s rating seemed to hit a plateau; it actually slipped down to almost 2100 in January, and then it bounced around for a couple of months in the low 2100s. By the time he got on the bus for the trip to the Columbus tournament in April, James had lost his shot at Justus’s record, and his rating was stalled at 2156.