Boneheaded!

Metro Birmingham chess school teaches kids to play, and the teacher’s 7-year-old
By Kathy Kemp — The Birmingham News
December 27, 2009, 5:33AM

The children sit on the floor, mildly wiggling, as their teacher starts the class.

“Today’s lesson is getting you to find the pressure point,” David Brooks begins, talking so fast that it sounds like gunfire. “I want you to find the weak spot near the opponent’s king.”

The kids, ages 6 to 12, don’t have time to think about that. Brooks suddenly yells, “Chess octopus!” They jump up and rush to a table in the Cherokee Bend Elementary School library and, in a flashing pinwheel of arms and fingers, they set up a chess board for play.

Brooks’ 7-year-old son, Clay, is in the middle of the bunch, which, in another flash, turns quiet. Brooks instructs Clay and another child to demonstrate some moves.

“The pressure point is becoming obvious to me,” Brooks says. The two boys stare at the board. “Now that’s not the kind of move you want to make,” the teacher says. “What do we call that?” The class of one girl (8-year-old Lauren Snipes) and more than a dozen boys responds in unison:

“Boneheaded!”

You can probably tell this isn’t your typical chess class, which one might assume (accurately enough) would be quiet, sterile and sedentary. The philosophy of Brooks’ 3-year-old Knight School, which holds afternoon chess classes at Birmingham-area schools, is that children learn to play better in an exciting atmosphere with fast, timed games, computer-generated big-screen tests and a reward system that confers Black Belt status on the highest achievers.

Here is the full article.