DRC/Barron Ludlum
Chess becomes teaching tool
10:13 AM CDT on Saturday, August 18, 2007
By Matthew Zabel / Staff Writer
If your children come home from school and announce that they played chess that day, don’t worry. They might have learned something anyway.
It might have been part of that day’s math lesson.
Jerry Nash, the scholastic director of the U.S. Chess Federation, told educators who gathered at Texas Woman’s University on Friday how chess could teach many math skills to young children.
“Will chess solve all the problems? No, but it is a tool that enables teachers to do more efficiently what they are required to do,” Nash told the group. “The math and the critical-thinking skills are inherent in the game.”
Nash said he began to see the benefits of chess when he worked as a college minister in Lake Charles, La.
Students with problems would come talk to him, he said, and they would want him to tell them how to make things better.
The problem, he determined, often centered on the students’ inability to think for themselves and make intelligent decisions.
Here is the full article.
Special thanks to my friend Alexey Root of UTD for bringing this article to my attention.
Very cool article. Nice to see Mrs. Root involving in chess and education.