The chess problem.

22 January 2002—At one point during the volunteer orientation session at the jail, the sergeant shows a film. It’s a cheesy industrial piece of wannabe cinema verité, kind of like anti-drug films they show in high school. Its message is painfully blunt and thinly veiled: don’t do favors for inmates. It might as well be: don’t feed the animals.

Their logic goes roughly like this: inmates are manipulative, and the smallest favor can lead to disaster. If a volunteer does something innocuous but identifiably contrary to even a little rule at the jail, the inmate can then use that transgression to get the volunteer to cross worse lines. The jail says it has a zero-tolerance policy on favors, but, well, I think there are some blurred lines there.

And yet, what I got in trouble for was chess.

There are a lot of other places I could be a volunteer tutor. There are library programs all over the place. Their hours are easier, their rules are a lot less restrictive, and the library staff don’t look at you like you’re a security threat. I’ll admit it’s gotten somewhat easier over the years, Housing Unit 21 notwithstanding–I’m at Housing Unit 6 now, and after a little trouble at the beginning of my current stint, it’s been more or less smooth.

But T is the kind of learner who makes going to the jail so worthwhile. Our weekly session is one of the most engaging things I do. There are a lot of times I’ve been tired when I’ve gotten there (I go there Tuesday nights from 7:30 until 9 or 9:30) and full of energy when I was done.

T and I have been working together for about four months now. He’s the fifth learner I’ve had, and he probably ranks as the most dedicated of the people I’ve worked with. He stays focused every session, sometimes for over two hours. We’re working on everything: reading, writing, vocabulary, basic skills. He wants to learn everything I bring him, and he’s definitely making progress.

More than a few people have asked me why I want to work with people in jail. There are an estimated 40,000,000 American adults who lack basic literacy skills, but there are only about a million literacy volunteers. Don’t people who need help and aren’t in jail deserve it more than the people I work with?

No. Everyone who wants help and is willing to work hard deserves it. My thoughts run roughly like this: people are in jail for a bunch of different reasons, but many share the unfortunate trait of having never had someone in an educational environment (or maybe anywhere else) who really cared about their success. It is a crime how many people graduate from high school who can’t read or write at even a fifth-grade level.

And not that many people want to volunteer at the jail. The need is huge. My program finally stopped recruiting volunteers, because we just couldn’t retain them. As far as I know, there’s only one other volunteer left. We have a few paid tutors, which is fantastic, but the demand still far outweighs the supply.

Unfortunately, I can only work with one person at a time–it just takes all of my energy. I may need to try working with a small group, but I really like the one-on-one interaction. With adult learners, individualized attention may be even more crucial than it is for children and young adults.

One of the things that is a wonderful opportunity with adult learners is that they almost always have highly developed skills in other areas of their lives. They excel in areas where they don’t need writing skills. They compensate for their difficulties in reading by developing systems that help them do what they need to do.

An effective tutor is someone who can find out what those skills are and try to help the learner adapt those strengths to make reading and writing easier. If done right, both people in the relationship become tutors and learners in different ways.

T asked me a couple of months ago if we could play chess. I’ve played other games with learners, usually word-based games like Scrabble and Boggle, but I hadn’t played chess with anyone. In fact, I hadn’t played chess in several years. (I was pretty devoted to it when I was in the second and third grades, and I did well in school-district championships, but then I got the crap kicked out of me in the fourth grade and I hung it up. Couldn’t take the heat.)

I said yes. I thought it would be a good reward for working so hard, and there’s so little in the way of nice things I can do for my learners without the deputies looking askance. I did think a little about how I could possibly relate chess to what we were working on – possessives, at that point – but I hadn’t developed it very much.

The next week, when I got to the jail, one of the other inmates in T’s pod asked me about the big match. I had no idea how much it meant to T. Apparently he’d been telling everyone that we were going to play. After we worked for nearly two hours, we put away our notepads and books and brought out the chess set.

I won the first game, sort of by accident. I had put him in checkmate without even realizing it myself. He wanted a rematch, so we played again.

Then T came alive. When we’re working together on reading or writing, he’s quiet, deliberate. It’s sometimes hard to hear what he’s saying, because he doesn’t want to be wrong. But as he began his attack, I saw another side of T entirely. His voice took on a playful, taunting quality. “I see you coming,” he said in a put-on Jamaican accent. “Yes, I see. I see. You are trying to come into my house. No, no, we cannot have that. Oh, no, we cannot.” As he took control of the board, he only got more animated. When he set his last trap for me and I walked blindly into it, he could barely contain his glee. I’d never seen him so excited. We agreed to a tie-breaking game the following week.

I had to miss the next Tuesday because of Christmas, but I went on Thursday instead. Again, we worked for almost two hours, and then we broke out the set. We were about five minutes into the game, T’s fake Jamaican accent starting to rev up, when the deputy on duty got my attention. “Can I talk with you over here for a minute?” he asked.

His tone of voice had nothing fun going on in it.

He led me over to an area outside the lunchroom where T and I work, and he began to ask me questions: what exactly is this program I’m part of? what’s my full name? how does chess relate to the program? I don’t think he was asking with an intent to understand. “I called my sergeant,” he sniffed, “and he doesn’t know what chess has to do with teaching reading either.”

I felt more intimidated than I expected to. I explained that we work hard, and this is a reward for that hard work. But I wasn’t being articulate or convincing, and I think my nervousness was showing through in my voice. At least I felt it shaking.

The deputy said he had to help supervise pod time in the housing unit next door, as they needed three deputies to do it. It was a lie; in two and a half years of tutoring, I have never seen more than two deputies on hand for pod time. Never. He lied right to my face, and he knew there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t want to put my program in jeopardy, so I went back to T, told him we had to shut it down, and that was that. I left.

About as soon as I got outside I thought of all the things I could have said to the deputy. I could have explained to him all of chess’s usefulness in teaching critical thinking, prediction, even consequential actions. But really, it was primarily a reward for working hard and doing well, and I was glad to see him so confident about his skills with something that’s not destructive for him.

As I walked through the yard between the housing units and the main building, I heard a barrage of semiautomatic gunfire – nothing unusual, just target practice. I told a different deputy, as we passed through two sets of heavy sliding metal doors, that as much as I’d gotten used to the jail over the years, the gunfire still unnerved me. “Well, remember,” he said – as if he were talking to a curious fifth-grader – “those are the good guys shooting.” I grimaced and moved on.

I was afraid the housing unit deputy would report me to my program, so I called them first to give them the heads-up. I spoke with the program’s assistant director,who seemed to sympathize with me and told me that if I want to do something that might catch the eye of the deputy, I just have to make sure I can relate it directly to the program. He understood the value of chess, but he said it was a little too hard to defend. No harm done, he said, just be careful. Play Scrabble or Boggle, he suggested.

Then I was out of town for a couple of weeks, and when I got back I got a phone call from my the director of my program, who had heard from her assistant director that I was had gotten questioned by the deputy for doing a favor. She wasn’t calling to chew me out, she said, but I couldn’t do favors like that, favors the deputies can use to discredit our program. I gave her my best explanation of what value we could get from playing chess, and she politely but firmly told me it was out of the question. You can write about it if you like, she said.

That turned out to be a very good idea. Perhaps too good.

The following week I was back at the jail. The technician at the housing unit (who has been supportive of me ever since the time I got to the unit and couldn’t get in because it was her dinner break, and I parked my ass on the floor and read for an hour until she came back) apologized and said she now had to make a record of my visits. The same deputy from before was there, and I heard him snidely say inside the control booth, “Oh, the chess guy’s here.”

Authority complexes.

When T came out of his pod I told him everything that had happened. I felt bad that I hadn’t been able to fight better for what I felt was something that would be good for him, and I was starting to fear that I was losing credibility with him. T’s young, but he’s kind of hard – I don’t know a lot of details about his life, but he hasn’t had it easy, especially in the last few years. Not to say that he hasn’t contributed to his situation, but it’s not all his fault, either.

I mentioned the idea of writing about chess to him. I started talking with him about the game: how he plays, what he thinks about when he’s playing, how he knows what his opponent is going to do. He couldn’t really articulate it, and he was dubious about how we could relate it to what we’re doing. We both got homework that week: each of us had to think about ways chess could relate to reading and writing.

Finding a practical (and, as Sarah, who’s in law school, would say, practicable) relationship between chess and reading proved difficult. There are definitely connections: it’s related, for example, to prediction, a component of reading instruction that many educators, including my mom, consider crucial to a learner’s success. Prediction involves not only guessing what may happen later in a story (thereby teaching a student how to form a hypothesis that requires gathering examples for validation) but also using context clues to guess at unfamiliar-looking words in a sentence. Similarly, a chess player has to use prediction to succeed: she has to anticipate what her opponent will do and find a way to use that knowledge to her advantage.

It was fairly apparent that that may be a bit too abstract a connection to make. T could agree conceptually that it’s a good idea but not know how to apply his chess-prediction methods to his reading.

Thanks for coming down to audition, prediction. We’ll call you.

I moved on to finding ways to relate chess pieces and their differing capabilities to different types of words. A pawn is easy: all those little articles and connecting words that sometimes get lost in his writing. But then, what would represent nouns, adjectives, verbs? Too complicated a system, and probably not even that useful. If you have any suggestions, I’m more than happy to hear them.

It was getting a little frustrating.

But then something occurred to me: perhaps chess could relate more directly to writing. All writing is meant to convince, in one way or another: a speech is meant to call the listener to action by persuading that a certain action is needed; a letter is meant to affect relationships between sender and receiver; a love song is meant to convince the listener of the singer’s earnestness. The components of persuasion are arguments of differing levels of strength. For every argument there exists a counterargument (“no there isn’t,” you Monty Python fans are saying right about…now), though perhaps not of the same persuasive force.

Similarly, in chess, the objective is to capture the opponent’s king using pieces of differing strengths. Chess pieces are traditionally assigned certain points based on their relative importance toward winning the game. The standard breakdown is as follows: queen (9 points), rook (5), knight and bishop (both 3), and pawn (1). I liked where this was going, so I decided to bring this to T to see what he thought of it.

The next week at the jail I got in without incident, but a deputy I didn’t recognize was on duty, and he parked himself right near us so he could monitor us more closely. At one point he was standing in front of us, leaning lazily against the food transport carts, and he kept checking his watch even though an accurate clock was right there on the wall.

I asked T to rank the pieces in order of their importance to him, most to least. His list differed slightly from the traditional: queen, knight, rook, bishop, pawn. I asked him if any one of those pieces could win the game by itself. No, he said. What if he had the queen and one of his knights? No sweat, he said. What about a knight and a bishop? No, he said. What about a knight, a bishop, and a couple of pawns? Sure, he could do that. We made a long list of different combinations, basically coming to the conclusion that the queen and a middle-ranking piece could probably do it, three middle-ranking pieces could probably do it, but two middle-ranking pieces probably needed at least a pawn or two to win the game.

I suggested to him that in writing an essay, in which he would have to convince his reader of something, that just one argument probably wasn’t going to cut it. He would have to have at least two really strong arguments, or a few pretty good arguments, or a couple of pretty good arguments and a couple of weaker ones. Next I asked him what he wanted to write about. He had to pick something he wanted to convince me of. This is what he chose:

The jail is using the vending machines and the commissary to extort the inmates.

Um, OK, I said. The deputy continued to hover nearby.

I asked T what his arguments were. The first was that prices in the machines and the commissary were ridiculously high. Instant soup, which he said costs three dollars for a case of 24 at the market, costs a dollar for just one at the jail. Chips and candy were about twice the price of what he was used to at home.

OK, I said, if this argument were a chess piece, what kind of piece would it be? He thought about it for a moment. A knight, he said. Can a knight win the game by itself? No, he said. He would have to come up with an additional argument.

He next argued that the jail doesn’t give the inmates enough food, thereby forcing the inmates to use the machines and the commissary to make up the difference. He gave examples of the types of food they serve and how much they serve of it. It’s mostly starches, frequently leftovers, and not a well-rounded diet. We both paused, sort of stunned at what he had come up with. I asked him what kind of piece this argument represented, and he decided it was a queen. I had to agree. If the two components of extortion are high prices and being forced to pay them by someone with some sort of authority, then he had a pretty good argument. A queen and a knight can win the game.

Then I asked him to think about which pieces his opponent had. We talked about possible counterarguments. He came up with two: one a simple negation, which is that the prices may have to be that high, because that’s what the jail’s supplier charges; the other, a suggestion that the food the jail serves is at least something, whereas some of the people who are in jail for drug use may not have been eating much at all, so what the jail supplies is actually an improvement. He ranked these as a rook and a bishop, respectively.

What he did next was fantastic. I drew out a chessboard and asked him to show where the pieces would go. Each of his pieces was endangered by his opponent’s pieces, and he had to either block them or move out of their way in order to capture his opponent’s king and win the game.

I explained to him that writing works the same way. To be successful, you probably have to anticipate your reader’s questions and counterarguments. By taking them into account, you can frame your argument to disarm the counterarguments before they’re even raised. I left him to write his essay. I don’t know how much the deputy heard of our conversation.

The following week he presented me with his essay. It was amazing: great structure, wonderful use of paragraphs (we’d worked on that some months back), and well-supported arguments. There are things we need to work on in the essay, but overall, I think it’s a very effective piece of writing. It even had a conclusion with a potent suggestion:

If every inmate boycotts the commissary for a week, that might get the jail to reconsider how much it charges.

I’m now actually afraid for my program. The sheriff’s department won one little stupid battle, but as a result it may have opened itself up to a larger threat to its authority. My days there as a tutor may be numbered.

Oh, one last thing: T let me win that first game.