Chess Cultivates Young Minds in St. Louis Schools

Alex Vergilesov moved a bishop to the center of an empty chessboard then took a moment to think. Vergilesov, who works with the Chess Club of St. Louis, then placed six opposing pawns on random squares, which revealed a clear path of diagonal destruction for his centered piece before he took a step back for a second look.

“You have to move the bishop around the board and take a pawn with every move,” he said as he turned toward his young audience with a quick glance at the clock. “And we’re going to sit and think about the answer, for 15 seconds—in silence.”

After about three seconds, the first hands shot into the air. Four more arms quickly followed.

After two more ticks of the clock, one first-grader could no longer bear the quiet. “I know! I know! I know!” was repeated over and over until it morphed into an anxious whine sort of like a farm animal.

Vergilesov would only glance at the clock.

The six-year-old mind is young for a game as deep as chess, and maybe half of the dozen-or-so wiggling arms, if called upon, will quickly find the correct series of moves. And though this is clear with every puzzle, Vergilesov continues to create them, cycling through each of the major pieces to swallow up a new line of sacrificial pawns. And with each example, he makes sure to stop the class in order to give them time to think.

“Chess teaches a child that you can think about something before you answer,” Vergilesov said about his basic, learn-to-play sessions that reach nearly 60 different classrooms around St. Louis County, where he says the game's greatest lesson is how it instills "forward thinking."

"Instead of reading a question and picking an answer that you think of first, you think for a little bit and consider your options—and your answer might be different than your intuition," Vergilesov said. "Chess can teach a kid to sit on his hands for 15 seconds and think about the question.”

The effects from those moments of pause haven’t just been realized by Vergilesov. Through the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis, his in-school program seeks to help prove that chess can positively affect the academic performance of its students—and it reflects a growing nationwide trend to confirm the same theory.

The Scholastic Center is partnered with America’s Foundation for Chess (AF4C), which drives the First Move program into the nation's schools. The supplemental curriculum uses chess as a learning tool in the classroom to support academic, social and emotional goals for its students—not necessarily learning tactics or opening principles of chess, but instead using the game to teach life applications, such as respecting rules and "how to lose."

The program is designed specifically for second-and third-grade classrooms, and will reach nearly 50,000 children across 27 states this year.

Vergilesov and his after-school offerings are direct witness to the natural growth effect of teaching the game at an early age. Since 2009, the Scholastic program has nearly tripled its numbers, now encompassing nearly 1,000 kids in 80 classrooms around St. Louis’ public, charter, private and magnet schools, archdiocese and community centers.

“There has been really good feedback, especially as it rolls from spring semester to fall semester,” he said. “We had been working with a lot of elementary schools in the spring, and I’ve noticed a pattern of a lot of middle schools calling and saying ‘hey, these fifth graders came into our schools talking about chess, and now we want it in our school.’ I think that’s a sign that (the program) is doing a good job.”