JustOneThing - A Disagreement Over Who Will Win ... Teacher vs Students!

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hirohurl1.6 K2 years agoPeakD2 min read

It was the last day of term at one of my college gigs and the four first year students (2 Japanese, 1 Filipina, 1 Vietnamese) in my TOEIC class had all worked diligently, achieved 100% attendance, and finished the course with one class to spare...

So we all agreed to have a chess party on the last day to celebrate their success!

Homework: Study Chess!

None of the students had played chess before, so "homework" for the week was to learn how to play chess. I gave them some online resources and left them to it.

I expected the 90 minutes of class time to divide into three parts, with the first 10-20 minutes spent on going over the basics. Next we would play a "simul" in which I would play against all four students on four boards at the same time, which I thought would finish within 30 minutes. Lastly, as I thought, the students would play a series of student-versus-student games to find a student champion who would receive a prize!

In the last section, the students would play using chess clocks, with 5 minutes each on the clocks and no increments. (Usually, in that scenario, the winner is the student who realizes that fast play is the key, and wins because her opponents all lose on time.)

It took me longer than I expected...

In the end, it took me longer than I expected to defeat all four students. It turned out that the young lady in the blue dress had put in quite a bit of preparation and proved harder to beat than I had expected!

So what was the disagreement?

Simply this: When I said that nobody would beat me, the Filipina student immediately disagreed and asserted that she would win!

The Vietnamese student had already joked that she was a profeshional player. Yeah, right! There we have another disagreement!

At the beginning of the class, when I was talking about what we were doing, I made a short video where you can hear the "disagreement" about who will win: