By Anonymous
Filed Sunday, March 26 at 10:50 PM
by Peter Downs
March 20, 2006 -- Richard Pack made a modest proposal to the St. Louis Board of Education on March 14: teach children how to focus by teaching them chess.
Pack said he was a counselor at Scruggs Elementary School when he ran a program to teach students chess. The MAP scores of children who were taught chess went up 30 - 40%, he said. And when the chess program was stopped, the scores of students at the school dropped back down.
Pack asked for a chance to put the program back in a school during the class day, not after school, to see if he can duplicate its accomplishments at Scruggs. "Evaluate it, and if it doesn't work, stop it," he said.
Pack said the point of the program is to teach children how to focus their thoughts. With fast-paced TV shows, music, movies, and video games, "I contend children haven't learned to focus," he said, and low test scores don't reflect an ignorance of the material so much as an inability to stay focused on the test.
The current curriculum, he suggested, fails to teach students how to focus. "How can they be taught to focus when teachers are under pressure to teach the material," he asked?
In concept, Pack's chess teaching program sounds similar to the violin program at Holy Trinity Catholic School, where teaching a difficult instruments teaches children how to concentrate and focus their attention.
Currently, St. Louis Public School teachers are trying to teach the MAP test, "but imagine the outcomes," Pack said, "if we can teach our children to think."
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