Author: Mark Chih/Xiyan Ziran
It has been three years since the last time I talked about education in the “Dateline” column. Last year (2023), my child’s school officially resumed normal classes after the COVID-19 epidemic. Although we have experienced the epidemic in the past three years, there have been no special changes in the children’s lives. They are still in the same school system and are happy children with no homework or exams every day. During this period, we began to let him try more diversified extracurricular activities, and we also learned more about his interests and expertise from these activities. From basketball and swimming to piano and drumming, he was not excluded; among them, the activities that he felt obviously different in enthusiasm were chess.
From the time the child was in kindergarten, we noticed that he particularly liked playing board games, and we also observed that he quickly understood the rules and logic of the game. However, it was completely unexpected that he would fall in love with chess. After he learned the rules of chess at the summer camp in the second grade of elementary school, he fell in love with chess crazily. I also started learning from scratch with him. I was forced to play chess with him every day. As a result, I lost to him after one and a half months. Can’t see the back of his car. I began to think that the child might have some talent, so I began to study the Japanese chess culture.
Three major learning lessons that chess brings to children
Among Japan’s chess sports, the largest number of participants is “Shogi” (about 4.6 million), followed by Go (about 1.3 million), and checkers only have about 20,000 participants. It is also in the middle and lower levels in the world’s national chess rankings. . Although the overall social atmosphere is not universal, the advantage is that the competition is not fierce, allowing children to have a lot of space to explore on their own. The child has participated in two national age-specific competitions in Japan (under 12 years old is divided into U12, U10 and U8) and won second place. However, after participating in some East Asian competitions last year, it can be seen that the chess ability gap with children of the same age in other countries is (To put it simply, he was beaten until he fell down); also from these experiences, I saw several learnings of children.
1. Facing failure:Chess is a game with simple rules but extremely complex strategies. Even a world champion can hardly play a perfect game. Therefore, when children start playing chess, they will face their own constant mistakes and failures, and how to play chess. Grow from the experience of failure. A resilient player must have a certain persistence in winning or losing, but even if he encounters a failure, he can calm down immediately and prepare for the next game; or he can stay calm when the outcome is not decided and reverse the situation at the back end.
2. Time management:Online chess has become popular in recent years. It is easy to find opponents on the Internet to practice games. There have also been many changes in the competition system. For example, a player only has 45 minutes, 15 minutes or 5 minutes to play, so it is no longer the same game as before. Chess must be played for two to three hours. Under different time limits, there will be different strategies for playing chess. For example, instead of playing chess carefully step by step, you can also force the opponent to run out of time and win.
3. Be responsible for your own learning:When learning chess, there are usually a lot of stagnant periods of learning. Usually the performance or points in the game do not improve, which will also affect the children’s motivation to learn. If they don’t love playing chess in their hearts, it will be difficult for them to be attracted by external incentives and continue to practice, so their parents can’t get too involved, not to mention that we are no longer as good as them in terms of understanding. In addition, parents cannot directly report any situation that occurs during the game, such as discovering a foul committed by an opponent. The players themselves need to communicate with the arbitrator. This is also a kind of learning.
As a parent, how do I view my child’s chess learning journey?
Many parents encourage or even force their children to learn talents from an early age in order to develop their brain potential and hope that it will help their children’s academic performance. However, my wife and I feel that it is too early to consider academic studies now. The main reason for exposing children to extracurricular activities is to hope that children can discover their strengths and weaknesses through various attempts, make choices, and at the same time build the ability to adjust themselves.
Children who have studied in the Montessori education system for 9 years are very accustomed to independent learning based on their interests. Learning chess is exactly the child’s interest, and we are optimistic about its success. On the other hand, because there are currently no exams in school and the concept of “peer competition” has never been emphasized, playing chess can be said to provide children with many alternative learning options that are not available in school life, such as competing with strangers within established rules. .
At first, the child is not very concerned about winning or losing the game, but is very interested in the challenge of the game itself. The advantage is that he can have a more stable performance in the game, and after losing, he can quickly adjust his emotions to prepare for the next game. Contest. But relatively speaking, he is not that focused in a single game and has less patience to calm down and analyze the situation carefully. Since I can’t make any substantial suggestions about the game, all I can do is try to provide him with opportunities to play, and then let him learn how to improve himself through coaches or computer tools.
Gradually, the child’s desire to win began to be stimulated, and he also practiced fighting against different opponents. I hope that my children can compete with their peers by playing chess. I don’t want them to develop a competitive spirit (the fact is that if they are too obsessed with winning and fail to objectively evaluate the chess situation, they will lose), but I know that children will encounter many different situations in the future. Types of people and groups, chess competitions are also divided into individual or group competitions, so you can comprehensively learn how to deal with all kinds of people.
Looking at it more broadly, I think the current shortcoming of traditional education is the lack of “failure education”, which can be learned in competitive activities such as chess.Traditional school education focuses on final results and tends to avoid risks rather than facing failure. Therefore, there are fewer opportunities to learn from mistakes or deal with frustrations.
The world will change faster and faster in the future. If you only think about avoiding risks without being mentally prepared to face failure, the path you can take may become narrower and narrower. As we age, the cost of learning from failure becomes higher. Therefore, if parents can create an environment where children can learn from failure from an early age, it should be able to prepare children for the future.
※This article is authorized to be published by the Dateline website. The original title is “My “Failure Education”: 3 Life Lessons I Learned from Playing Chess with My Children in Japan》, reproduction without consent is prohibited
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About the Author:
Mark Chih was born in Taiwan, raised in Canada, and now lives in Japan. His current job is technical strategy cooperation, and he has some exposure to the Japanese mobile wallet market. After work, I run Worklife in Japan with a group of friends to assist Japan’s international business exchanges. The rest of the time, I explore the meaning of education through my son’s eyes.
2024-03-27 06:00:40
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