Received 12 registration forms from the hearing students so far who will play at the School tournament on the 11th. Since there is no rating system here and pairings need to be as equal as can be, I asked a question about the names of pieces to get a rudimentary idea… ten got it right with one of those having crossed out a selection.

Looks like we’ll have more hearing students than deaf students playing, but in the RPI, you just never know what will be in your box of chocolates (apologies to Forrest Gump).

Last Wednesday, I worked with the Deaf students on scorekeeping and gave them some homework. Yesterday, we went over one of the papers (a 15 move partial game). I had a coterie of students sitting around the board watching and learning. After all this time, looks like I’ve hit on a method that works far better than a classroom-type setting for these students. It fits my style of mentoring and discipling a lot better, but have been reluctant to do it, since using it with the hearing has resulted previously with most not focusing and wandering off. The Deaf students actually clustered around – girls included (which is always fantastic to see, especially here).

I have an interesting aside here… on Wednesday, when reviewing how to keep score and notate moves, one of the students was having difficulty. He’s 21 (yes, in elementary school, not uncommon here… last year had a 29 year old) and still learning his ABC’s… he’s a very competitive and smart young man and I was greatly encouraged to see him stick with it to get the letters and to understand the process of scoring. But I’d never considered that learning Chess and Chess scoring was a way for learners to get their ABC’s… another benefit of Chess, eh? (smile) Praise God!

I’ll be travelling this weekend, but hopefully will be able to run a full mock tournament including the actual names of players on Tuesday to get truly familiar with SwissSys. The big concern is the Saturday 14th Tournament… mixed signals on whether the Deaf students from the highschool will show, but they have the applications nonetheless.