Viswanathan K's Thoughts

“Chess has problems at the grandmaster level...They're not getting a great game”, wrote Christian Donlan . Amen to that: Anand and his challenger, Magnus Carlsen drew their first game in just 16 moves. It gets worse: games between the top 20 end in draws 60% of the time. And Donlan adds that “games often end in resignation when an actual victory starts to loom on the distant horizon.” That often means that the average player (or fan) often has no clue why one guy won (since he can’t see that far ahead)! Then there’s all that memorization (of openings, of end games and everything in between). All that memorization is sort of against the spirit of the game, says Zachary Burns, “We want it to be a game of creativity and positional play.” Many have tried to change the rules of the game in the past for these exact reasons, including Bobby Fischer with his Chess960 variant. More recently, David Sirlin tried to make things interesting via his variant, Chess 2. So what are his c...

Most kids complain about how boring and/or meaningless most of the stuff they are taught at school is. There are the usual and well known reasons: teachers who barely know the subject, another set that doesn’t really care about the subject or the students, text books that are totally useless etc etc. Things don’t improve when you go to college either: apart from the above reasons, many lecturers/professors teaching professional courses resent the fact that their students will start with higher salaries than they make after years of experience. Is there any hope of improving things at either end then? Or is the only way (at least theoretically) to increase teacher salaries? Even if that were possible (which it isn’t anyway, because parents will be up in arms if school fees are raised), I realized that kids would still feel school is boring and/or useless when I read these lines by Roger Schank:  “I was a pretty good teacher if I do, say so myself (and many of my students say exac...