Value and develop all the varied pieces of a challenging and diverse childhood - Post #4 of 21
So now that we have identified the Superpowers that chess helped develop, it’s time to look at the people in your life or your school who have their own superhero ability to help in this mission to get into elite schools. One of the secrets in life is studying what others do well and learning from them – adding their superpower to your own arsenal. As a simple operator of an after-school chess program and a career educator, I definitely started learning about the college admission process with a limited field of vision. But boy, did I had help along the way! I have spent a unique teaching career among a talented team of people whose secrets I have carefully, systematically studied, culled, and gleaned for twenty years. Meet the advisory team I have listened to over my career--a fantastic, diverse group of people who together helped my kids get offers from Berkeley, NYU, and Georgetown. My third child is now in eighth grade, and in these weeks of January we silently await to distribution of her freshman schedule course selection card. The exact courses she will choose have been established for ten years now, and with big bro and big sis already a Georgetown Hoya, the unison among the five of us in the family regarding course selection is abject. Here is my team who helped us crack the code:
1. My Varsity Advanced Chess Students.
I am the founder, owner, operator, and CEO of the largest kids’ chess academy in the USA: The Knight School. We coach over 3500 kids each week, and that number is consistently growing. The kids I coach in my advanced chess classes are not average: many of them are the sharpest kids in each school in their city. Playing with students like these in fun chess tournaments year after year has been instructional. I have had a unique opportunity to observe patterns and impulses on a daily basis that populate my knowledge of how academics, education, attitude, drive, and college admission actually work. Basically, I get to know the top high school students in every high school a decade before they graduate.
2. My Preschool Chess Students.
Believe it or not, we teach chess to preschoolers! And they love it. My psychology and education backgrounds imprinted on me the tremendous value of creating a wildly enriched environment for my own then-toddlers and now for all toddlers of like-minded parents. These experiences reinforced my certainty that the highest levels of intelligence begin in the cradle with the reading of one book to a very little person and, in this way, the path to an elite college begins early. If you’ve stumbled on this page but are thinking it’s too soon to be thinking about these things – keep reading. This process starts yesterday.
3. My Buddies in Guidance.
Often there are two official positions within a high school’s Guidance Department. One type of guidance counselor helps you through troubled times. These counselors are very important. Equally important is the other type of high school counselor, the designated “college counselor.” This person is a specialist whose sole job is to help all students in their high school get admitted into college or a trade program. I ate lunch and attended faculty parties with both types for twenty years. When the college counselor came to speak to my English classes, I listened. When the kids asked them college-admissions questions after their presentations, I listened. When my parents asked me college-admissions questions, I researched. Believe me, my kids’ success at college admission relies heavily on the insights of my guidance buddies.
4. My Fellow Faculty.
I have had the perhaps rare privilege of teaching both Honors and AP classes in two completely distinct high school academic departments: History and English. For two decades, I split time at the paperwork-mill, weekly, Monday-afternoon high school departmental teacher meetings of these two very different disciplines. I taught AP European and AP World and AP American History for twenty years, and I also taught Honors English for these same twenty years. My friends on the faculty and I wrote hundreds of college letters of recommendation for the valedictorian set for twenty years, and I was able to glean from my colleagues (especially early in my career when I had little experience) which sorts of students were likely to go to elite colleges. I started seeing the patterns of why, when I was actually surrounded by amazing kids in every direction, some students found the path to the elite.
5. My College Professors.
I have earned five college degrees: a B.A. double major in Philosophy and Psychology from Alabama in 1981, a B.A. in English from Auburn in 1983, an M.A. in French Early Modern History from Auburn in 1985, an M.Ed. in Secondary Education from Montevallo in 1987, and a Ph.D. in Latin American History from Auburn in 2001. In doing this, of course, I studied under professors from all sorts of academic backgrounds. I learned how colleges work.
6. My Professional College Consultant.
Yep, these experts exist in every city, and I paid one to advise me. These experts (often former college counselors) were a treasure trove of clever ideas and deep understanding of yield-protect, legacy, course selection, and all the other hidden truths about the college admission process.
7. My Title 1 Students.
One amazing population I spend a ton of time with are my 60-student classes of underserved students to whom I bring chess pro bono each year. I understand affluent students who are saturated with privilege, and conversely, I also understand the ocean of kids for whom admission to an elite university is virtually unreachable – but I also know how much colleges hunger for the diversity that bright Title 1 students can give: The bottom line is that I want my own kids to attend schools that value the nine superpowers that chess imparted to my kids, presented and expounded upon in Blog Post #1.
8. My Day School Students.
I currently teach and am the headmaster of The Day School, a global online ZOOM course that tackles Geography, History, Chess, Shakespeare, and Composition. That daily 4:30—5:30 course is a thrill, and one of our major topics is how to get into an elite college. In other words, I teach the topic of elite college admission as a profession, and we discuss this regularly in class and flesh out the nuances.
9. My Non-honors High School Students.
It was interesting to analyze and contrast and compare the trajectory of my wonderful college-prep students with my wonderful honors students. 80% of the history students I taught were in “regular” history, and 20% in Honors or AP history. The two experiences were starkly different. I have written two novels—The Well Kept Secret and The Better Kept Secret—that serve as both young adult novels and also history textbooks. Both novels bridge the disciplines of English and History, and both were written with the benefit of the input of my students, honors and non-honors alike, sitting on the floor, listening to me read, helping me edit, year after year after year. The remarks of the two groups were always telling, as I noticed that non-honors kids often had fun, far-fetched ideas that the honors kids would never have pitched. The honors crowd would speak much more, and gave more disciplined ideas that I often actually implemented in the novels. As a result of these types of experiences, I observed all the different types of students, not just honors kids.
10. My Honors Students.
Not only have I taught honors students/valedictorians in two disciplines for 20 years, I have actually conducted a systematic survey/poll/study of what these students of mine were thinking all along. If my team of superheroes has a Captain America, this is it. I did this systematic study and interview process in order to gain insight so my own kids would one day be competitive, if they wanted to be, and interviewing valedictorians about their course selection over the years became a fun hobby of mine. When my own eighth-grade kids handed me a high school course selection sheet for their freshman courses, we discussed how to move forward with that anecdotal study and its results greatly informing our plan. Achieving an exceptional GPA and displaying rigor of course selection isn’t simply about taking the courses a school offers in a traditional order. We learned to shake things up a bit.
11. My Own Children.
My main qualification, however, is that both my kids concluded their respective senior-year college application gauntlets with the same look on their face: they were both thrilled to announce to their friends and teachers that they would be Georgetown Hoyas. And let me tell you, they have thrived on that Hilltop, socially and academically. They are happy and secure, and that is the point. That is the only point.
I am deeply grateful to these teams of insightful people, and they all have my profound respect. Cumulatively, they gave me the insights to partner with my kids in a way that allowed my children to work hard and succeed.