Class at play: A schoolteacher\u27s narrative of chess, curriculum, and social mobility

This study is an autobiographical investigation of my construction as a public school chess teacher from a blue-collar background. Exploring chess as both a form of cultural capital and a metaphor for social life (and especially the work of teaching), I trace my personal history from first learning the game to my present and intended future uses of it in classroom settings as part of the official curriculum. In the course of that exploration I also develop a narrative understanding of the working class circumstances into which I was born and the conflicted intellectual identity I forged through an upward class mobility that led me to become the first member of my immediate family to graduate from college. I further narrate my evolving understanding of chess as a possible school subject by reflecting on its status during my childhood schooldays and my working day as full-time chess teacher in a public school setting. In the course of writing this study I have found that I am most at home—and am rewarded with the greatest sense of purpose—within the tensions and struggles of practical school life (why I feel like an amphibian too long out of water in more purely academic settings) and that I am a much more thoughtful teacher when I am actively writing about my work. It takes me a step beyond the old teacher/academic paradigm I used to think I had to straddle (straddling is a recurring theme I this work). This study finds me recognizing a personal and professional need to work within that tension and dialogue in both directions when possible—reclaiming the role of teacher as intellectual within the academic game and remaining closely tied to working class learning communities