Please, no more chess!

We all like to wax poetic about the benefits of chess in school. Inevitably, however, there are those individuals for whom it is less than an enriching experience.

I have hated chess since elementary school, when I was in the gifted program and one feature was a weekly chess tournament with a big chart on the wall keeping track of everyone's victories. From first through sixth grade, I never won a chess game, ever. It became a weekly exercise in humiliation or futility or something similarly crappy. I won my first chess game ever in sixth grade, against a third grader. Even that sucked.

A sad story to be sure, though I wouldn't consider it a wholesale indictment of scholastic chess. I'm sure many of us could share similar experiences about scholastic sports.