The Pawn Stars

I sincerely apologise to my regular readers(if any) for the delay in posting a report on the latest happenings in my chess class. This post comes at the end of two lessons, both of which were devoted to teaching the Max Lange Attack. 

Since the beginning of my lectures, I have tried to tell my pupils to develop their pieces first, next focus on getting their king to safety and then start an attack. With the same etho in mind, I began the first of the two lectures mentioned in this post.

Lesson 1:

I met the kids after a break of some weeks due to exams. Now that all of us were free, we dived in headfirst. However, a slight hiccough delayed my plans for this lesson. The kids had apparently forgotten most of the stuff I had taught them before the exams (http://www.chess.com/blog/aayush1998/pawndering-openings). In essence, we were back to square one in terms of the opening I had thought of teaching them. Without any other option, I started anew. Nevertheless, I brought in a slight change in my teaching pattern by asking them to come up with ideas after each of the standard opening moves and after discussing each of the ideas in class, telling them which one we could follow in the Max Lange Attack. This way, I supposed, they would understand the intricacies of the openings better than me just going about telling them moves and the corresponding ideas. What I liked about this approach was that they grasped the opening better and in the process also touched upon some of the other opening such as the Petroff, Philidor, Ruy Lopez and Two Knights. I wouldn't write much about this lesson since in terms of the content taught, it was largely similar to the previous one(refer to link above). Once again, we were short of time and had to stop after having seeing the variation arising after exd4.

Lesson 2:

This was a much more exciting lesson than the previous one since I planned on making them play games on the variation they had just covered. Before I could start off though, a surprise awaited me. One of the students had walked in holding a scrambled Rubik's cube in hand, by the time I had finished briefing them upon what I wanted to do, this kid had unscrambled the cube and quitely snuck it into his desk away from my view(he knew the algorithm). Infact, he was the same kid who had joined my class just prior to the break we had. I intend to take him and the class's tactical maestro(mentioned in the second or third blog post) to the first local tournament that comes on the calendar. For now, I shall wind up, maybe sometime in the next few days I will post the games the kids played in this class.

Cheers.