To get to SuperNationals, which was in Nashville, Tennessee, my family and I had to take a 4 hour plane trip. Once we were in Nashville, we stayed in a gigantic hotel with over 5,000 other participants! The tournament itself lasted 3 whole days with 7 rounds total. Each round can last 4 hours.

My Performance

In my section (under 1000 rating), I tied for second place and got sixth place on tie breaks. Though this sounds really good, I was playing in a rather weak section, and should have gotten first place.

I got 6 points out of 7, which, as I said, wasn’t as good as the expected 7. And yes, 1 point is the difference between 1^st place and 6^th place. It would have been very easy to have done worse than I did, because to do worse, all I have to do is not try as hard, which is…very easy.

My Preparation

To prepare for SuperNationals, I did chess tactics on CT-Art, took chess lessons from a coach, and played a lot of practice games.

• Doing tactics on CT-Art has made me more aware of tactics, and has taught me patterns, so I see tactics quicker.
• My coach taught me about the importance of the two bishops, and how to get good minor pieces. He also gave me a larger repertoire of openings.
• Of course, playing many practice games allowed me to practice what I was learning, and find where I could improve.

I found that I performed much better at SuperNationals than I did during my training. I think there are several reasons for that. The first and most important is that I had much more motivation to do well. Also, I worked hard preparing for the tournament. And finally, there was actually less noise at SuperNationals (I’m usually distracted by noises). Even though there were more people, I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

My Lessons

After we came back from SuperNationals, I was thinking about the lessons that I learned, and I found multiple things.

First, winners do not rely on others to be weak. Winners care about their own performance, not other people’s performance. This basically means that winners will do their best, at whatever they’re doing, regardless of what other people do.

Also, I learned that you should set lots of achievable goals for yourself, and then not mess them up. I chose to compete in the “Under 1000” section, rather than the “open” section where the top 150 players have ratings over 1500. If I would’ve played in the open section, the best score I could’ve hoped to achieve would be about 4 wins and 3 losses. But, in the U-1000 section, if I don’t make any mistakes, I should have 7 wins and 0 losses. I have found in school, life, and chess that it’s better to set achievable goals and not make mistakes, rather than setting very high goals that are not achievable. Real life is more about not making mistakes than performing miracles.

As I wrote about in “Freddie Loses His Game,” if you are a learner, you are a winner. In the tournament, I lost the first game, which put me out of the running for the 1^st place trophy. I could’ve quit, right then. But, I kept going and I won all the rest of the games. I learned the lesson in the first game that I should’ve been more careful. Being careful and not making mistakes has always been my challenge. True learning is “doing” what you learn. I am happy I am learning to be more careful and I am “doing” fewer and fewer mistakes. That’s why I play chess—to learn to do my best.

Remember, if you’re a learner, you’re a winner.

This proposition is actually interesting, because on one side, this would be a violation of the 4th amendment, but on the other, the government won’t go around randomly searching through peoples’ electronic fingerprints unless there is a community need. Community safety is the biggest point that affirmative, saying without a warrant, can pull.

I was just putting this out there, and if anybody reading this has any insight on the proposition I am fighting for, please leave a comment. Any comments could help me win my final debate!

Thanks, Dorian

Of course kids would like to being goofing off instead of doing homework. Some people do say that video games improve speed and hand-eye coordination, but that’s another story.

Parents don’t want their children up to 12:00 pm doing homework that they started on right after school got out. When that happens, one can understand why we don’t like it.

Teachers like to say that by doing homework makes kids have more exposure to the subject.

Studies prove both arguments. They say it doesn’t matter whether kids have homework or not, especially because the kids that would do the homework anyway are the ones that have straight A’s.

I’m personally right in between. I think that the fact that homework doesn’t matter at all is a little suspicious, but filling a moving truck full of homework is crazy. I can understand how parents would feel if their kids can’t even make it to the dinner table because they have 2 more essays that were assigned today and due tomorrow. Of course, if there is absolutely no homework, then kids might go off doing illegal things or misbehaving.

My middle school for the 2011-12 school year had a policy making sure teachers in our 7 periods did not assign more than 30 minutes of homework each. 30 minutes each still adds up to 3 hours and 30 minutes—a little too much?

Maybe 20 minutes each would work, because it only adds up to 2 hours and 20 minutes.

What is your position in this argument? Post a comment below |

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At the beginning of the year, I came into all of my classes unsure, but excitedly. I was ready to meet new people and learn new things.

For the first half of the school year, my first class was math, second Spanish, third computer skills, fourth science, fifth Language Arts (English), 6th Physical Education (P.E./Gym), and last of all I had social studies.

Math was interesting, and I liked my teacher. Spanish was a world of new. Computer skills was utterly boring. Science and L.A. were not knew, but not old. My P.E. was a little daunting, because there were a combination of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. My social studies teacher was just like my 5th grade teacher that I really liked, so my S.S. teacher was my favorite.

Because computer skills was so boring, I switched to Home Economics.

By the second day of school, I knew the campus.

I was still getting settled into school when one of the teachers at our school died. There was a time of sad in the school, because this teacher had meant a lot to a lot of people. In our yearbook that was dedicated to Sensei Takahashi, this poem was written about the teacher:

You can shed tears that she is gone,

Or you can smile that she has lived.

You can close your eyes and pray that she’ll return,

Or you can open your eyes and see all she’s left.

Your heart can be empty because you can’t see her,

Or you can be full of the lessons she shared.

You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday,

Or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.

You can remember only that she is gone,

Or you can cherish her memory and let it live on.

You can cry and close your mind,

Be empty and turn you back.

Or you can do what she’d want:

Smile, open your eyes, love, and go on.

By the second quarter, I was quite into the routine and ready for winter break. Winter break came, and I had never felt that my breaks were so short. I sure was growing up.

After winter break, I got right back into the routine, but was feeling as if I was working for the next break that was in 2 weeks. The school year kept moving like that through the 3rd quarter, until the 4th quarter came around.

During the fourth quarter, I was just waiting for summer break. On the calendar, summer wasn’t that far away, but on the school campus, summer was still a while away.

Finally we had one week left. But, I still had 2 presentations to do. I got those done in no time, then I signed yearbooks and got my yearbook signed.

And then, today came. Today school was only 2 hours, and each period was only 15 minutes.

I learned that I can’t just work from break to break, otherwise I will miss to much in between. I found out what it was like to be in middle school. I noticed that as I grow bigger and bigger, everything else seems to get smaller and smaller. I noticed that I was one of the tallest kids in my grade.

Most of all, I learned that one must enjoy life as it comes by, and that there are periods of everything. Sadness, happiness, excitement, and so on.

Pre-K, Kindergarten, 1rst grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade, and 6th grade are now behind me. Now I must face the future, not only 7th grade, 8th grade, high school, or even college, but adulthood, business, and unimaginable technology.

This year, the State tournament took place in a rodeo in Pasco, WA.

Of course, we were not sitting in an out door rodeo. We had a roof over ourselves, and the moment we walked out of the arena, it felt like we were in a conference center.

They had air conditioning, food, everything you expect. Except that we were in the middle of the desert.

The first problem we ran into in Pasco was a bull it was huge and was holding up the traffic. I could see damage for a long time, cars trampled… A few problems with my little April 28th joke. On bull? Trampled cars? No way!

Okay, to reality. The first problem we ran into was that the hotel room that we had reserved was a non-smoking room, but they gave us a smoking room! We had to go find another hotel, and we ended up staying up until 11:00 PM on the night before State.

Luckily, we didn’t run into any problems until we got to the Trac Center, which was hosting State.

When we got to the Trac Center, we signed in and found a table. But, we were supposed to sign in the night before. We were only one of the hundred families that didn’t sign in. That did pose a problem though, which was that everybody now needed to sign in, and it took them forever to get the pairings set up, let alone start the first round.

Once the first round finally started, I took my PDA in and got it all set up so that I could record my moves that I played with it. But, right before the round started, a judge came up to me  and said that I couldn’t use it. He said I could only use a Monroi. I ended up losing that game on time, because it takes me longer to notate by hand, and we had less time than I was used to.

The thing is, when I write down the moves I make, which is called notating, by hand, I have to go through a brain process. This process was taught to me by my coaches for the 2-hour games, and it turns out, only for the 2-hour games.

And the reason I couldn’t use this process? Because I was playing games where each side had 25 minutes, not 2 hours.

After the first round, I went with my dad to go talk to the tournament director about using my Dell PDA. He said it was fine with him, but it also had to be fine with the tournament director. My dad said that he had thought that the guy we were talking to was the TD, but it turns out he was the tournament organizer, not the TD. We got the actual TD to sign our “pass” for using the PDA.

That was really the last major problem that occurred during the WA Elem. Chess Championships for me. That is, except for the hundreds of little problems that popped up in my games.

From all this, I learned that I need to be able to cope with different situations, talk it out, and take advantage of my rights.

If I had not talked to the judge, I probably would have had 1 out of 5 points, instead of my 3 out of 5 that I had in the end.

Now, the next major tournament I have is the National Elementary Chess Championships, and I’ll keep you updated on that!

The other kids in the room were jumping up and down, getting out of their seats every five minutes. I felt like they had wasted 20-25 minutes of my time by the end of the game.

I could not focus at all and ended up playing a move that I had not fully calculated, because I was running down on time.

When the game ended, I had lost to my opponent. I was very frustrated that I had lost, because I was winning before the people started to goof off.

One other thing that made me mad was that there was a coach in the room, but he was doing nothing to prevent them from being loud. He might as well have never threatened to forfeit their games, because they never stopped getting up and down and making noise.

One lesson that we can learn from this is that even when people are trying to annoy you or get your attention, you have to ignore them. I tried doing this, but of course there were to many people making too many noises for that to work.

Another interesting thing is that if there is a constant noise, it will not be as annoying as a noise starting and stopping, starting and stopping, and starting and stopping, and never ending.

If I was to listen to hard rock music while playing my game, as long as it kept going, I could tune it out pretty easily. But, if I was listening to hard rock while somebody was sitting there turning my music on and off incessantly, than that would be very hard to tune out, if not nearly impossible.

All in all, the people that were never ceasing to annoy me, were being very disrespectful and in my opinion, should not be allowed back.