Once I walked into English on Tuesday, I knew it was going to be an interesting class. On the back board for homework, it said to write everything you knew about chess and/or the rules of the game. Now I’m not a big fan of chess. Mostly because I don’t know a thing about it and I think it is very confusing. But I was also wondering why Mr. Olivo wanted us to write about it.

I wasn’t in school yesterday, but I did the homework and wrote what I knew about chess; which wasn’t much. In school today, Thursday December 17th, we watched a clip of the book we read called The Rules of the Game. As you can guess, it’s about chess. A young girl has a mother who taught her how to play chess very well. The little girl got very good at playing and was the state champ. She knew all of the secrets and how to win every time. After we watched the movie scene, Mr. Olivo told us to go back to the book and write down as many passages as we could find where Waverly (the young girl) felt like her mother was her opponent. I found 4. Mr. Olivo found 8. He put a chess board on the projector and I didn’t know why. Maybe we were going to play?

We did not end up playing. Instead, Mr. Olivo played the story like it was one big, giant chess game. It was like two games in one. The story was about chess, and the story itself was played like chess. For example, when the mother said something, she was always right. So she won the game in the end. She beat her daughter. In Waverly’s head, at the end, she was imagining her life as a chess board and her mother as the opponent. The way I’m saying all of this does sound confusing, but if you ever read the story it would make sense. The author, Amy Tan, is a very clever writer. The way she wrote the story was very smart and I think it was a great story to read in English class. (Jessica S)