Sunday, November 01, 2009

Bad, Bad Chess Coaches

Chess may be said to be the "gymnasium of the mind", but P.E. grads teaching chess?

Commenting on this piece of news ("Azerbaijani chess schools lacking coaches: deputy education minister") in today's Sun Herald, GM Ian Rogers writes:

While Australian Education Departments are notorious for using humanities teachers to cover for the shortage of maths and science teachers, the Azeri idea of asking physical education teachers to also teach chess is probably a step too far.

Sydney has suffered from a number of under-trained and even bogus chess coaches and it could be argued that the students would have been better off with no coach at all. Certainly the opportunity cost of having phys-ed teachers teach chess rather their speciality would be great.

That's an interesting comment he makes about Sydney chess coaches. Who the hec accredits these people?

5 comments:

chess blog said...

I don't know but I taught myself

Anonymous said...

FIDE has a accreditation program with 5 levels and Ian holds the highest title of FIDE Senior Trainer. I had to attend a seminar to get the highest available that way which is FIDE Trainer. But there are abuses too even in this system and rules have been broken. For example Ignatius Leong who I am not sure has ever worked as a trainer is a FIDE Senior Trainer even though he has not met rating requirements or gotten the necessary results.

Anonymous said...

There are 4 people who hold Fide Trainer titles in Sydney.

Javier Gil, Brett Tindall,Vladimir and Irina Feldman

Anonymous said...

Those Sydney titles seem fair enough but remember that if FIDE Trainers don't keep paying big money to FIDE every couple of years, they will lose their titles. FIDE's coaching accreditation program sounds good but is really just another money-making scam.

Anonymous said...

Exactly right... one should not judge a coach purely based on the amount of money paid to FIDE.