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A local author who taught chess to South Bronx elementary school students in the 1990s has published a new memoir detailing his life and the career changes that had a lasting impact on the lives of his students.
David McEnruty’s book “Sunrise in the Bronx: Chess and Life Lessons from the South Bronx to the White House” was released on October 15th. He met with the Bronx Times at a cafe in Mott Haven to reminisce about his life as a chess player and the teachers and students whose lives were changed by the game. Many of them we still keep in touch with today.
McEnulty entered education in an unexpected way. He was born into a family of musicians and majored in philosophy at Florida State University, but “accidentally tried acting.” He developed a love for acting and played several roles on stage and in movies. But then he began a writing project about street crime in New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, which quickly overtook his other interests. “Soon, I became a writer rather than an actor,” he said.
Mr Makanurti later rose through the ranks in real estate and building management. One day, while working for an unscrupulous East Village property owner, longtime friend and chess master Bruce Pandolfini called McEnruty and offered him a day of teaching chess to third graders. I asked him to do it.
At the time, McEnruty was in his mid-40s, had never taught a classroom, and although he was a well-regarded chess player, he had not reached master level. But he ended up taking on a side job, and everything changed from there.
With Pandolfini’s encouragement, he willingly quit his job in building management, taught at American Chess Foundation schools in the Bronx and Harlem, and eventually took a full-time chess position at Community Elementary School 70 (CES 70) in the South Bronx. I took up a position as a teacher. At the time, it was a compulsory class for students from kindergarten through second grade.
The memoir details McEnruty’s difficult early years as a new teacher, a white man in a school with particularly black and brown students. From behavior management to how to explain the basics of chess to young people who had never heard of the game, he hardly knew where to start.
“I was terrible,” he said. “The children were eating me alive.”
But with strong support from CES 70 Principal Sylvia Simon and veteran teacher Mark Singer, Mr. McEnulty quickly learned how to teach at his students’ level. For example, he realized that no one had a working definition for the word “corner.” When he told them to place their chess pieces in the corners of the board, they didn’t know what to do. So he had to explain how intersecting straight lines come together to form angles.
McEnulty said he also noticed that many chess masters are self-taught and most of their teaching ideas don’t work in a classroom environment. “I wasn’t starting with where (the students) were, I was starting with what (the students) needed to know,” McEnruty said. “They didn’t understand my language of instruction.”
The author welcomed former CES 70 colleagues and students to his home to celebrate the book’s release. Photo by David MacEnulty
But once he learned to engage at his students’ level, they quickly took to the game, and enthusiasm began to spread throughout the class and the chess team at CES 70, which he also led. Mr. Makanurti began to see his students change and grow in new ways.
“What struck me was how much (chess) helped their emotional intelligence,” McEnruty said.
By learning about the game and its history, students also learned that they can’t simply take each other’s pieces off the board or make up rules to win. He said the game’s traditions, constraints and strategies taught students resilience, perseverance, problem solving, critical thinking and emotional regulation.
Additionally, MacEnulty found that this game could be tied into almost any lesson in other subjects. He taught students how chess reflects elements of storytelling because each game has an introduction, climax, and resolution. He also taught about Queen Isabella of Spain, who was an avid chess player and is said to have made the queen, rather than the king, the most powerful piece on the board under her reign.
The young students took it all in. Chess “was helping (the students) understand life,” McEnruty said. “That was a real eye-opener for me.”
The CES 70 chess team, which McEnruty inherited from his mentor Mark Singer, was made up of students who were enthusiastic but inexperienced in playing against others. At the time, there were few other programs in the Bronx, so McEnulty realized that “if I wanted to be good, I needed to play against kids from Manhattan.”
He began taking his students to weekend tournaments. After six months, some of his children started winning, proudly returning to school with trophies and quickly building display cases. Parents started to get excited, and by the second year the kids were teaching each other how to play chess, playing in their building after school, and even showing up an hour before school to play. Ta.
“The team just kept growing,” he said. And by his third year, MacEnulty’s teams won city and state championships. Photo by David McEnruty
“Sunrise in the Bronx” was a former teacher’s way of lovingly remembering the challenges and triumphs of an unexpected career. Mr. McEnulty had been thinking about writing a memoir for 10 years, but once he started writing it, he was able to draft it in just two months thanks to the extensive notes he took from tournaments in the 1990s and the words of former students. He said that it was put together. It is included at the back of the book.
“When I look back on my life, it’s hard to find an aspect of my life, both past and present, that hasn’t been influenced by learning and playing chess,” former student Sunil Matavik writes in the book. I’m writing.
Matavik was a member of the CES 70 team with MacEnulty in 1998, winning the national middle school tournament in Arizona, and went on to teach chess on his own. Now he’s a husband and father and works as an auditor, a career that he said uses all the skills he learned playing chess.
Decades later, MacEnulty still keeps in touch with many of his CES 70 students and colleagues, and recently gathered them at his home to celebrate the launch of his book. Makanarti told the Bronx Times that he is proud that many of his former students, like Matavik, have gone on to successful, well-paying careers in engineering, finance, law, artificial intelligence, creative work, and more. spoke.
“They all say they started playing chess,” McNulty said.
Although chess is not currently a required class in schools, the program has expanded throughout the Bronx, including Project Pawn, which recently grew school-based instruction into Soundview’s flagship center. McAnulty is friends with the program’s co-founders and said he would love to see the game become more popular and accessible to people of all ages in the Bronx.
As the CES 70 community gathered to celebrate the book, MacEnulty remembered how far he and his students had come and how they learned and grew together.
“I look at them now and I’m really surprised,” he said.
Contact Emily Swanson at eswanson@schnepsmedia.com or (646) 717-0015. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes.
