Sunrise in the Bronx: Chess and Life Lessons – From the South Bronx to the White House is a memoir by David MacEnulty. MacEnulty spent eight years teaching chess at Community Elementary School 70 (CES 70) in the Bronx borough of New York City.
I read MacEnulty’s memoir in one sitting. That’s in part because there are no chess diagrams and games to play through, making reading faster. But it is also because MacEnulty writes well about compelling subjects.
Handling Chess Pressure
As I wrote in a previous SparkChess article, most players put pressure on themselves to win. Or at least to draw! When part of a team, this pressure may be amplified. Not only does losing make you sad, but your loss may also cost your team a trophy.
MacEnulty helped his CES 70 chess team members deal with this pressure. Here is one quote from what MacEnulty told his students:
If you are doing your best, if you are thinking things through, you fail because someone knew more. For the price of a game, you get a great lesson. That’s how we get better.
MacEnulty also reminded his students that whoever loved them before their games will still love them after, even if they lose.
Cheating
MacEnulty does not shy away from the ugly realities of chess, such as cheating. Besides mentioning how players from other teams sometimes cheated or intimidated their opponents, MacEnulty also shares how he dealt with his own students who cheated.
After a game of scholastic chess, the opponents mark a sheet indicating who won and who lost. Sometimes one player leaves without marking that sheet, and their opponent fills in the game’s result. At one tournament, two of MacEnulty’s students cheated, in separate games against the same boy, by incorrectly recording wins for themselves. MacEnulty was accused, by the parent of the boy who won those games, of training his students to cheat.
Having one’s students accused of cheating is a challenging situation, as MacEnulty’s own reputation was also at stake. His interactions with his students after, helping them see how others might generalize from two of them cheating, are instructive and emotionally moving. After much dialogue, MacEnulty’s students had thought through the issues around cheating and winning. They could correctly answer his last question: “Is it worth giving up your personal integrity so the team can win?”
The full version of this story, including what happened with the boy’s results, is worth reading in “Chapter 12 – Cheating and Intimidation.”
Legacy
According to an article in The Bronx Times:
The Bronx Times
MacEnulty said he had been thinking about writing a memoir for a decade, but when he started writing, the draft came together in just two months, helped by copious notes he took at tournaments in the 90s and from the words of former students themselves, which are included at the back of the book.
MacEnulty’s CES 70 students lived in the poorest congressional district in the United States. Thanks mostly to MacEnulty and to benefactors (listed in Chapter 7), the CES 70 team won the 2000 National Elementary School Championship. The team was then honored by President Bill Clinton at the White House. Now, many of MacEnulty’s former CES 70 students have professional careers.
Sunrise in the Bronx: Chess and Life Lessons – From the South Bronx to the White House is published August 29, 2024, by New In Chess. MacEnulty was interviewed by Ben Johnson, for the Perpetual Chess Podcast on December 4. The YouTube link of that interview was published on December 24.
After teaching at CES 70, MacEnulty served as director of program development at Chess-in-the-Schools. After that job, and until his retirement in 2018, MacEnulty was head of the Dalton Chess Academy at the Dalton School in New York City.
MacEnulty received many accolades throughout his career. In 2005, actor Ted Danson portrayed MacEnulty in A&E Network’s production of Knights of The South Bronx. In 2007, MacEnulty was named Chess Educator of the Year by the chess program at The University of Texas at Dallas. As mentioned in this 2019 US Chess podcast, US Chess has honored MacEnulty with scholastic service and career achievement awards.
