Checker lessons

This week's FunCast is taken from an article I wrote called "Ex Checkers." It's about a class I taught to prisoners, and the lessons thereof. It concludes:

Class after class, variation after variation, the convicts, the people in my checkers class, and I, played, and learned together. We even created new variations borrowing rules from one and fitting them into another.

As the classes progressed, I began realizing what my checkers classes must have meant to people who have lost their freedom:

* there’s more than one way to play checkers
* the more ways you know, the more you have to play with – more things to think about, more people to think with, more opportunities to keep the mind alive
* the only variation worth playing is the one that’s fun for both players
* because there’s more than one way to play, every game has to start with negotiation
* all the rules of a game are negotiable, the only rules that aren’t negotiable are the rules that keep you playing together.


You can listen to this week's FunCast here.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith