PERSONAL ESSAY
PRIMARY SOURCE
Teaching Chess, and Life
from an essay adapted by The New York Times, September 3, 2000
Carlos Capellan
If you were to walk down West 160th Street in Washington Heights, you would see drug dealers whistling to people in cars and handing off small packages to passersby. As you walk further down the block, you would see residents who are too scared to sit and talk to their neighbors on the front steps. These families stay inside most of the time. You would see parents pick up their children from P.S. 4 and hurry off the block before trouble can start. This is my block and this is my neighborhood.
Many kids my age in Washington Heights wind up in gangs, as drug dealers, in jail, or dead. I decided long ago that I would not end up in one of those situations because of the consequences I saw others suffer. I have stuck by this decision with help from several important people. One of the most influential people in my life is my former chess coach and current boss, Jeremy Chiappetta, who has taught me a lot about chess and more about life.
As an eighth-grader at a gang-infested junior high school, I joined the chess team as a way to stay out of trouble. I already knew the coach, Mr. Chiappetta, because he was my social studies teacher.
As a ninth- and tenth-grader, I volunteered to help Chia with his chess team at Intermediate School 90 on West 168th Street. During these years, I matured. I learned how to present myself in a positive way: taking off my hat inside buildings, judging when it was appropriate to make jokes (I had to learn this lesson a few times), and knowing how to speak in certain situations.
At one tournament I learned an important lesson from Chia. It was the last round of the U.S. Amateur Team East. I was playing for a top prize and was nervous. In the middle of the game I found a winning combination and I began to slam the pieces out of happiness. Then a big hand stopped the game clock and pulled me away. It was Chia. I could tell that he was angry, but I did not realize what I had done wrong. We talked about the meaning of sportsmanship. I apologized for my rudeness to my opponent and forfeited the game. I didn’t win a prize.
With Chia’s mentorship, I learned from my mistake. As a coach at I.S. 90, I’ve had to teach the same lesson to others. It makes me feel good about myself because I like helping the younger kids learn the game Chia taught me to love.
Chia left I.S. 90 the year I became an eleventh-grader. He recommended me as an assistant chess coach, for which I am paid. This is my second year at I.S. 90 as an assistant coach. My responsibilities include teaching chess strategies and tactics three days a week. I also chaperone the team at tournaments almost every weekend.
All of this would not have been possible if not for Mr. Chiappetta. He turned me to chess and kept me involved. He gave me the opportunity to earn money doing something I love. Chess has kept me off the streets. It has challenged me and taught me to think in new ways. Because of chess, I was recently honored by the Daily News as one of the “21 New Yorkers to Watch in the 21st Century.” Chess has made me a mentor to younger students, giving me the chance to become their Chia.

SECONDARY SOURCE MAGAZINE ARTICLE

Community Service & You

from Career World, September 1998

T. J. Saftner

Imagine you read the following help-wanted ad in your local newspaper:

Change the World Around You! Individual required to help out at nonprofit organization. No experience necessary. Interesting work with excellent benefit package. Short workweek and flexible hours.

Would you apply?

What if the ad also said, “Must be willing to work without pay”? Before you say “No way!” consider this:

Last weekend, millions of Americans worked at soup kitchens, shelters, playgrounds, museums, prisons, and schools—and they didn’t earn a cent. But they didn’t go home empty-handed either. What these people received for their contribution wasn’t money—according to a survey by Independent Sector—but a chance to learn new skills, prove their reliability, demonstrate their creativity, and build their self-esteem.

Record numbers of young people are getting involved in community service to gain a sense of belonging in their community, to foster personal development, and to help do all that needs to be done in today’s world—from tutoring young readers, to building houses, to working at a blood drive.

Making a Difference

Volunteering can sound a little intimidating when you’re a teenager. But look what’s going on already in youth volunteerism:

Youth Service America is an alliance of organizations committed to community and national service whose goal is to “encourage the vitality, creativity, and goodwill of young people.”

In 1995, Youth Service America joined basketball star Chris Webber and 1,000 young people in a massive river-cleanup project. In 1996, Youth Service America worked with four local nonprofit organizations to help construct playgrounds in Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia.

Though these and many other events have attracted media attention, millions of young people volunteer without being recognized in the media for their efforts. Why do they do it?

Stephanie Star, a senior at Highland Park High School in the Chicago area, says, “It just feels good. You get a lot out of helping other people.” Stephanie volunteers at a battered women’s shelter. She spends one evening a month at the shelter, serving dinner and talking to the women.

Not only can you make a contribution to your community and make a difference in someone’s life, you can learn new skills, network°for future job contacts, and gain some valuable experience—all of which can help you in your future endeavors. Stephanie says her experience has helped to broaden her understanding of different kinds of people as well as social issues.
Making a Move
Volunteering can be a long-term commitment or an afternoon event. There are many areas available for community service: churches, soup kitchens, shelters, schools, the environment, politics, and lots more. You might be phoning, organizing, cooking, working with the young or the old. Whatever you do, it will most certainly affect someone’s life. Who knows…it might even be your own.

SECONDARY SOURCE MAGAZINE ARTICLE

Feeding Frenzy

from People, June 2, 1997

Peter Ames Carlin and Don Sider

When 15-year-old David Levitt makes his weekly appearance at the Haven of Rest food bank in Pinellas Park, Florida, he is greeted as a good Samaritan.

No one knows better than Levitt how to get food to the hungry. Since 1994 the surplus food-sharing program he designed as an 11-year-old for the Pinellas County public schools has sent more than a quarter-million pounds of cafeteria leftovers to the county’s shelters and food banks. Singled out for praise last year by President Clinton, Levitt, a freshman at Seminole High, is currently backing state legislation to protect donors of surplus food from liability lawsuits.“It’s a no-brainer,” says State Representative Dennis Jones, who is shepherding Levitt’s bill toward certain passage when the state legislature meets next spring. “You wonder why it’s taken so long for someone to do it.”
The same question crossed Levitt’s mind in 1993, when he first read about Kentucky Harvest, a nonprofit organization that funnels leftover food from restaurants and other businesses to charities. He was only a sixth-grader, but Levitt understood that a nation that regularly sends 30 million people to bed hungry shouldn’t toss nearly 20 percent of its edible food into the garbage. ButtonholingOsceola Middle School principal Fred Ulrich outside class one day, he asked if he could start a Harvest program using cafeteria leftovers. “I figured he didn’t know me,” says Levitt, “so he couldn’t be mean.”
Ulrich wasn’t mean. He was merely realistic, pointing out that district health regulations prohibited using previously served food. (“Red tape, red tape,” Levitt sighs.) But, encouraged by his mother, Sandy, Levitt attended a Pinellas County school-board meeting and made his case for a local Harvest program. He not only won the board’s approval but a spontaneous ovation to boot.

The board’s approval, alas, merely gained him entrance to the bureaucratic maze. Next he had to contend with state health-department rules governing the handling of secondhand food. For a time it seemed that packaging requirements would doom the program—the state demanded specific containers, and the schools had no money to pay for them. Undaunted, Levitt wrote to a major corporation, which promptly shipped eight cases of plastic bags to his doorstep, and on November 8, 1994, Levitt helped make the school’s first delivery: cartons of milk and bags of salad for Haven of Rest. “That,” he says, “was satisfaction.”

The younger child (sister Jamie is 18) of Sandy Levitt, a bookkeeper, and her husband, Rich, vice president of a medical-supply company, Levitt grew up in Seminole, a suburb of St. Petersburg, earning A’s and B’s in school and playing volleyball and a handful of musical instruments. “David’s a typical teenager,” notes his mother. Eventually he would like to attend the U.S. Air Force Academy and learn to fly. “That’s today,” he says. “Call me tomorrow—I might change.”

What doesn’t change is his ability to make things happen. And while he’s fortunate to have a mother who helps push his projects along (Sandy is “the silent driving force,” according to her husband), Levitt’s energy has won him plenty of fans. “David has drawn attention to hunger and the availability of food in the community,” says Mary Dowdell, director of Tampa Bay Harvest. Adds Stan Curtis, the Kentucky stockbroker who started the first Harvest program: “Any parent in America would be glad to have him as a son.”

Including the First Dad,who invited Levitt to the White House last spring as part of a Points of Light ceremony. Taking his medal from Hillary Rodham Clinton, Levitt wasn’t shy about pushing his agenda. “What,” he asked the First Lady, “do you do with the White House leftovers?”