I was looking into getting lessons from pros. If you know info please help me out here:


KGS username and rank: Jennie 2p
Length of lesson: 1 hour
Price: 35$
Bonus: Packages or Bundles for buying alot of lessons at once.

KGS username and rank: YilunYang (also pala) 7p
Length of lesson: ????
Price: ????

KGS username and rank: GuoJuan 5p
Length of lesson: 1hour 30 min
Price: 70$ (55€)

KGS username and rank: Mingjiu 7p
Length of lesson: 1hour 30 min
Price: 70$ (55€)

KGS username and rank: Redrose 1p
Length of lesson: ????
Price: ????

KGS username and rank: JKerwin 1p
Length of lesson: ????
Price: ????

KGS username and rank: Breakfast 3p
Length of lesson: 1hour 30 min
Price: 45$
Bonus: Regular students get 40$ per lesson


KGS username and rank: ysyoon 8p
Length of lesson: ????
Price: ????


KGS username and rank: Younggil 8p
Length of lesson: ????
Price: ????


KGS username and rank: YinKuo 3p
Length of lesson: ????
Price: ????

For Guo Juan (and perhaps some others), see http://internetgoschool.com/

I've had in-person lessons from YilunYang and GuoJuan. Both were good, though I had a minor preference for YilunYang. YMMV.

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What do you expect from professionals that amateurs cannot teach you better? Why would you wish to spend USD 40 ~ 75 per lesson when USD 7 ~ 25 will do?

Robert, the burden of proof that amateurs can teach better than professionals definitely rests on you.

As I have said before, I am prepared to prove it for pupils up to 3dan, provided that conditions (honorarium or none, duration and format of lesson etc.) are equal and the media format is one I can and want to create. Practically speaking, pupils can try different teachers incl. me and compare.

Of course, I am not the only amateur teacher teaching better than most pro teachers. As I have mentioned before, there are even non-teacher amateurs weaker than myself having taught me more with much less invested time than all the professionals having taught me but overlooking my - what from their POV should be obvious - most important weaknesses. It is a minimal requirement of a teacher to identify the pupils' obvious important weaknesses reasonably quickly. Proof of my ability to do that? See the samples on
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/teach.html

I believe this self-promotion should be eliminated from this topic.

In my oppinion it is the same with professors at universities, which excel at their profession and research, but are not necessarily good teachers. Of course, there are some, which are very good at both. But Professors are only learning to teach by doing and are more concerned with theory of their profession, but not of teaching.

Thats why i believe that indeed some amateurs might be better teachers than professionals, although they understand less of the game itself. However, i guess there are still very good professional go players and teachers out there. Would be interested in your oppinion of who could be that...
Furthermore, it depends very much on your rank, whether you'd like to be taught by a professional or amatuer, because there is a big price gap.

Greetings,
I just participated in a series of classes at the Guo Juan Internet school.
I was very impressed not only with her and the other teachers breadth of knowledge but also how well they could teach.
it seemed that they all, but Guo in particular has a very well worked out vision for what an individual needs at a given moment. I had been getting overwhelmed by the amount of areas of the game that one needs to master but through following her advice I was able to get back on track.
I can't comment on the amateur vs pro thing but I think it is quite reasonable to charge the fee in question.it seems very clear to me that a professional teacher is not necessarily the same as a professional player but Guo is definitely both.
cheers,
buri

Professional players that are also teachers for Western players? It is a big problem because most of those professional "players" seem to have little chance to play in professional events. So it is more like asking for holders of professional ranks that are also teachers for Western players.

Among them in the OP list, I know as teachers:
YilunYang, GuoJuan, Breakfast, ysyoon.

YilunYang: I had only 1 teaching game from him won as a prize. It was teaching by short move comments only, very disappointing. His book teaching is much better.

GuoJuan: Some of my games were commented on request of journal editors etc. It was teaching by short move comments only, very disappointing. The reason may be that the journal editors spent too little money. She can teach better, especially if she takes time for preparation. Her early demonstration board lectures were about as disappointing as those of other pro teachers, but during recent years, she has hold some topic-orientated lectures, for which she prepared herself well. Those lectures were pretty useful for the intended average rank of the audience. I have not tried her A/V lectures because I dislike such media formats for learning.

Breakfast: I have seen some free comments on my games in the style he appears to comment usually when teaching by SGF. The comments are a bit better than the average professional teaching by short move comments style: he addresses the pupil's weaknesses more specifically and at least touches an attempt to work towards a hint of a potential systematic weakness. Having said that, it is still rather disappointing. OTOH, my impression can be misleading if his paid commentaries should be better than that. I have not tried taking personal lessons from him, nor tried his topic-orientated precompiled lessons. His book is very disappointing, except that he tries hard to present interesting example study cases.

ysyoon: Her game commentaries in journals (one of them is on my game) are very disappointing, but slightly less so than the average professional's game commentaries in that style. Her demonstration board lecture was so uninteresting that I had to quit after a few minutes and am not motivated to see more. I have not taken personal lessons from her. I could not motivate myself to read more than a fifth of one of her books, but this is explained by it being for kyu players and too easy for me.

Whom of them I would thus recommend for teaching? Do you really want to know...? Definitely they are all wrong teachers for a pupil like myself, who I expect a) generally applicable advice and b) clear mentioning of my IMPORTANT weaknesses (and not just of some arbitrary minor weaknesses). It is possible though that pupils wishing teaching by almost only examples might have a different opinion. It is also possible (but I am not sure) that Yang and Guo can teach much better but do not advertise their potential well enough.



At any rank, lower price is better for the pupil (when the quality is at least equal).

I find it a bit ironic you claim of meta discussion on another thread, but you start one here. He asked for pro teachers and not a discussion about amateur teachers.

I think that would be the least of our concerns, if only slightly off-topic. That's the kind of derailing that topics often get.

On the other hand, stating

is, at least, extremely rude.

Note that I've never had classes with Robert or any other amateur or professional teacher, but he is clearly advertising his services while classifying every professional he has had contact with as "disappointing".

It is still interesting to know why and which kind of pro teachers.

Honest belief is not rude, in particular not extremely rude, in particular not "at least extremely rude".

Would you not agree that a teacher must be able to identify the pupil's important weaknesses quickly? Most pro teachers could not identify mine, or, from what I have seen, quickly identify those of other pupils. Instead, most pro teachers use mostly or only teaching by examples. This is almost completely wasted effort on pupils thinking in terms of reasons, purposes, explanations, generalisations.



Wrong. As you can read elsewhere, I mentioned a very few exceptions such as Prof. Jeong. He does provide careful explanations when teaching. However, he is not (easily) available for Western students.

You seem to be sceptical about my description "very disappointing". Let me explain again: A teacher failing to fulfil his core tasks of teaching the pupil so that he can learn well is no better than very disappointing.

Greetings,
to go off at a slight tangent re Guo Juan Internet schools, there is another option. One can pay one euro for one lecture which you can listen to for a month. The lecture sare superb.
So, for the cost of one private lesson one could study relentlessly forty lectures on all manner of topics which you personally select. That is not only an exceptional offer but also answers the problem of catering to personal weakness to a considerable extent.
Cheers,
Buri

Robert is not being very diplomatic, and hence I understand the sentiment behind your post, but the burden of proof in this case most definitely does not rest on him.

The best pitchers/hitters in baseball often are not the best pitching/batting coaches after retiring as players. In fact, the best coaches tend to be scrubs and journeymen. Michael Jordan is considered the worst basketball executive of all time (and simultaneously the greatest player of all time). The professors with the best scholarly output tend to be the worst teachers in college.

Doing and teaching are two separate things.

Also, teachers often do not need to transmit the highest-level of knowledge to their students. That is, the extra knowledge possessed by a pro may not surface in a lesson unless the student is fairly high-level himself.

I don't know how strong the OP is, but I would also strongly recommend an amateur teacher if he is a kyu player. Battousai is a pretty good one who is cheap (although this assessment is somewhat subjective). You can check out his teaching style somewhat in his public lectures, which are available on his Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/dwyrin).

EDIT: I am not saying that pro teachers are bad; only that there are very good amateur teachers who are cheap as well. The world economy is not that great after all...

Don't you think that in athletics a much broader range of amateurs have very strong fundamentals, with the athletic professionals distinguishing themselves mainly as larger, faster, stronger, and tougher? If you want huge lungs you need a personal trainer, not someone who happens to have huge lungs. In Go, on the other hand, you still see poor fundamentals even at the level of very strong amateurs. (Or so professionals say. I wouldn't presume to judge.) If Go professionals had merely memorized tons of joseki, or were merely better at staying focused for three hours, then there would be no reason to presume that teachers would be unusually good at teaching. If pros are nearly unique in recognizing the fundamentals and putting them into practice, they are uniquely qualified to teach them to others.

I'm not necessarily taking a side on the pro-ama teacher debate. It does seem that it would be overkill for a 20k to take lessons from a pro. (Of course, maybe it would be overkill for a 20k to pay for lessons, period.) But I don't think the athletics/go analogy works very well.

Hypothetically, if you have any random professional player and any random amateur 4+ dan I definitely maintain that the burden of proof rests on the one who claims that the amateur player will be a better teacher.

It may be possible that in some situations a selected strong amateur is shown to teach better than selected professionals, but there is no reason to assume that this should be the case. Which is why the burden of proof is as I maintain.

I do not mean to pick on you, but you are confusing both my point (and Robert's as well) by setting up a straw man that resembles my point but is fundamentally different. I am talking about the existence of identifiable amateur teachers who are good and cheap. We are not talking about whether we would choose as a teacher if all we knew about the candidates was their pro/am status and dan rank.

Furthermore, I understand that Robert has been somewhat prickly in this discussion, but nevertheless he has provided somewhat detailed (and, yes, subjective and possibly biased, given that he teaches for money as well) reviews of the professional teachers with whom he has had lessons. He has stated his opinion and its basis. The right way to provide a counterpoint is to write about your own experiences with pro teachers, which others have done in this thread.

When I say that the burden of proof does not rest on Robert, I do not mean that the opposite burden exists for someone else. How could anyone hope to prove that pro teachers are better than amateurs of vice versa? We can provide our theory and some anecdotal personal evidence that supports it. To say that the burden of proof is on anyone seems needlessly aggressive to me.

I have not seen this for teachers' knowledge (and I have a great ability to understand high-level explanations if only they are clear instead of resorting to the ambiguity of intuition like in "create beautiful shapes" or "follow the flow of the game"). Instead, a typical problem is asking a professional teacher for explained knowledge ("When is shape 'beautiful'?", "Why is this particular shape more beautiful than the alternative?" or "What is the 'flow' of the game?") or reasons and receiving an answer like "My thinking is intuitive, I cannot state explicit reasons.".

Something similar can occur though: The pro expects solution of a (too) difficult local life-and-death problem within seconds. This is the one of ca. half a dozen of my important weaknesses that pros do discover (but, in personal teaching, no professional has said even half as clearly as some fellow amateurs incl. Benjamin Teuber 6d that it means having to practice more problems).