That is one of the best videos I've seen in years Ed, thank you very much for sharing...

Hi topazg,

You're very welcome. I like it a lot, too,
and every now and then re-watch it and/or forward it
to friends.

Robinson's ideas are in the humanistic tradition of John Dewey, A. S. Neill, Carl Rogers, and Abraham Maslow. They run counter to the thrust of most education reforms of the current day (in the US, anyway). New recruits for Teach for America, for instance, are taught to run their classrooms more like prisons than factories. As in my day, children are trained to be still, be quiet, be on time, know their place, and conform. But now, under the banner of "No Excuses", they are put in more rigorous straitjackets, especially if they are minorities. Sometimes the teacher in my classes would tell a student to stop looking out the window. Now students get demerits if their eyes are not glued to the teacher at all times.

There is a kind of war going on in public education, with the humanistic side in retreat. Take Weather Woman, for instance (a meteorologist featured in another video). She would like fifth graders to do arithmetic computations almost as well as calculators, if not as fast. But what happens when divergent thinking meets third grade arithmetic? In our schools, divergent thinking loses, as a rule. Weather Woman wants kids to learn not just the right answers, but also the right ways to get those answers. She poo-poos textbooks that ask kids for different ways they can find the answer (an attempt to foster divergent thinking). That does not make them good little calculators. Real mathematicians are creative, akin to poets. When John Conway visits third grade classrooms, kids have fun. Unfortunately, we cannot have a Conway in every elementary classroom.

I came to humanistic education by way of teaching English conversation in Tokyo to adults. My training was in the behaviorist tradition. My students had learned to be quiet. But conversation requires talking. Well, I knew how to get them talking. Reward any speech. And that means to reward mistakes. Within a few weeks they were talking. So far so good. Now was the time to shape their behavior by differential reinforcement. So I began correcting errors. Wrong! They clammed up. OK. Back to rewarding everything. When their errors were such that I did not understand them (to keep to our theme) I asked questions so that I could understand. After a few more weeks I noticed something strange. They were making fewer errors. That was not supposed to happen. So I gaily continued to make my classes rewarding for my students, without trying to shape their behavior. That is how I started to come around to student centered education.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I've never been quite sure what to think of Dewey. Often he wrote about educating the whole person for a life as a citizen in a democracy rather than just training children to become workers, yet he was a strong supporter of William Wirt's Gary Plan (Dewey, Schools of To-Morrow https://archive.org/details/schoolsoftomorro005826mbp). Applauded by Carnegie for producing malleable industrial workers, the Gary Plan involved the implementation of rigid subject rooms and school bells, as well as a strong emphasis on "shop" classes (wood working, metal working), drafting, and other skills useful for industry.

A disclaimer. I graduated from William A. Wirt H.S. in Gary, though by the early 1960s it had fully implemented a tracking system. Some of us took lots of math (geometry using Euclid (!), algebra, trigonometry, calculus), science (biology, chemistry, physics), U.S. and world history (context, not just dates), English (yes, reading classics), foreign languages (Latin, in my case), etc. While the non-college track students were forced into shop classes, home education, consumer math, minimal non-rigorous science, little-to-no reading assignments, history as indoctrination, no extra languages, etc.

So, I just cannot reconcile Dewey's support for Wirt with his vast writings on educational theory.

A couple further references:

Noam Chomsky, Education is Ignorance, http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare02.htm

John Taylor Gatto, Chap.9, The Underground History of American Public Education, http://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/09/john ... anagement/

Hi Bill,

That's very interesting. My current understanding of student centered education
is that we have to find a balance. ( Also true in so many other areas. )
I came to it from experience in various fields, including Go and English.
How's your experience with correcting mistakes (or not!) in Go ?
( Let me re-visit some of your game reviews, too... ).

Amazing! Thanks Ed.

_________________
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

My favorite metaphor now is that of the dance.



Well, I think that correcting errors is usually fine for go. The main thing is not to discourage beginners, I think. But praise is more important. You catch more flies with honey than with gall, as the saying goes.

As for game reviews here, the relationship is not the same, and the audience is not just the player. I usually offer food for thought. I think that the closest thing to my FTF approach is my recent responses to pak0.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Yes, very interesting how often the dance metaphor creeps into many diverse areas.
Including judo, kendo, karatedo, wrestling, Go, and, dance itself.

I, and I feel confident in saying many others here, greatly appreciate your comments. I don't really need a spoonful of sugar with the medicine, though...but I'll take it. And, yes, I often lurk in other players' game posts to read comments by you and other strong players. Thank you!

A very common experience, at least among many
kyu or low-dan level adult Go students, here in the US:Also, post 10 of When to stop attacking.

Another generic advice thread, posts 8 and 9

For Tami's question above, here is one version of my reply:I've seen this discussion on KGS, on this forum, and elsewhere for years.

One of my current projects is to find (better) analogies to share with Tami, and others who share her frustrations.

Go-Man: a Pac-Man variant.

Let's imagine one strategy for Go-Man (see previous post):

If we just want to reach higher levels as quickly as possible,
we learn to evade the Monsters. We "sacrifice" picking up the Go-dots.
We improve our evasive maneuvers and traversing techniques.
We become better and better at reaching the Exit fast.

But here's the rub: eventually, we will get stuck at a certain level.
Because in order to get past the Monsters at these levels,
we must freeze them periodically. And to freeze them we need a lot of Go-dots --
Go-dots that we lack because we were so keen on passing all the previous levels
that we didn't pick them up, at least not enough of them.

To get past this level barrier, there is only one way:
we must return to the previous levels and pick up the Go-dots that we missed.

We don't necessarily have to gobble up 100% of the Go-dots on previous levels.
Perhaps 75% to 90% of Go-dots on each level is sufficient.
But less than 50% on every level is most likely not enough.

There is no way around it -- we must acquire enough Go-dots to reach the higher levels.

If you're read this far, by now most of you know where this Go-Man analogy is going.

The growth curve for Go is in some ways analogous to Go-Man. For some people, anyway.
There are probably exceptional cases where the Go-Man analogy fails completely.
I'm not concerned with the exceptions here. I'm looking at where the analogy works,
which I think is most cases I've seen, including the original favorite topics mentioned earlier:

• I want to reach N-dan in X months.
• Why am I stuck at x-kyu or y-dan ?
• I just made 4 kyu yesterday! Damn, today I drop back to 5k. Why ?!
• I have a general question on how to improve (e.g. Post 51 above).

Now we're ready to use Go-Man to dig into these topics, one by one.

Favorite topic/question:

• Why am I stuck at x-kyu or y-dan ?

Short answer: because you lack Go-dots.

Favorite topic/question:

• I just made 4 kyu yesterday! Damn, today I drop back to 5k. Why ?!

Short answer: Because you lack Go-dots.

This is the same answer to the question "Why am I stuck at x-kyu or y-dan ?" ( See previous post ).

Favorite topic/question:

• I have a general question on how to improve (e.g. Post 51 above).

Short answer: if you understand Go-Man, you'll see why general questions like these are not very productive.

Generic/specific question: what's the shape of the Go-dots graph ?

If we plot Go levels ( from 20 kyu, through amateur 1 dan, through pro ) on the x-axis,
and the required number of Go-dots on the y-axis, what's the shape of the curve ?

This is related to the favorite topic "I want to reach N-dan in X months."

My suspicion is it's exponential, but I am not sure.
Even if it's exponential, I don't know what kind of exponential curve, exactly.

My suspicion is also that it's not a linear curve.
This could explain, at least partially, why many people under-estimate its shape. ( So. )

Waiting for Godots?