Experience with Teaching Beginners

RobertJasiek · #1

What is everybody's experience with teaching beginners? Since oren asks, let me start with a few notes about my own experience:

Apart from written teaching, my teaching of beginners (in this thread, I mean double digit kyu players) comprises clubs, tournaments and pupils. I have very little experience with teaching absolute beginners (newbies), e.g., I have never taught at schools.

My experience in clubs was mostly from 1991 to ca. 1997; since mid 1993 "teaching" starts to make some sense. However, it was not pure teaching, but post-game discussion. Nothing special, and not so impressive as teaching, IIRC. At that time, I simply was a player.

My teaching at tournament events is mostly at the European Go Congresses since 1993, simply because this event allows very much time for friendly games or teaching. I play many games against many players of all levels, but EGCs have very few players weaker than 20 kyu, so teaching beginners concerns 20 to 10 kyus. I'd say that most were satisfied to delighted by my teaching. A few regulars would ask me several times at every congress to review their games, because, as they said, they liked the reason- and explanation-orientated teaching.

Roughly one third of my pupils has been beginners. IMX, beginners are not different from pupils that are intermediate or dan players. Of course, I teach beginners less demanding and must explain more basic or easy things. Surprisingly though, most beginners are as curious to hear much theory as stronger players. There are exceptions of beginners with specific difficulties, such as slow reading, and so I must adopt my teaching style to those beginners' special needs. This is not a matter of teaching skill, but of not showing one's exercised patience. Sitting 5 minutes while waiting for the beginner's reading of the next move is tougher than non-stop dense teaching, but it can be important to let the pupil think, because he must learn to think well if he shall solve reading or strategy problems. As much patience the teacher needs with himself, the pupil needs the patience to avoid blunders due to prematurely interrupted reading. Showing the variations and the related theory is only half of the teaching task; helping the pupil with his own psychology and thinking for actually doing the reading is the other half. Beginners need to learn this more than stronger players.

The "tough" kind of beginners wants to play only. For them, my task as a teacher consists mainly of convincing the pupil to listen a few minutes more than just one or two minutes in between every two games, and to read some problem books for improving their reading.

Boidhre · #2

RobertJasiek wrote:

The "tough" kind of beginners wants to play only. For them, my task as a teacher consists mainly of convincing the pupil to listen a few minutes more than just one or two minutes in between every two games, and to read some problem books for improving their reading.

If they're weaker than 18k I'd consider that to be the best kind of beginner if you want them to improve quickly.

tekesta · #3

I personally do not have extensive experience with teaching beginners, but I do remember some things from my experiences therein. For starters, most of the ones I have taught to play and were indeed interested discovered the game through Hikaru no Go. I did not spend any significant length of time teaching any single person. I did not have to explain much since my students wanted as much playing time as possible.

Now that I look back, I knew only some things about teaching beginners. I have recently realized that life & death is an emergent property of the rule of capture.

Presently I teach a student here and a student there, on and off. Where I live, Go is a rather obscure game that most people have never even heard of. So much of my time would be devoted to explaining what Go is and this is something I yet have to master.

When I go to church on Sunday mornings, I often bring along my Go set. At breakfast time, before the start of Mass, there are two young girls, not of Asiatic origin, aged 7 or 8 (with their parents, of course) interested in learning. One took lessons from me for the first time today. I explained to her the rules and capture & liberties. We played a couple games of capture Go and that was it. She seemed to have a little more patience and interest than the next one I will mention. My other student has been learning from me for the last several weeks. It appears she is often too busy with school work to devote any significant amount of time to the game; whenever I play against her she makes the same mistakes over and over again. I'll spend a bit more time teaching her, but it might be easier if I talk to her about Disney Princesses :lol:

Where I live Go is not very well known and detaching it from its intellectual connotations is difficult since getting good at the game requires constant effort and refinement. (Then again, even more kinesthetic pursuits like boxing and baseball have similar requirements for success.) As well, there is a certain anti-intellectualism in US society, which means generally that it's cool to possess below-average intelligence and deride anyone with well-exercised intelligence as being out of touch with the common citizen, not to mention lacking plain honesty. I have to contend with this cultural climate when teaching the game of Go to novices.

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Those who are skilled in combat do not become angered, those who are skilled at winning do not become afraid. Thus the wise win before the fight, while the ignorant fight to win. - Ō-sensei Ueshiba

moyoaji · #4

I have probably taught around three dozen absolute beginners how to play go over the last few years between club promotion tables and cultural events at my university. I have found the most important thing is to get them started playing a game.

My current formula/plan is to teach them the rules using basic examples:

This is capturing

Click Here To Show Diagram Code: [go]$$Wc This is capturing $$ --------------- $$ | . . . . . . . $$ | . . . O . . . $$ | . . O B O . . $$ | . . . 1 . . . $$ | . . . . . . .[/go]

This is also capturing

Click Here To Show Diagram Code: [go]$$Wc This is also capturing $$ --------------- $$ | . . . . . . . $$ | . . . O O . . $$ | . . O B B O . $$ | . . . 1 O . . $$ | . . . . . . .[/go]

The diagonal doesn't connect

Click Here To Show Diagram Code: [go]$$Bc The diagonal doesn't connect $$ --------------- $$ | . . X . . . . $$ | . X W X O . . $$ | . W 1 . O . . $$ | . . . , . . . $$ | . . . . . . .[/go]

This is 4 points for white

Click Here To Show Diagram Code: [go]$$Wc This is 4 points for white $$ --------------- $$ | . . O . . . . $$ | . . O . . . . $$ | O O O . . . . $$ | . . . , . . . $$ | . . . . . . .[/go]

This is a ko

Click Here To Show Diagram Code: [go]$$Wc This is a ko $$ --------------- $$ | . . . . . . . $$ | . . . O . . . $$ | . . O B O . . $$ | . . X W X . . $$ | . . . X . . . $$ | . . . . . . .[/go]

After that, I play a game with them. If they are curious how to proceed I'll tell them the basic idea of corners-sides-center. During the game I try to find common beginner mistakes and point them out so they see how the stones work.

These stones get captured

Click Here To Show Diagram Code: [go]$$Wc These stones get captured $$ --------------- $$ | . . . W W X . $$ | . . a W X X . $$ | . . O X . . . $$ | . . O X . . . $$ | . . O X . . .[/go]

This is a ladder

Click Here To Show Diagram Code: [go]$$Wc This is a ladder $$ --------------- $$ | . . . . . . . $$ | . . O O . . . $$ | . O B B O . . $$ | . . O , . . . $$ | . . . . . . .[/go]

After the game I talk about scoring again. I show them territory scoring. I explain how dead stones work and how you can move stones in your territory to get boxes.

Then, if others are there, I try to get two new players to play a game and I monitor it. If there is any confusion about rules I'll let them know. Usually, two beginners are quite capable of playing several games.

For example, at my university's Global Games event our club taught Go and Shogi to fellow students. One guy played 5-6 games of go on a 13x13 board against 3 different opponents not including myself. He was able to teach one opponent about ladders after I had explained it to him in our first game. Yeah, all the players made a lot of mistakes, but they also learned a lot of moves through playing that they thought were fascinating because they discovered them themselves.

My goal when teaching beginners is not to teach rulesets or amazing strategy. I only want them to like the game and I think the most important thing to do for that is to get them to play games - so I try to move quickly into playing and not spend more time than needed on rules. If they have questions about these things I will teach them, but otherwise I let them discover tactics on their own.

gowan · #5

Even though we like to promote the game as having simple rules, in fact for beginners the rules aren't so simple and, in my experience, beginners often get confused. Furthermore, beginners haven't gotten a sense of the goal of the game so it is likely to be boring for them. I don't play on a 19x19 board with people around 20 ranks weaker than I am; a 9x9 board with handicap as needed works better. For complete beginners I like a version of the capturing game. I like this because it focusses on just one idea, capturing or avoiding capture, and beginners learn naturally about capturing and connecting. Once they have progressed past the capturing two stones version I move to the 9x9 board with regular rules, of course not going into full detail on the rules. I let ko and seki occur naturally during play rather than teaching them explicitly at the start. In fact, I recommend actual play on a 9x9 board as early as possible without the student becoming confused or bored. I think area scoring is best with beginners because questions of whether stones are alive or not and what territory is are avoided. The big problem with beginners is finding appropriate partners for them to play. Unless there are other beginners or weak ddk's available beginners can become dismayed at how much more skilled even the weaker players in the club are and they lose interest and give up the game.

EdLee · #6

Hi Robert,

I've been teaching beginners, including absolute beginners, in Go for about 10 year;
and in another discipline, for about 20 years.

Locally, we have a Go club and we meet every Wednesday evening from 6 pm to 10 pm
at a coffee shop. Occasionally, random people would ask about what we are doing.

For an absolute beginner presentation, please see post #4 in this thread.

Experience with Teaching Beginners

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