If you had a child (or already do)...

[perceval]

i would be only mildly reluctant and let his mother say no and take all the blame for being close minded of course .
i like being the good cop.

slightly of topic i started playing go with my 7 year old and he enjoys it! but he insist on playing on 19x19 only for some reason, so i give him only 9 stones but i play into working ladders that i play to the end to help him gather thickness. maybe it will teach him bad habits but at least he agrees to play again.

does any of you have experience playing with 7 year old (or have you learn at 7)? i am not sure what i can explain to him. he seems to get the concept of eyes but i don't really tests his life and death capability

[xed_over]

i would be only mildly reluctant and let his mother say no and take all the blame for being close minded of course .
i like being the good cop.

slightly of topic i started playing go with my 7 year old and he enjoys it! but he insist on playing on 19x19 only for some reason, so i give him only 9 stones but i play into working ladders that i play to the end to help him gather thickness. maybe it will teach him bad habits but at least he agrees to play again.

does any of you have experience playing with 7 year old (or have you learn at 7)? i am not sure what i can explain to him. he seems to get the concept of eyes but i don't really tests his life and death capability

I started teaching my neighbor when he was only 6 years old (if I recall correctly). He mostly got the hang of it ok, but he wasn't improving as fast as I thought he might so naturally I suspected I was having a little trouble getting some concepts across. About a year later, he really took off when I switched to Chinese rules and the over simplified explanation of those rules as "the one with the most stones on the board wins". Then he learned on his own to resign when he got behind, which in turn helped him look for bigger moves and so on.

[snorri]

But yeah, if you live in the US, then maybe it does indeed make sense to discourage your children from following their dreams.

The world remains a strange place

The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America by Daniel Brook is a great read on related topic. Basically, it discusses how more and more recent college graduates in the U.S. are lured into more lucrative careers even when they start out with more idealistic goals.

The more potential you have to earn more, the harder it is to resist. So students go to college thinking that they will work for a non-profit or in science or be an elementary school teacher, etc. and are forced out that idealism because of concerns about paying off loans, being able to afford health care one one side and the potential to have a vastly wealthier lifestyle on the other.

So there is this fear of poverty that is very real. But also there is an oppurtunity cost that may be even a bigger factor.

[xed_over]

So students go to college thinking that they will work for a non-profit or in science or be an elementary school teacher, etc.

Is that why kids go to college?!?

I had it all backwards then. I went to college because I wanted a better paying job than flipping burgers.

[xed_over]

I suppose there is no one who actually wants to learn anything?

ah, yes... that's why I dropped out.

[oren]

I had it all backwards then. I went to college because I wanted a better paying job than flipping burgers.

And then we ended up in IT... Where did we go wrong?

[shapenaji]

I started teaching my neighbor when he was only 6 years old (if I recall correctly). He mostly got the hang of it ok, but he wasn't improving as fast as I thought he might so naturally I suspected I was having a little trouble getting some concepts across. About a year later, he really took off when I switched to Chinese rules and the over simplified explanation of those rules as "the one with the most stones on the board wins". Then he learned on his own to resign when he got behind, which in turn helped him look for bigger moves and so on.

I've often wondered about this, There's always something that has to be accepted in Japanese rules. People have to be taught that spending moves to kill something is bad.

Children, especially, learn by doing, and when we say, "Oh, you shouldn't do anything more there", I feel like we really impede their powerful creative learning process. Better to have them lose because I took the rest of the board, than for them to lose because they filled in all their own space. In the former, they can see that their moves were wasted, whereas in the latter, all they learned was that if you have a stone somewhere, you don't have territory there.

It's good to hear at least anecdotal evidence that this works.

[jts]

I started teaching my neighbor when he was only 6 years old (if I recall correctly). He mostly got the hang of it ok, but he wasn't improving as fast as I thought he might so naturally I suspected I was having a little trouble getting some concepts across. About a year later, he really took off when I switched to Chinese rules and the over simplified explanation of those rules as "the one with the most stones on the board wins". Then he learned on his own to resign when he got behind, which in turn helped him look for bigger moves and so on.

I've often wondered about this, There's always something that has to be accepted in Japanese rules. People have to be taught that spending moves to kill something is bad.

Children, especially, learn by doing, and when we say, "Oh, you shouldn't do anything more there", I feel like we really impede their powerful creative learning process. Better to have them lose because I took the rest of the board, than for them to lose because they filled in all their own space. In the former, they can see that their moves were wasted, whereas in the latter, all they learned was that if you have a stone somewhere, you don't have territory there.

It's good to hear at least anecdotal evidence that this works.

Time to roll out the double-blind experimental protocol, then. I'll teach my kids territory scoring, you teach yours area scoring, and we'll track their progress.

[Dusk Eagle]

Time to roll out the double-blind experimental protocol, then. I'll teach my kids territory scoring, you teach yours area scoring, and we'll track their progress.

Nit-picky, but that's only single-blind.

Anyway, shapenaji makes a good point. Even when teaching adults Go the fact that you don't have to capture all the dead stones can be confusing. Perhaps starting with Chinese scoring, especially for younger kids, could really help them understand the game better.

[jts]

Time to roll out the double-blind experimental protocol, then. I'll teach my kids territory scoring, you teach yours area scoring, and we'll track their progress.

Nit-picky, but that's only single-blind.

Anyway, shapenaji makes a good point. Even when teaching adults Go the fact that you don't have to capture all the dead stones can be confusing. Perhaps starting with Chinese scoring, especially for younger kids, could really help them understand the game better.

It's actually not even a little bit blind. (Unless my children inherit my myopia.)