Life In 19x19

cdybeijing wrote:

RobertJasiek wrote:

NoSkill wrote:I was looking into getting lessons from pros.

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.

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.

lemmata wrote:
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...

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.

cdybeijing wrote:

lemmata wrote:
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...

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.

lemmata wrote:the extra knowledge possessed by a pro may not surface in a lesson unless the student is fairly high-level himself.

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).

cdybeijing wrote:I definitely maintain that the burden of proof rests on the one who claims that the amateur player will be a better teacher.

Do you consider my previously stated evidence sufficient? If not, why not?

[admin]

The last on-topic post was as quoted below. I repeat it as a hint for the proper direction of this thread.

Buri wrote: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....
cheers,
buri

[/admin]

Hello Joaz,

one more question:

Joaz Banbeck wrote:The OP asked about professionals

It would help us if you could clarify who, IYO, is a professional:

- regular pro player (this would exclude most of the players mentioned by the OP)
- having a pro rank
- living from Go teaching (this would qualify also me, maybe Cornel Burzo and Ion Florescu as pros)

Best wishes,

Well, if we are going to stick to pro teachers only, I will say this: Guo Juan's English is probably the best of the people that the OP mentioned. Some pros may have better pronunciation but she seems to have the best grasp of conversational English within that group. This might be important if you plan on asking your teacher questions. Some of her audio lectures are also quite good.

Joaz Banbeck (size deflated) wrote:[admin]

Gentlemen,

Please drop the accusations of rudeness, and indeed drop the whole issue of Mr. Jasiek's teaching ability or lack thereof.

NoSkill wrote:I was looking into getting lessons from pros....

The OP asked about professionals ( my underlining added ). Please stick to the topic.

Thanks,
JB

[/admin]

Surely those interested in go teachers are interested in getting the best teaching for their money, and I don't see how a discussion of the relative merits of pro vs. amateur teaching is irrelevant to the topic.

Besides that, Robert earns at least part of his living by teaching go, and he believes that he can do it better than others. Why shouldn't we talk about it?

Furthermore, Robert has raised some interesting points, such as whether some teachers are better for western players than others, or the question of what constitutes a good go teacher, and I'd rather see such conversation encouraged rather than squelched.

While Robert's self-promotion may be tiresome to some, I find it similarly irritating to be told what not to talk about.

daal, I agree. It seems we are encouraged to discuss related topics in a new thread and in a gentleman-like manner. An admin please correct me if this interpretation is wrong.

Even if they are not professionals, I'm glad of being in the NGA with Juri (5d on the verge of 6d), Antti (6d, former insei) and Jeff (6d).

lemmata wrote:Well, if we are going to stick to pro teachers only, I will say this: Guo Juan's English is probably the best of the people that the OP mentioned. Some pros may have better pronunciation but she seems to have the best grasp of conversational English within that group. This might be important if you plan on asking your teacher questions. Some of her audio lectures are also quite good.

I have to disagree with this comment... I think almost everyone in the OP has acceptable English, and I wouldn't say Guo Juan is better than those listed. The only one I'm not so familiar with is ysyoon. Younggil has only recently moved to an English speaking country, but his English has been getting significantly better.

Maybe I'm reviving an old topic but I'd just like to say that Younggil's english has improved so much over the past three years it's like talking to a different person.