Life In 19x19

RBerenguel wrote:

daal wrote:John's post reminds me of a description I once heard of a clown school in Switzerland, in which the juggling students were required to spend the first year using only one ball. Anyone can toss a ball or three from one hand to the other, but if you spend a year doing it with just one ball, that ball will do exactly what you want. It seems obvious to me that this precision would be far more difficult to achieve otherwise, and is an invaluable skill when faced with complex patterns. How this applies to learning go, I'm not quite sure, but as an example, really knowing inside and out how a certain jump can be cut and under what circumstances, is something that could be trained in a similar manner.

Actually the proper way to learn the 3 ball cascade (i.e. starting into juggling) is to start with just one ball and keep at it for an ungodly high amount of time. Of course, no-one does it for long enough (on its own) and you eventually pick 2, three and then spend a lot of time crouching. But the day you get a cascade is great

When I was eight I got a magic set for Christmas, which included three hard rubber balls and a booklet on how to juggle. The first lesson was to throw one ball straight up in the air and catch it with the throwing hand. So far, so good. The second lesson was to do it with your eyes closed. That was the end of my juggling career.

In any domain, whether Go, juggling or playing the guitar, there is the balance between what's right and what's enjoyable. Extremely motivated students are capable of doing what's right, provided they have a teacher who tells them. Most of us require some kind of positive feedback, whether it comes from solving problems (close to the right thing), reading books about the opening (marginally productive) and replaying pro games (close to irrelevant, despite John's plausible remark about the subconscious).

A teacher should recognize the student's reservoir of motivation and feed it accordingly, even if that makes the learning path less efficient in itself. The joy of juggling three balls for a few iterations will surely reinforce motivation for those students who'd give up after a week of desperately trying to juggle one ball blindfolded.

This is something I've long underestimated as a (low level) club teacher and started understanding when learning the guitar in a correct but utterly boring way. Nowadays I include the conditional phrase "if you want to improve". Otherwise, Bill's "study what you like" is the best possible advice for self study.

If you don't like memorizing pro games, there's indeed no urgent need to find out how to do so.