First day here and disappointed with first OGS teacher - Do you think I was rude in this "teaching game"?

I would consider calling me a liar an insult, but it’s way too early for that.
I don’t even know what “this” is, nor where I told that the teacher was/wasn’t rude

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A lie is when you say something is true which you know to be false. Having a different opinion to you whether something is rude or not is not a lie.

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I am that teacher you are all talking about behind my back.

I have taught most days for free since 2020. I make a point at the start to say that I teach as I go rather than in review. Often I ask if this works - those I have asked say they prefer this to post game review as more timely, but as you point at, and as I experienced with the player complaining here, it can damage player focus and fluidity of play.

A 3k can teach at 6k-12k level that I target. Or I would not continue doing so. Sometimes, the player beats me and my teaching is not good. But I try. I am retired, aged 66 with chronic mental and physical health issues. Teaching takes my mind away from these. Sometimes they damage my teaching.

Online culture these days is such that of all the 100s of players I have taught, only one ever said anything like “Can I do anything as a thanks for the lesson?”. Just ponder where we are where we tend to take with scant regard for who gives.

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I played two games with @NicelyManifest.
In the game description he wrote: slower game please.

I enjoyed playing and chatting with him.

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Let me give more details following my previous post.

I also played a (non-teaching) game with him in 2020. He indeed put “slower game please” in the description but I didn’t understand he wanted to play slowly every move, including at the opening (usually I play the opening fast and slow down during the middle game, so that my total thinking time during a slow game is around 1 hour) and to spend about as much time chatting than thinking about the game. If he had expressed his expectations more clearly I would have played differently, or I wouldn’t have clicked on the challenge.

The game ended at move 41 after 9 minutes. I had just played a bad sequence a bit fast, he resigned while being 5 points ahead according to AI and blocked me.

Note that I’m not criticizing the fact that a 3k teaches 6k-12k, anyone who volunteers for teaching is welcome. Nor am I criticizing what he asks to his students (answer slowly every move on the board and answer fast to the chat). Just saying that students have not clearly been warned.

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I have to say it feels to me that a lot of this stems from limits in the way OGS works – specifically, y’all keep talking about a “game description”, which as far as I know doesn’t exist: I imagine you’re referring to the “game name”.

I don’t know what the character limit is for the game name, but it’s clear that it’s intended for very short descriptions, and indeed NicelyManifest’s “Teaching game for 6k-12k players” is one of the longest I’ve seen.

From this discussion, it’s clear that such a short description is not enough to capture nuances that may be very important to describe the intended style of the game, and that relying on dumping a longer description in chat after the game has started is also not a very useful strategy for live games.

It would be nice if we had an option to actually add a longer description to a custom challenge, perhaps causing a flag like the “custom komi” one to appear next to the accept button.

I know I for one have wished for it several times in the past. There are so many potential interesting ways to play Go, including different ways to teach and learn, and to me it seems weird for an online server to be designed in a way that kind of forces you to somehow contact your opponent before the game if you ever want to try something vaguely unusual – meaning you can’t benefit from the “public” nature of the server to find an opponent, and you have to instead find the opponent on your own before creating the game (or cross your fingers and hope whoever clicks on your challenge doesn’t dislike whatever you’re trying).

I’m not sure I was able to explain myself properly, anyway, just food for thought :laughing:

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My game with him ended after move 2. He then chatted and lectured me the importance of playing slow and his demand that I must play slow. So I challenged him: you understand you lecture someone much stronger to play slow? That did not end well.

Ironically, his SLOW game was like 20 minutes main time, and I was the one who constantly setup 1 hour +5x1min games. :rofl:

Thanks for the response. I understand you now and I no longer blame you for your behaviors. I assumed you were much younger. What you say sometimes seems patronizing and almost condescending if you are younger. But if you are 66, they make more sense and I can understand the way you acted.

Although I don’t agree with your criticism of “online culture these days”, I can understand your point of view and why you may feel disappointed that few people thank you enough.

I apologize if you feel like people are talking “behind your back”, and I also want to let you know that it might be easier for both you and your students if you acknowledge that people come from different backgrounds, speak different languages and have different expectations about play style and etiquette. For example, to many people, an opponent who leaves in the middle of the game and blocks you is much more insulting than an opponent who doesn’t chat with you.

Next time when you see a student like me who doesn’t respond quickly always, try to accommodate their behavior if you can. Or, you can say sorry and leave the game without calling them rude.

That said, I am not upset any more and I don’t want this post to grow into a “name and shame”, so if you think it is appropriate, @Gia @BHydden, please feel free to close the post for further replies. Thank you all for the discussion!

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I would like to offer a more positive possible interpretation of this. Go has a nice culture of people offering free teaching games to weaker players, money only tends to change hands once you get into high dan teachers (though I as an EGF 4d OGS 9d never charged, some weaker than me do). The student says thank you for the game at the end, but I wouldn’t expect anything else to be offered to me; what would it be? Some money via paypal, a box of chocolates or flowers in the post? But what that student can do is give back to the Go community at large by themselves offering a teaching game to a player weaker than them. The KGS Teaching Ladder was a good example of this. So @NicelyManifest whilst you may not directly see more than a thank you, by giving free teaching games you contribute to that free teaching culture and encourage your students to do the same so there could be a thankful 15 kyu from that 8 kyu you taught, and who knows, some time later they might have improved and end up giving you a free teaching game in the future.

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Another case: https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/1b5emlf/why_did_he_get_mad_because_i_did_not_resign/

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I played game with him recently. He insisted that I have to play slow even standard moves where its literally nothing to think about. Well, I slowed down. Then he suddenly resigned because I didn’t talk often enough in chat. That was unexpected. And how am I supposed to (think a lot before each move) and (talk in chat a lot) at the same time?

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In my opinion I don’t think this is a good teaching style at all. It feels like the teacher is thinking only from their perspective. Expecting the student to respond in 1 minute to a variation and getting upset when they don’t is just not good teaching. Students can take 2-3 minutes to just read out a 3 move sequence properly and this is with me walking them through it over voice.

Sharing a variation is fine, but it doesn’t require a response. Some variations can be taken as a rhetorical question to someone over the internet. Even if you say something you think clearly expresses your intent, over text in can mean something different. Teachers need to have more patience.

And don’t blame the student for not understanding. If you don’t like how it is going you can apologize that you are not the right teacher for them. They did nothing wrong as they were trying to learn and answer when they could. But you were not enjoying the experience for a free teaching game. Apologize and move on and explain they did nothing wrong and it is okay, you just didn’t mesh well.

Finally mental health is not the internets problem. I’m very happy that Go helps you personally. But that is not random strangers problems and they are not required to be understanding over your situation when they could not possible know or understand from a single interaction over the internet. This is not the place to mention it or use it at an excuse. A different forum post asking for advice how to take your specific situation into account or to talk about it is fine. But that is not what this thread was about in any way.

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From his old profile

I have endured 28+ years of anxiety, depression and tension headaches. Slow, calm games where I have at least some connection via chat with my opponent is like an antidote to these problems.

That was nice to point out from him so that to understand better his way of teaching.

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Ironically talking in game is generally considered very bad manners and usually only found at DDK. Friendly conversations is nice but it’s not like it is required. I’ve been playing on zen mode because I want to have a bigger board and focus. Doesn’t mean I am ignoring my opponent.

IRL I would agree (obvious exceptions are obvious, teaching games, friendly games over a 15 minute break where you also want to talk with the person while playing, &c.), but online I don’t think it’s rude at all to chat. I am always happy when my opponent engages with me in chat. It’s their right not to, but it does make the game lose a little humanness.

Of course, certain ways of chatting are rude, such as giving advice, but I think not chatting is if not rude, at least a bit cold

Anyway that’s all a bit Off topic as we are considering teaching games with an agreement on this side.

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This person, like all of us, has his own quirks, and while it benefits him also for reasons he has since explained (and in the usual way that all teachers benefit), NicelyManifest is overall still a giver and he needs to be encouraged.

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Encouraged, yes, but probably also coached. When players new to OGS have a bad experience, it needs to be taken seriously - if someone repels more new users than they help, then that person has had a net negative impact on OGS, regardless of their intentions or their hourly rate.

In the case of this user, I think the main thing is being a lot clearer about what he expects from his students during the lesson. He said at the beginning, “I teach as we go with comments and variations. I hope this suits you.” But it’s clear from the chat that he has additional expectations, like that the student will carefully study variations during the lesson, respond quickly to prompts, and engage in dialogue during the lesson. This is not really standard practice in go instruction, especially when it’s all just text, so I think he should set clearer expectations at the beginning of the lessons to avoid future problems.

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At first I agreed with pwsiegel and the sentiment that a teacher should be clearer about their expectations.

And that would be “ideal”.

But on the other hand, maybe students should not be so sensitive? In real life if you take a lesson from someone - even someone you pay - they don’t lay out all their personal ettiquette guidelines in a document for you to approve.

Instead, you take a lesson, and if they are gruff and rude, you move on to a different teacher.

I guess that collectively as OGS folk we care about this because we don’t want newcomers to move on to a whole different site just because there’s a teacher with a “wrong style”.

So it makes sense to reassure a newcomer that not all teachers at OGS are like any specific teacher.

But we have to point out the obvious (which the OP noted themselves, but seemed to ignore) that any teacher you get at OGS is just a person who put their hand up to teach. OGS isn’t a “site that hires and vets teachers”. We do vet abuse, to ensure that interactions are civil here, but teachers are just as free to block students that they don’t like to teach as anyone else is free to block a player they don’t get along with.

I’d also note that the OP was a bit muddled in what they were asking in their post.

The title asks “was I rude?”. The answer is no - they just turned out to be not the sort of person the teacher wanted to teach.

Then suddenly the post turned to “therefore I am disappointed with OGS”, and we all turned to asking the question was the teacher out of line? And that led to the idea that the teacher should document their expectations of the student!

No. I don’t think that’s the right answer.

Possibly being a bit more polite about what happens when a student turns out to be “not the right kind” would be a sensible request to that teacher. But that’s about it, IMO.

If after volunteering my teaching I got told “you need to document your student expectations better”, I’d say “screw that, I’ll go teach somewhere else”.

OTOH, if someone politely approached me and say “hey, could you be a bit more polite when you discover that a student doesn’t suit you” … that sounds reasonable.

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To be clear, I’m not really arguing for an OGS policy which says that all teachers have to specify their expectations of students, or something like that. Rather I’m offering advice from one human to another, which is basically “If you have strong opinions about how your students should conduct themselves during a lesson, maybe you should tell them at the beginning rather than getting mad at them half way through”.

OGS policy only enters into it insofar as a new user had a bad first experience on the site. I’m not a moderator, but by my judgment the teacher’s behavior toward the end of the interaction starts to approach the “no harassment” clause in the OGS ToS, whereas I don’t think the student did anything wrong.

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