Somewhere each game is a teaching unless you play all time with the same player. If you lose, ask why.
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From my experience people can have extremely different abilities when it comes to that type of analytical thinking. And it appears as if people are born with that skill. They either have it or they don’t have it.
Trying to teach someone Go (or chess, …) who dislikes analytical thinking, is a waste of time.
I also believe that only a small fraction of the total population really likes analytical thinking. Maybe 10% or even less.
So for me the first step in teaching newbies is to find out whether they do like analytical thinking. If they don’t, learning Go is a pain for both sides and it’s better to play Activity (or whatever) with them instead.
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In fact, i never had to find it by myself. They do.
Question is: Will they let you know?
And are you (as a teacher) willing to pick it up? Or will you drag it on and on and on, hoping that more of the same will just do the trick at some point.
If you go into a newbie-teaching session with the understanding that most people are just not well equipped for such games, the probability for frustrations is just significantly reduced.
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Well to me go is for everyone as long as they enjoy it. Got an artist once who tried to draw with 0 reading… Why not? Sometimes people discover hidden analytic abilities… What i mean is there are no miracle and i don’t push (anymore but that’s another story) people to play go.
I noticed quickly two kind of people the one who will play and the one who won’t. A bit like with Interest in mathematics.
So i teached a lot and i really didn’t have to separate them myself, they do.
There is a big difference in teaching one beginner and teaching a classroom of beginners. And there are text books that step by step, easy to hard, covering all sort of aspects in stages.
A teacher usually doesn’t get frustrated by students behind in a classroom, but instead favoritism toward talented ones. That’s how the system works, selected few get promoted to more advanced classes, while those stay behind, will just keep repeating practices, quizzes and questions over and over, till they finally get it or just drop out.
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Besides attraction on analytic is quite a part of the fun you get but still not sufficient in itself. You can priviligiate other things, and first not want to spend so much time on go (which usually happen).
There are some people who from the very beginning just want to play, and will even ask you more and again. These ones i meet them later and i know they became go players.
There are other ones who midly want to play. Sometimes they become go players because they keep being attracted by what go is even if they don’t look very fitted on the analytic side maybe.
And there are others who just don’t care at all or so few. Next day they won’t ask a game again.
I’m fine with all of them.
Now i remember a good example of a very near friend (at that time) who i don’t really know about his analytic abilities/taste but he refused to hear anything about go for like 5yrs and one day became go crazy and made his way in the game. So hard to say unless you want to train quickly strong players only of course.
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A lot of Go schools would sell the idea that learning Go would help promote critical thinking, patient, endurance, and analytic abilities, instead of being prerequisites.
Hard to say it’s true or not, but they are selling points for parents to send their kids to Go schools though.
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Which is fine because learning Go does all that.
Young kids are special anyway because they can compensate limited talent with significant training much better than adults.
But also with young kids you see enormous differences in talent when it comes to games like Go.