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by Aria von Elbe
November 22, 2004
It was the fifth meeting of the new Pine Crest
High School Go Club when I realized we were actually getting somewhere.
The previous meeting, I’d logged into gobase.org and we went
through beginner Life
and Death problems, which, you’ve got to give them credit, the members learned
fast. They really seemed to understand the two eye requirement for living groups
and I even had one of those eager know-it-alls who dared me to pull up a 4-dan
problem. And he only figured out the answer by process of elimination between
options A and B. There’s no way he could explain the moves afterwards, but then
again neither could I.
Still, despite everything I’ve been
trying to teach my “students,” I was most proud during that fifth meeting. I
decided it was time for them to learn how to play a real game, not just Capture
Go. But what do you do when you don’t have enough equipment for
you club
and haven’t received the starter kit from the AGA yet? You tell your members to
boot up their computers and go to kiseido.com, the infamous KGS, one of the most
popular and graphically pleasing Go servers out there. Thankfully, my members
agreed, downloaded the client, signed up for accounts, and started playing 9x9
games like there was no tomorrow; even though there was and I know for fact that
more than a few of them were playing online during various classes
the next
day.
But that’s not what made me proud, though of
course I
love the idea of others tuning the teachers out to play a game against a stranger
some halfway around the world. No, it was the way they paid attention to what I
was teaching them when they handed control over to me after their games, and the
way the used what I taught them in their second go-round, that made me
smile.
That, and when I got down to the Miami Go
Club meeting two days later and shared teaching stories with my sensei.
Who would
have ever thought that the man who taught me how to play would be sharing a laugh
with me over the precocious Life and Death “genius” in my club, a club he’ll get
to see first-hand this week. And with sensei coming to teach at my club, never
again will my students think I know the answer to every Life and Death problem.
Which I’m okay with, jus as long as they continue to play in class when they’re
not supposed to.
-16-year-old Aria
von Elbe is an 11th grader in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
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