Yang Lesson Review - A Small Gathering Of Friends

I have one student in particular that I have been spending a lot of time with in the past few months.  In the time that we have been working together he has gone from 21k to 14k.  He gets most of the credit due to his hard work, but I have been commenting his games pretty regularly, so I take some credit too.  Recently I started reviewing my Yang lessons with him online by replaying the sgf files of those lessons on KGS at a specific time each week.  My lessons with Yang are private, but it is really easy to upload them and step through them for my student's benefit later.  Although I used to make all my lessons public many years ago, I think that at this stage, with KGS being a little less civilized than it used to be, that I would be too self conscious making the lessons public again.  I do the replay of my lesson not only for my student, but also for myself as a form of review.  In the six weeks that I have been doing this we have drawn a small audience, and I would like to keep it that way.

There was a post not long ago on go discussions concerning stronger players "taking over" lessons, so I have been silent up until now about the reviews, and people have wandered in from time to time and they behaved themselves well.  Aside from my involvement with the Mac, the focus on my Yang lesson reviews also accounts for the lack of posts to this blog.  They have dominated my go activities lately, and I had been reluctant to mention them until now.

I have been really clear with anyone who ends up watching that the objective is to review the lesson rather than go off on tangents that were never explored in the original lesson.  I also make it clear that we are trying to keep the review at the 20k - 10k level.  My student is around the middle of that range right now.  So far things have gone really well.  Last week there were only three people besides myself in attendance, and it went very smoothly.  During a previous presentation we had about eight people in the room, and it was a little more difficult to control, but I can be pretty direct, so it wasn't really a problem.

I am still not advertising the time of the review because I am not trying to populate the room, just posting about what I am doing right now in my go life, which after all is the purpose of this blog. For those who might wonder how Mr. Yang feels about my lessons reviews... he was asked, and he approves.