Youngsters in San Diego were treated to go lessons from Ted Terpstra, the new AGA Executive VP, at a summer camp at the Japanese Friendship Garden on July 18th. “This week it was first and second graders, next week is third & fourth graders and then fifth and sixth the week after,” reports Terpstra. “It was the first time that the children had played the game; we started with 5×5 boards so they could get a feel for trying to surround territory and capturing. They had been exposed to go on Monday at camp when a couple of episodes of Hikaru no Go were shown on HULU. I used go sets and accessories from the AGF Class Room Starter set I just received for the La Jolla Library class I am teaching this fall. I also checked out several volumes of Hikaru No Go from the neighborhood library that the children eagerly read while waiting for the class to begin. I had wifi so I put up a game being played on KGS just to give the kids a feel for how a real game developed. It was great to see how quickly these children learned the game and exuded enthusiasm,” said Terpstra. – Paul Barchilon, E-J Youth Editor, Photo by Ted Terpstra.
This year’s Teacher of the Year winner, Joe Walters of Pasadena, CA, learned go in the Navy. That is, he learned about go. “A buddy and I tried it and wound up bewildered, with two walls across the middle of the board,” Walters said. “I didn’t really start to understand go until the Ishi Press books began to appear in the 1970’s.” Walters’ current rank is about 8K. Each year the 
Justin Teng of Rockville, MD and Rachel Daley of Boulder, CO are the winners of the 2012 
Applicants are encouraged to write about how go has “affected you as a person.” Daley’s essay was particularly striking in this regard. “I’m not an especially social person,” she admitted in her essay, but “the go club forced me to leave my house at least once on weekends and spend time with other people, from older men with hearing aids to a young Korean girl who has since moved back to Korea.” She started a club at her school and began helping the organizer of the local club. “One week he left me in charge of teaching anyone who dropped by. For a 14-year-old it felt like a lot of responsibility . . . . I found that I was better at teaching the game than actually playing. Without even realizing it, I became more confident with strangers. . . . Go also taught me how to be comfortable in a room where I was the only female. I saw [the male players] as my peers and rivals instead of some different entity. This gave me the confidence to never feel intimidated by the male majority in my science and math classes. . . . I realized that this is how society changes – not by a sudden huge wave but by individuals not accepting degrading stereotypes and moving forward despite them.” Applications are now being accepted for the 2013 scholarships. 
