This article is the written version of a video recorded at Saijo Club in Bucharest. The explanations belong to Catalin Taranu 5P.
The first thing you need to remember as a teacher before keeping a lesson is that you have to give the informations in a positive, relaxed and friendly manner. Who saw Saijo Sensei once, knows what i’m talking about.
When we enter the room, we must forget all our personal problems and take a friendly attitude because the first impression (first course) is very important. Based on this, the students will decide if they want to have anything in common with Go in the future.
As a first conclusion, the students will decide to attempt a second course based on the teacher and his/her way of teaching. That’s why we should never use expressions like “I told you so” or “you don’t know anything” 
Ideally, a teacher should start the first courses with a story about Go, to warm up the students (who know stories like these, please post them here, thank you). A little story preferred by Saijo Sensei is about ko and infinity and sounds like this:
A fairy comes down from the skies once at every 100 years and lands gently on a stone, her kimono barely touching the stone. Ko means the time it takes to erode that stone for good.
That would be all before switching to the board. But let’s remember how we were as beginners, how little we knew and how un-clear was everything. Now that we know how a stone in Atari looks like, let’s not get mad on a student that doesn’t get it quickly. “I told you ten times how this Atari thing is” won’t make good to anybody. Nor would any other remark that would put pressure on a student. Remeber that the memorising process is based a lot on repetition.
Another important thing is to try to involve all the students during the course and to encourage them permanently even if their moves are bad. Also, don’t give away too many informations, it will confuse them. It’s best to let them discover the solutions by themselves. We’ll see later in the article how to do that.
Switching to the technical part of the first course, we need to explain the rules. Catalin follows Saijo Sensei’s theory and says that there are only two rules in Go: capturing stones and surrounding territory. This is for simplicity and because these are the main rules, the rest are just being derived from them.
Capturing stones. Many beginners have problems with the liberties thinking that the diagonals are liberties as well. A very simple explanation is “a stone has as many liberties as the lines that goes out of it” and we show the example from the first image. That should make it clear that if we have a stone on the first line it will have 3 liberties while a stone in the corner will have only two liberties. We will continue by capturing all these stones and remove them from the board.
Then we will show them a group made of two stones and we’ll be surprised to hear that the group has more than six liberties. It is important that everyone goes by the demostration table to put stones on it until it’s clear how the liberties thing is. Even if the first stundent will say “ten liberties”, we’ll say “it’s good (we have to encourage them permanently), the stones are captured, but there are a few unnecessary stones, let’s see who else wants to try”. It is important for them to discover the correct answer by themselves and we have to be patient to achieve that. We should keep asking them to come to the demonstration board and put them to capture more complicated groups and we should wait every time for the correct answer.
The teacher will have to explain the suicide rule when a good time comes. “Because A doesn’t have any liberties, it has to be taken of the board, that’s why it’s forbidden by rules to suicide”. It all depends on how long the courses will last and the students age (if we have plenty of time, we should switch directly to Atari Go without explaining the suicide rule, allowing the students to discover it).
The next step is Atari Go, “who captures the first stone, wins”. We can start with an empty board or with a cross-cut. Then we can go to “who captures three stones wins”. Chances are that now someone will ask about the suicide (a positive feedback for the teacher).
This would be the first part of introducing Go – capturing stones. Ideally, the students should be allowed to play as many Atari Go as they can to assimilate the informations received so far. But it all depends on how much time we have on our hands.
Conclusion for the first part: some stories/legends about Go, perhaps something about the Asian Go scene, continental scene and about Go in our country. Then we should explain the capturing rule (by asking them to come to the demonstration board) and then let them play Atari Go.
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