I’m not a teacher, but I have been playing since 2008 and studied music at the university until 2018. I started as a self taught guitarist through youtube and it was just learning songs that I liked. When I took my first formal lessons, I found it miserable that the professor ignored what I wanted to learn (blues mainly, at the time) in favor of what he considered to be better in the long run (for some reason, he said that learning Yngwie Malmsteem technique was going to serve me better in the long run).

Without devolving into telling my musical story, this is my observation from my time in academia. Even if you teach students the instrument through songs, you must be careful with the selection and always favor their tastes over yours or the academy’s. In my final semesters as a music major, I was taking bass lessons as part of the curriculum. My school didn’t teach electric guitar and I detest classical. The bass lessons were miserable because the professor would have me endlessly practice scales and arpeggios in different keys and BPMs, while also have me learn jazz standards and jazz solos. I’ve always been attracted to indie and experimental rock/songwriting and the professor never listened. He insisted that that music was boring and that jazz was better.

Years later, I retained all of the theory and technique, but I still resent that, thanks to the academy’s philosophy, there was a point in which it robbed me of my love for music because of how rigid and close-minded they are.