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by zszugyi 2182 days ago
What's fascinating to me is the amount of knowledge and teaching experience that has to go into designing those exercises. How long and how many teachers and students did it take to come up with a good set of exercises to develop towards a certain skillset?
1 comments

It's difficult to say.

On the one hand I thing such lessons can be so effective because they are generally one-on-one. That already goes a long way to disseminating knowledge, especially when compared to the "knowledge dissemination theater" that is the large lecture hall.

On the other, musicians construct these insane pedagogical family trees. So-and-so's teacher was a student of so-and-so, who was a student of so-and-so, and now we're already back in the 19th century. My personal opinion is that a lot of that is more inspirational than practical. But it certainly has an effect.

There's also the easter egg that teaching can accelerate one's own mastery. It's basically forcing one to do rubber-duck debugging as a full-time job. Add to that an ever-expanding knowledge about the physical aspect of playing instruments (how to avoid injury, how to maximize practice time), and I think that's where a lot of the knowledge comes from.