[counters]

This really got me thinking, so here's another comparison to draw on:

As a teenage musician, I hated drilling my scales and etudes. Why bother when practice was limited and I had cool ensemble and solo rep to learn? What I didn't understand and appreciate at the time is that all the technical drudgery serves a very real purpose. Most of the existing pedagogy is directly pulled from, based on, or references real repertoire which you'll undoubtedly encounter in your musical career.

All those scales in intervals? Well, you can't even begin to make a complex passage musical if you can't execute the technique! Arpeggios in weird fingering/shifting patterns? Turns out that some very exposed orchestral passage necessitates that you use an oddball fingering because it's just not practical to do anything else in context. That entire development section in the concerto you need to cram for an audition? Good thing that one of your etudes book was effectively variations and embellishments on that section, so you can lean on muscle memory and focus on making it sound nice!

Essay writing is much the same. No matter what I'm writing - an e-mail, a project proposal, a performance review, whatever - I'm trying to communicate a point. That means constructing an argument and supplying evidence. And doing so in a way that your audience will grok without any additional intervention. You build this skill by practicing, sometimes in ways that seem dumb, boring, and disconnected from reality. Not every pedagogy is ground so well in reality as my music example, but I can't imagine that the cynical take that it's all purely to automate grading is a rational take on things.

[calvinmorrison]

I've jumped back into doodling on guitar after a mid-20's post band break up and... it's totally different this time. I am so much more interested in scales, building chords by manually and so forth, when I was younger I wanted to play songs.

The opposite is true for my math. I enjoyed algebra as a kid and hated trig and calculus. Now I am much more interested in calculus and don't like algebra algebra.

Sometimes there's different ways to learning, I have no idea.

[riskable]

> That means constructing an argument and supplying evidence.

Ah wouldn't it be fantastic if school essays were more like proving to your boss that you followed the spec to the letter and less like... Following the spec to the letter.

That's the difference and it makes all the difference.

[counters]

What about convincing your colleagues that something about the spec is wrong?

It's worth noting that the same skills the "version 1" essay is supposed to teach should be helpful if all you need to do is compile a checklist and save yourself the hassle of argument.