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You made an interesting observation, but in my personal experience, educators can help students by striking a balance between rigorous fundamentals and getting to improper-but-enjoyable interactions with a new skill, when teaching a new subject—if the student isn't already strongly self-motivated. My personal experience is with language learning, which might be comparable to focusing on sheet music and scales. When learning languages like Mandarin, Japanese, or Arabic, you can spend a lot of time focusing on fundamentals before getting started with how to say basic useful phrases (e.g. proper tones for Mandarin, and the alphabet system for Japanese and Arabic). I spent more than a month learning the mundane fundamentals of tones in Mandarin before learning basic useful phrases. I was personally strongly convinced this was useful and was prepared for the mundanity, but I could easily see myself or other people quitting after spending several weeks without knowing more than a few phrases. With Arabic, too, I spent weeks with one teacher just focusing on the alphabet and how the letter shapes transform in certain letter combinations, without learning more than very basic phrases—which I appreciated, as the strong basis paid off down the line. Another teacher, however, spent about two-thirds of the time on phrases with romanization with English letters, and about a third of the time on the alphabet. ~~ For learners—especially adult students—already convinced about learning a subject, a mundane approach is acceptable because they already have the proper motivation to learn. But especially for younger students, perhaps it's okay to spend a good amount of time having fun learning the subject—but not in a way that's necessarily optimized for time. For adolescents learning musical instruction, a better approach might be a split between theory and learning to play a simple but nice song without knowing how to read notes. But for already strongly-motivated students and/or adults, a few weeks or even months on more mundane can be even preferable, especially if the student has volunteered to spend their time working through the mundanity. |