241–250 of 437 posts
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Unless you plan to be a professional musician, why does it matter if you “get far”? Isn’t it supposed to be for fun?
Because eventually you plateau without proper foundations, and that's not fun.
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You're using yourself as a refuting example, but at the end you disqualify yourself by being 4th out of 20000 in some undisclosed math ranking
his whole point was that once he found joy in it, he could excel. I'm confident there's loads of things I could be good at - I'm only good at the things that I enjoy putting effort into.
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You need to "get far" enough for it to be fun. You want to have fun playing along to your favourite song. Or impromptu jam with a friend. Or sing for yourself because a song reminds you of a memory. They all have a minimum skill requirement, without which it isn't as enjoyable. You need to know to play reasonably well by ear to have fun imo.
Sure, those are definitely fun things to be able to do, but it’s not some kind of essential life skill. If it’s not someone’s thing, why force it? There are plenty of other skills that are also fun to have.
I just had a kid so this is pretty real to me. How it will go is anybody's guess, but I hope it does go well :)
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"20 years later, I got back to playing piano, and I can't thank my parent enough for having me to continue playing in my teenage years." One of the tragedies of being young is that few have the insight to realize that the 'boring' stuff parents and teachers are forcing us to learn will actually benefit us and that eventually we'll be very thankful that they did. My parents nagged me all the time about studying and ev…
> One of the tragedies of being young is that few have the insight to realize that the 'boring' stuff parents and teachers are forcing us to learn will actually benefit us and that eventually we'll be very thankful that they did. I'm 40. I don't know, perhaps I'm still young. I did not appreciate having to learn the boring parts. Learning things for the next exam so as to forget them in two weeks... I didn't see the…
I’m in my late 40s. I left grad school to get a job in VLSI because it was possible to do so in the job market of the 90s. In today’s job market we wouldn’t even pickup the resume of a new college graduate that didn’t have at least a masters. I would’ve been totally passed by today.
Assuming the benefit we’re looking is getting a high paying job of course.
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Unless you plan to be a professional musician, why does it matter if you “get far”? Isn’t it supposed to be for fun?
Because eventually you plateau without proper foundations, and that's not fun.
This is a completely alien perspective to most people. Most people never even really try to be good at anything. That you think this quirk of your own psychology is the norm shows a deep disconnect with the mass of mediocre people who don’t care about being competitive because they’re not trying to get highs up on some leaderboard. https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
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If the kid isn't enjoying the piano lessons, will forcing them to do it for 20 minutes every day really be beneficial? Sure, they will now be able to do something - something that they absolutely hate... (also, why is it always piano that parents try to force on children?)
> they will now be able to do something - something that they absolutely hate A valuable life skill if you want to ever have a job or get paid.
A huge problem is that giants of education such as Jean Piaget and Seymour Papert make a strong case for this. Unfortunately they generalized their own experience as kids to all others. They did not understand that they were exceptional cases, and what applies to them does not necessarily apply to 99.999% of the rest of the world.
But their message was so cool, somewhat similar to "we can all love each others", or "world peace", that it was embraced with abandon.
I was fortunate to have a great math educator in college (i.e. a guy who was teaching us, math majors, how to tech moth to kids). He told us bluntly "math is hard".
I think education would progress if one simply accepted this truth "math is hard". Stop the delusion that there is a way to make all math fun.
Still, once you accept that math is hard, you realize that the mission is the same: try to find ways so that learning math is less hard and more fun. But accept that the default state is that math is hard. There is no "royal road" to math. Aristotle was onto something.
And by the way, the fact that "math is hard" is not all bad news. The goal in school is not only to learn math, but also to learn how to work hard. There are kids for whom math feels like swimming for a dolphin. Up to a point. There will inevitably be a point where they will hit the phase of "math is hard". And it's going to come as a rude shock. It's better for this realization to come a bit early in life and a bit less shocking.
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My parents forced me to play piano, right up until I told them that I'll destroy our piano if they don't lay off, and any consequences they could think of would not stop me (I was normally an obedient child, but enough was enough). That got their attention. 30 years later I picked up classical guitar and loved it! Do I thank my parents for forcing the piano on me? Hell no.
Like I commented in another post, piano gave you the foundation for learning classical guitar (and appreciating that genre of music). Very few guitar players can even recognize note names on a staff. You’re not going to get far with classical guitar without it.
In fact, I never actually learned to sight read until I started on guitar. All I remembered from the old days was "all cows eat grass"
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The really important thing is to teach kids to find their joy. At the end of my second year of piano lessons, my teacher took me into her living room, and we listened to Glen Miller records for most of the hour. And then we had a cup of tea, and she told me, "this is the music that I love. I play piano because I love that music, and I want to be able to play it myself. What kind of music do you like?" I didn't really…
“Joy” is not found in a day. People enjoy doing things they are good at. It takes a long time to get good at some things and those days suck.
There's got to be more to it than your simplified breakdown.
My first exposure to computer programming was fun and instantly addictive. There was no struggle to learn coding. Same childhood experience for guitar. Nobody was around to push me. There was no need for "discipline to practice". It was simply practice-was-natural-thing-to-do because I enjoyed it. I wasn't a child prodigy. I was finding early joy in programming and guitar -- even though I was very bad at it.
On the other hand, I'm very skilled at cooking and Microsoft Excel. But I do not enjoy making any meals or fiddling with spreadsheets. Likewise, there are a lot of kids out there that hate farming but are actually very good at milking cows and running the tractor because their parents made them do the chores every day. Some kids then grow up to move to the city and leave behind the farm life for good. On the hand, some siblings will cherish farming and happily take over from the parents.
That said, I'm aware of the "No True Scotsman" argument about "joy" : If you _truly_ were skilled at cooking and MS Excel and farming, you'd actually enjoy it.
ok... so the meta question is ..... how does one tell the difference between "skill precedes joy" vs "The beatings will continue until morale improves!" ?
There was a popular "Tiger Mother" book where Amy Chua's daughter has a meltdown in public and didn't want to be forced to play the violin anymore. That finally convinced the mom to stop. On the other hand, the older sister seemed ok with piano lessons. Maybe children are just different.
TLDR of anecdotes above is any theories of optimal child-development has to account for _counterexamples_ to the skill-vs-joy connection : Kids can find joy in things they are bad at. Kids can hate doing things they are good at.