Yesterday, my elder son was having trouble with a passage with 16th notes on the piano. My perceptive wife finally figured out what was wrong - his finger position was poor. She had asked about this with his first piano teacher and she just said it would work its way out as he got older. Well, when we switched to his current piano teacher (an experienced teacher who pays attention to details), she immediately said he needs to curve his fingers properly. This was something my wife had asked his first piano teacher to address to no avail. It kind of reminds me of the Madame Marika song that my younger son is learning about in his Yamaha Music Wonderland course "fingers curved like a spider". The problem is - bad habits are hard to break. I know this from typing. I always shift with my left pinky and I've not been able to break this bad habit. With teaching students keyboarding, I've given up on trying to break bad habits given my personal experience!
Furthermore, my wife noted that our elder son has progressed rapidly with violin because his Suzuki violin teacher (Mr Kashap) demands proper technique before the student even plays a note. This resonates with me because in The Talent Code, Daniel Coyne notes not all practice is effective.
I also disagree with Will Richardson's recent TED talk in which he lauds his daughter learning a song from YouTube. True, she learned to play something, but did she learn to play it well? I doubt it. Now, I suppose it doesn't matter if you are just doing this for fun, but if you want to have some real progression, the guidance of a great teacher is paramount. I also note that as one gets into more advanced study, it becomes harder to try to learn a subject with such superficial means.
I've always been skeptical that such learning is possible with subjects like mathematics and science. For example, when I mentioned at an open house that "I'm the most focused when I'm programming a computer - I need to be fixated on the problem at hand", a member of the audience, a computer science professor, came up to me and said I hit it right on the nose and I was exactly right. I recall one Friday night as a grad student how I had set about to program the Brysk-McCowan cylindrical slant stack. After about 90 minutes of focused FORTRAN programming, I had successfully implemented the article from Geophysics into a working computer program. I surprised even myself. Twitter, YouTube, Khan Academy etc may help one learn these 'left brain' subjects, but there is no replacement for old fashioned correct practice.
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