Yes - I think to expand upon my post above and your excellent reply, it all boils down to "context matters". I think learning theory and concepts (in both guit

Yes - I think to expand upon my post above and your excellent reply, it all boils down to "context matters". I think learning theory and concepts (in both guitar playing and programming) is far more interesting to me when applied to 'real world' situations. Basically, instead of learning and memorising the various keywords of, say, SQL, if you gave a student a dataset with several tables and thousands of rows of data and said - "Now extract X for me from these tables", then they will see that there are several ways of doing so, with different benefits and downsides. Similarly, if you gave a guitarist an unusual chord progression with, say a diminished or minor chord in the mix and said "Work out a solo that sounds good over that", then there will be some interesting learning in there without having to memorise every single scale that they could use. Many ways of coming up with a solution to the problem. Another anecdote that relates to my favoured method of learning - When I was in high school, I disliked trigonometry, and never really got to grips with soulless diagrams and charts on the page. But when I graduated and went to flying school, and had to learn spherical trigonometry (several fiendish levels harder than standard trig) in the context of learning navigation on a globe, I absolutely fell in love with it, and indeed I think the first time I ever got 100% in a maths test was in one of my first spherical trig classes at flight school.