3 ms·

You don't have to do a lot of repetitive, boring exercises to learn piano. Once you learn how to hold your hands a little, read music, and learn where the notes

You don't have to do a lot of repetitive, boring exercises to learn piano. Once you learn how to hold your hands a little, read music, and learn where the notes are, you can simply try songs you like, and switch songs when you please. On other instruments, you might not need to read music (I've met many guitarists and drummers that cannot read music, nor do they use printed music to play - and blind folks can play instruments too) Art is similar. You can look up skills as necessary to try to make the piece you want. Adult art learners often just start with the type of art they want to make. In both cases, the finished piece might not be the quality you want, but in neither case are you necessarily doing repetitive stuff to learn (playing scales over and over or sketching the same bits over and over). You can retry a piece or move on - the skills will still carry over. None of these reflect homework in school. Now, I know I graduated school decades ago, but math homework was repetitive with seemingly no real-world application and absolutely no help if I needed it. I took a math course online some years later and it was much better: Instant feedback if I got the problem wrong and instant help to walk through the problem if I needed it - then a different but similar problem was given for the homework. This was actual practice in ways traditional homework wasn't. Homework in the traditional sense isn't practice - they are all miniature tests that affect your grade. I didn't have to practice writing - I just did the papers assigned and rushed through them. You can grade papers for other subjects on prose and grammar instead of just doing it for language courses. You don't have to read classics to read better if you just read a variety of things you are interested in. You'll read plenty of boring things for other subjects and get that sort of practice. With most of this stuff, having actual homework isn't necessary as long as students are given time for practice. Practice is what makes you good at something, not homework, and practice can take many forms.

vkou 1mo ago
Are there a lot of concert pianists who got to the level that they did by just playing random songs they liked, without deliberately practicing the mechanics? And then, one day, woke up with the ability to quickly learn and perform unfamiliar pieces of music at the level expected of one? You can absolutely learn to play some piano by just noodling. Your learning will be much slower, and you'll miss important fundamentals that are present in any piano method. That's perfectly fine for learning things that you do for enjoyment, or things that don't really matter. It's a lot less fine for learning things that... do.

vkou 1mo ago

Are there a lot of concert pianists who got to the level that they did by just playing random songs they liked, without deliberately practicing the mechanics? And then, one day, woke up with the ability to quickly learn and perform unfamiliar pieces of music at the level expected of one? You can absolutely learn to play some piano by just noodling. Your learning will be much slower, and you'll miss important fundamentals that are present in any piano method. That's perfectly fine for learning things that you do for enjoyment, or things that don't really matter. It's a lot less fine for learning things that... do.