When a portrait artist starts work, they start with clear shapes and bold lines. Over time, those shapes and lines are softened with shading until the picture becomes clear. But the artist can’t just start with the shading: they build to it.
I think experienced professionals are sometimes hesitant to tell young people precisely how to do something – the seasoned pros recognize that there are multiple right ways to do a task, and multiple right ways to look at it.
On the other hand, when you’re doing something for the first time, you often just want to know “the right way” to do it. Even if you understand that there might be more than one, you still want to be given guidance.
I always think of marking scores; more than once, I’ve heard conductors describe lots of different good ways to mark scores. But as I started my career, I just wanted to know one clear way. I understood I’d adjust over time to meet my needs, but I wanted a fully-formed starting point.
It’s like keeping track of your obligations. You can use a phone calendar, or a paper calendar, or a day planner, and you can use each of those in different ways. But when my kids started using planners for homework in elementary school, they were told precisely how to complete them each week. Not because it was the only right way, but because it was a place to start.
This need for clarity exists in almost every aspect of our lives, from learning science (much of high school science consists of saying, basically, “So, what we told you in Middle School was mostly true), to learning to read music, to cleaning a bathroom, to reading a poem.