A/B/G postscript

In university music programs, pretty much everyone gets a weekly one-on-one lesson on their instrument with their professor. If you're focusing on building technique, this is extremely helpful, because your weekly lesson will nip problems quickly and keep you from going too far down unproductive roads. Your weekly lesson is also your weekly meeting with the carrot and the stick, should you forget why you're doing what you do.

If you're working on repertoire, though, it's a different situation. It's an A/B/G progression toward some goal, and since your lesson involves SHOWING YOUR WORK TO SOMEONE, your lesson is automatically Beta time. So instead of progressing from Alpha to Beta to Gamma, you jump almost immediately to Beta, and stay there for almost all of the process. (It's possible to do Gamma in lessons as well, usually with the preamble, "Let's just run it.")

Is this resonating with any of you musicians out there? How many of you want about a month of Alpha time before you take a lesson on your stuff? How many of you teachers are afraid that if you gave a month to a student for Alpha work, they'd end up being lazy and doing nothing? At what point can you trust your students to navigate the A/B/G process on their own?