Sounds like you had a bad experience, Urban.
Unfortunately, there are some really iffy teachers out there. About 1/3 of my students studied with another teacher before me, and of those a fair number didn't get their money's worth. It could be just the area I'm in (when I lived and taught in the city proper, it was a lower percentage), or it could be that more people are 'hanging up the shingle' to teach these days, as there are fewer gigging opportunities.
I do have to disagree with Alan though - jamming can constitute a lesson if you're working on specific things. If a student is learning a new scale, learning to apply a new technique, or working on structuring a solo, jamming can make up the entire lesson - but it still has a structure. I'm probably a lot like King - jams have a place, but within a bigger framework.
Maybe 5% of my lessons are 'jamming' lessons at the moment. But they're jamming with feedback. After a chorus or two, I'll stop them and say something like "I like what you did with this" (I'll play the riff they played) "because it did x... but you need to work a bit more on y, because it's more effective if you do this" (and I'll play the riff they did that didn't fit, and play it again with a varied rhythm, or more 'breathing space')
You learn to solo by doing, and if you're working on soloing it can be an important part of the lesson. But at the same time you need to be understanding what you do, so jamming isn't part of every lesson with any student - at least not with me. A couple days a week I'll go through my student notes and think about what might be missing, and the next lesson is built around that - this week I followed up a 'jam' lesson with a young lady studying jazz with a lesson that was 80% focused on chord structures - because she wasn't working around chord tones - and the other 20% was drills on finding notes on the fretboard and some chart reading. Next week we'll again incorporate a jam bit, so I can see if she's absorbed the chord structures.
Another student is a guy in his 40s who's just taken up guitar so he can jam with his buddies - he's so set on doing that, he signed up for two lessons per week. He wanted two one hour lessons, and I turned him down flat - as a beginner, it's a waste of his money. So we do two half hours: one is a specific lesson on chords, rhythm, a pentatonic scale position, etc; the other is a couple days later where we jam with what he's learned, and he gets feedback to practice with at home.
He's been with me a month now, and can already play a half dozen tunes (some Zeppelin, some Clapton, some CCR, and a bit of Roy Orbison) because he's both focused and uninhibited. That makes lessons a lot of fun for both of us.
Guitar teacher offering lessons in Plainfield IL
