I totally agree, Eve. Before I started teaching the 2 girls I met with them and their parents and among other things tried to find out what they meant by "Learn to play the guitar". I demonstrated several styles, including accompanying songs and was floored when the younger girl said she wanted to learn classical, and neither of them wanted to accompany themselves singing. Since they're church going folks I had assumed they wanted to do the singing at church thing. Wrong. So, I went with the Mel Bay classical course for the younger one and the regular Mel Bay course for the older one and so far they're both happy with their progress, as am I. They show up for lessons having actually practiced their assigned pages. Now, it's only been a couple of months, and if they did decide to want to learn to play chords for someone to sing to, I'd do that. We'll see what happens.