Wonderful Rick, I always felt a little guilty when my teacher told me how to fret the chords and where to use them on my banjo, and after he left I would experiment and find different ways of doing the same thing! At first I thought that by not following his teachings to the nth degree I was not doing things right and therefore never would.

Throw the guilt trip out the window, tell the teach how YOU are going to do it, and then have fun. I progressed much more rapidly after adopting that method than I had in the months under his tutelage. He still comes and shares new ideas with me which I incorporate into my playing, but I no longer feel that his is the only way of doing things! I guess the moral of the story is, "There is more than one way to skin a cat" (With apologies to Catspaw, of course!)