The problem isn’t talent. It’s the barrier.
Your daughter sits down at the keyboard. Her teacher hands her a page of black
dots on five lines, tells her some are quarter notes and some are half notes,
explains that this oval on the second line means F, but only in treble clef, and
by the way, the one right above it is also F but it sounds different. An hour
later she has learned two measures of Mary Had a Little Lamb and feels
stupid.
She isn’t stupid. She’s been asked to learn two unrelated skills at
once: how to play a piano, and how to read a 17th-century symbol system that
evolved for a world without audio recording. The reading is the wall. For kids
wired differently — and most kids are — that wall stops everything.