A large chunk of my teaching career has been devoted to teaching very young children. I certainly didn't plan on that. Trying to cajole a 6 year old into practicing a scale is hard work and I was trying to avoid hard work. But I soon came to love it.
My first youngster was six and his parents signed him up. "He's wanted to play guitar his whole life" they said. "That long?" was my sarcastic thought (although it almost escaped my lips). I had never taught anyone that young before and knew that it was going to be a challenge. I assumed that he would be a problem. It never occurred to me that I was going to be the stupid one. Concepts that I took for granted, like pitch direction and counting time, were very advanced thinking for him. Notes that come as "whole", "half", "quarter", etc., had no meaning at all. A 6 year old can say, "Mom gave me one half, my sister half, my cousin half, and my friend half" and it makes sense to him. I was going to have to figure this out on my own.
The few method books that I was able to find taught little kids the same way as older kids - but with cooler cartoons. Little kids don't learn the same way as big kids. This stuff was worse than useless. So I wrote my own book. That's not an exercise I recommend, but it seemed to me to be the only reasonable answer. I've rewritten that book a couple of times to get to where it will work for me. And I've used it to teach a lot of kids.
I've been teaching for so long now that I get to work with their children. The second generation. That's a real privilege. And I get to know some of them as adults. One young woman likes to tell people that she could read music before she could read.
My original goal was to teach virtuosi at college level. To be the teacher they aspired to work with. Instead I am the entry level guy. But that turned out to be the perfect choice for me. Passing on my love of playing music. Not just passively listening but actually creating it. And learning to appreciate all forms of music and, by extension, all forms of art. It's an attitude that I hope they carry with them through life.