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To be honest, I hate this method of teaching with passion. If you want to teach someone something specific, tell them. Doing it like this however makes the assumption that your specific method (in this case western music notation) is the "logical and natural" way of doing things and should thus naturally come to your students - when in fact, it's simply a reached consensus that has become somewhat fixed over the centuries. The problem is that teachers imagine such dialogs and imagine the answers of the students at the same time. That's a big no-no for me. Never assume that the students are going to think a particular thing, because usually that means you won't actually be listening to them, but just be grasping for things they say which you can interpret as what "suits your plan". What if the students answer to your questions in a different way and in the process come up with a notation form that is actually much more intuitive and a lot different? Do you then tell them, "well yeah, but you're wrong", or "my attempt failed, so I'll just tell you the real way"? Or do you keep up the game and continue asking questions in the hope to dissuade them from their method and still find your solution? That would, IMHO, defeat the whole point of this method and make yourself no longer appear very credible. The major problem is that many people take certain facts for granted. Most of us take the connection between "high pitches" and a "high position" on a staff line for granted - but by doing that we're ignoring that we're simply equating them because they both contain the word "high", even though it has an entirely different meaning in both cases. "High" in regards to frequencies has extremely little to do with the spatial "high", except that for certain (of course explainable) reasons, the two once were associated with each other and people began calling certain pitches "high" and others "low" (even though they might as well have called some pitches "hot" and the others "cold", for instance). By letting the students make the connection that "high sounds" should "logically" be placed "high up" on the staff, you're giving them the impression that "what sounds alike fits together", which might lead them to justify quite some weird reasoning in other cases… In this particular case, it would also be misleading for the students even if the dialog went exactly as planned and they arrived at your music notation method. It would make them think that all of notation is the logical result of such reasoning, which may confuse them a lot when they are later confronted with conflicting methods and extensions of that system. It would be a lot better to make it immediately clear to them that methods of communication (languages, music notation, whatever) aren't held to because they do things in a particularly logical or intuitive fashion, but because holding to a historical consensus facilitates communication in many cases. This form of teaching only works if you're honestly ready to accept any answer from the students and are able to react to them to come to any conclusion, which may differ from your preconceptions. For these kinds of subjects, the method is fine, but for trying to lead students in a particular, preconceived direction, it simply comes off as presumptious. I've had teachers that did that and I hated them for it.