Welcome back!

The story about your teacher reminded me of an attempt I made back in my 40's. Every lesson was the same thing, scales and more scales and never a song!

But back in '19 I tried again, 1st with Truefire, still a member and then adding GT. But what really made things come together is a teacher I am still with who taught me in 1 lesson, actually about 15 minutes, how to find the chords to a song I wanted to play on my own, and for an awefull lot of stuff I like to play it works great. So most of the songs I play, mostly relaxed acoustic stuff - I figure it out by ear. It may not be perfect, but I gave up on perfection and went for playing for fun! When you break out most songs, they use somewhere between 3 and 5 chords. Once you have those worked out you have the song. 

Hopefully you get there as well, because for us casual players, it really is about just playing our favourite songs.

Best of luck,

Bill