It's quite a surprising result: it turns out that there are cases where seeing someone else work through a worked example is more effective than struggling through the problem yourself.
(Obviously it doesn't apply universally, but your "see how ridiculous that sounds?" suggests to me you may not have heard of this before.)
As that link says, this approach is used in Maths textbooks, and yet, as the parent of two kids, I have never come across a single student who is able to pass trig without working the problems.
If reality differs from the results of academic studies, it's not the reality that is wrong.
It's quite a surprising result: it turns out that there are cases where seeing someone else work through a worked example is more effective than struggling through the problem yourself.
(Obviously it doesn't apply universally, but your "see how ridiculous that sounds?" suggests to me you may not have heard of this before.)