Material for older beginners

Roni Glaser Hey Roni, great question with which I struggled for a long time! 

I like to work with the "Play Guitar" series by Michael Langer and accompany that with the "Saitenwege" by Otto Humbach once the student improves and is fluent with all the notes. I also heard great things about the way the Juan Antonio Muro's "Basic Pieces" progresses. All those books offer a great variety of pieces and exercises without having a funny little rabbit jumping through the scores. But to be fair, I am using the mentioned books for younger students as well.

Generally, I wouldn't compromise your methods just because a student is older. I did this a couple of years ago, starting to play pop and rock arrangements way to early simply because I was scared that the older students might loose interest if we didn't progress fast enough. But truth is: a student needs to get the basics right, otherwise the frustration down the road is inevitable! Moreover, absolute beginners tend to have an idea of what playing guitar is like ("I wanna strum chords like Ed, I wanna shred like Metallica"), but have no way of telling whether they are disciplined enough to go all the way in. Your job as teacher is to make them fall in love with the process and to overcome frustration so that they don't stop once a piece is a little harder than they expected (which happened a lot when I just grabbed random fingerstyle transcriptions off the internet).