teach-from-paper skill

Teach From Paper

Convert one research paper into a ready-to-build teaching package: a lecture outline, a shortlist of teachable results with the intuition spelled out, a slide skeleton, discussion questions, and an exercise brief. The deliverable is an outline and a brief — not a finished deck; the slide skeleton is shaped to hand straight to /create-lecture, and the exercise brief to /scaffold-exercises.

When to use

• You have a paper (PDF, .tex, .md) and a slot to teach it — a lecture, a reading group, a job-market practice talk.
• You want the teachable core extracted and pitched to a level, not a generic summary.
• You're prepping the plan for a deck and want /create-lecture to do the drafting.

Not for: literature surveys across many papers (use /lit-review); refereeing the paper's correctness (use /review-paper); drafting the actual Beamer slides (use /create-lecture).

Inputs

• $0 — path to the paper.

If extraction fails or the tool is missing, ask the user for a plain-text version and stop. A scanned or partly scanned PDF extracts with exit 0 and blank pages, so also compare pdfinfo "$0" | grep Pages with the pages that returned text (awk 'BEGIN{RS="\f"} NF{n++} END{print n+0}' "$TMP"); read any blank pages directly with Read, or ask for a text version, and if you go on without them, say which pages were not read. When you are done, delete the extracted copy (rm -rf "$(dirname "$TMP")"): it is a plaintext copy of the document. The full paper goes in the context window (1M) — read it end-to-end before extracting; do not skim the abstract and guess.

Phases

Phase 0: Read the Paper + Set Audience Level (Pre-Flight Report)

Read the paper start to finish. Then resolve the audience level and time budget — from --level / --minutes if given, otherwise ask once. Echo a Pre-Flight Report before extracting:

## Pre-Flight Report
**Paper:** [title, authors, year]
**One-line thesis:** [the paper's central claim in your words]
**Audience level:** undergrad | phd | seminar   (drives notation depth + which proofs survive)
**Time budget:** N minutes (~N/2 slides)
**Prerequisites assumed:** [concepts students must already have]
**Running example candidate:** [the paper's application that can thread the lecture]

Get a nod on level + thesis, then proceed. Level governs everything downstream: undergrad keeps intuition and drops proofs; phd keeps the identifying assumptions and one key derivation; seminar foregrounds the contribution-vs-literature framing.

Phase 1: Extract the Teachable Core + Intuition

1. Identify the paper's 3-5 results worth presenting — not every proposition, the ones a student should leave remembering. Prefer the headline result, the identifying assumption that makes it credible, and one surprise or limitation.
2. For each, capture: the formal statement (trimmed to the audience level), the intuition (why it's true in one breath, no algebra), and the failure mode (when it breaks).
3. Map the paper's notation to something teachable; flag any symbol clash a student would trip on.
4. Separate method (how they get the result) from takeaway (what we now believe) — students conflate these; the lecture must not.

Phase 2: Build the Lecture Outline + Slide Skeleton

Produce a motivation → setup → key result → method → takeaways arc, then a slide skeleton matching the time budget (~2 min/slide). Each skeleton entry is a title + one-line content note + figure/diagram placeholder — enough for /create-lecture to draft from, no prose. Honor the project's pedagogy invariants in shape: motivation before formalism, a worked example near each definition, a transition slide at each act break.

Phase 3: Discussion Questions + Exercise Brief

1. Write 4-6 discussion questions graded by depth: comprehension → application → critique ("where would this identification fail?"). Pitch to the level.
2. Write an exercise brief — 2-4 problems sketched (prompt + what skill it drills + expected-answer shape), NOT full solutions. This is the hand-off to /scaffold-exercises, which fleshes out problems, data, and answer keys. Skip if --no-exercises.

Output / Report format

Write to qualityreports/teachfrompaper[sanitized-title].md:

# Teaching Package: [Paper Title]
**Audience:** [level] · **Budget:** [N min] · **Date:** [YYYY-MM-DD]

## 1. Lecture Outline
Motivation → Setup → Key Result → Method → Takeaways  (one line each)

## 2. Results Worth Presenting
### R1 — [name]
- **Statement:** … · **Intuition:** … · **Breaks when:** …
[R2..R5]

## 3. Slide Skeleton  (→ /create-lecture)
| # | Title | Content note | Figure/diagram |

## 4. Discussion Questions
1. [comprehension] … 5. [critique] …

## 5. Exercise Brief  (→ /scaffold-exercises)
- **E1:** [prompt] — drills [skill] — answer shape: [form]

Exit behavior

• Present the package in chat and confirm the file path written.
• Name the two hand-offs explicitly: "Slide skeleton ready — run /create-lecture [Topic]. Exercise brief ready — run /scaffold-exercises."
• If the audience level was never confirmed, do not ship — a deck pitched at the wrong level is wasted work. Halt and ask.

Flags

• --level — undergrad | phd | seminar. Sets notation depth, which proofs survive, and question difficulty. Asked interactively if omitted.
• --minutes — target lecture length; the slide count is roughly --minutes/2.
• --no-exercises — skip Phase 3's exercise brief (keep discussion questions).

Cross-references

• /create-lecture — consumes the Phase 2 slide skeleton to draft the actual Beamer deck. See .claude/skills/create-lecture/SKILL.md.
• /review-paper — referee the paper's correctness before teaching it if you're unsure the result holds. See .claude/skills/review-paper/SKILL.md.
• /lit-review — for situating the paper among many, rather than teaching one deeply. See .claude/skills/lit-review/SKILL.md.
• The exercise brief (written in Phase 3; section 5 of the output) is the input contract for /scaffold-exercises, which fleshes out problem sets; this skill stops at the brief.

What this skill does NOT do

• Does not draft finished slides — that's /create-lecture. The slide skeleton is an outline, not Beamer.
• Does not write full problem-set solutions — the exercise brief is a sketch for /scaffold-exercises.
• Does not verify the paper is correct — pair with /review-paper if the result's validity is in doubt.
• Does not read multiple papers or survey a field — one paper in, one teaching package out.