Teach From Paper Skill for Claude

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.

| Format | How to read it |

| --- | --- |

| .tex, .qmd, .md, .txt | Read directly with the Read tool. |

| .pdf | TMP=$(mktemp -t paper).txt && pdftotext "$0" "$TMP" (poppler-utils), then Read/Grep "$TMP". |

If extraction fails or the tool is missing, ask the user for a plain-text version and stop. 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

• 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.
• 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).
• Map the paper's notation to something teachable; flag any symbol clash a student would trip on.
• 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

• Write 4-6 discussion questions graded by depth: comprehension → application → critique ("where would this identification fail?"). Pitch to the level.
• 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 quality_reports/teach_from_paper_[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 Phase 5 exercise brief is the input contract for /scaffold-exercises (a downstream skill that 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.