
The Greatest Teaching Techniques Don't Compute over Zoom - hyperluz
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-12/the-greatest-teaching-techniques-don-t-compute-over-zoom
======
miki123211
> let me say a word about diversity and inclusion.

Blind person here. On line learning is the best thing that can happen to
diversity and inclusion, particularly when disabled people are concerned. For
me, being in an environment free of students constantly shouting over my
speech synth made a huge difference. I could adjust the volume of the teacher,
or even mute them for a while, when I really needed to focus on the speech.
Being able to request the name of the person talking, or hear who
joins/leaves/raises hand is really useful too. I imagine the difference is
even bigger for blind teachers, as they normally don't know who raises the
hand or talks, and that's very important to them. Other disabilities benefit
too, wheelchair users were very relieved they didn't have to move / be moved
through inaccessible buildings etc.

There are a lot of accessibility implications to on line learning, most of
them positive. Personally, I wish I could just stay that way forever.

~~~
nogabebop23
>> There are a lot of accessibility implications to on line learning, most of
them positive. Personally, I wish I could just stay that way forever.

It's obvious that your quality of education has improved and makes sense that
you'd want to kleep it that way. It would be great if we could support people
in your situation without greatly diminishing the experience of a huge
component of attendees though: all those with learning, attention and focus
issues. The stats are truely mind boggling with how many kids struggle to
control their behaviour in a virtual classroom.

Question: why DON'T you stay remote? Most of the time the last thing we want
to do is isolate people in different situations but it sounds like this would
be preferable for you. It would seem to be quite easy to support too.

~~~
kkylin
There are practical difficulties in having some students in the classroom and
some students online: it's hard for a single instructor to split attention
that way, unless they have some help (e.g., a student assistant) in the
classroom. It would be more effective if universities had more dedicated
online versions of courses. This had already been happening before the
pandemic and would probably be accelerated post-pandemic for a variety of
reasons.

Edit: fix grammar + clarify.

~~~
sjtindell
At my school our professors actually did this split very well. They had a
chime sound when an online hand was raised, they always prioritized those
students, and they had good tech to display their screens both in the
classroom and online.

With the right tech and competent teachers, it’s completely doable in my
experience.

~~~
kkylin
Oh, I completely agree with that. One of the issues, especially at large
public universities, is that many faculty members who are perfectly effective
in person have difficulties with the technology. Asking them to split
attention on top of an already stressful situation is hard, and training only
gets one so far. So the online experience is hard to make consistent across
courses and even sections of the same course.

------
darkerside
This is an odd opinion piece to have made it to HN front page. It's
essentially a collection of unsubstantiated claims that would likely have no
impact to policy even if they were demonstrably true because the driving
factor is human safety and not efficacy or ease of teaching.

Remote teaching may be harder, require more work, and have pitfalls that are
quickly overcome in person. Much more useful would be a collection of ways to
mitigate them, rather than an airing of grievances.

Maybe I'm being too hard on this, and it's just a good serving up of the real
conversation. So, what are other folks doing to overcome the difficulties
outlined in the article?

Reading the room, avoiding distraction, using humor, and inability to
establish command.

On the last note, I will say that I believe it's a red herring. The most soft
spoken person, who clearly has a passion to share their subject, will be
easily gifted this by a willing audience. Even over Zoom.

~~~
doopy-loopy2
Just because you don't agree doesn't mean it shouldn't be on HN.

Personally, it seems blatantly obvious that Zoom cannot replace face-to-face
interactions whether in a work setting or in an educational setting.

The people advocating "100% remote and video calls for everything" are either
just really short sighted or have some other motive going on.

~~~
darkerside
Oh, I don't disagree at all. The reason I don't think it belongs on HN is
because "It's essentially a collection of unsubstantiated claims that would
likely have no impact to policy even if they were demonstrably true because
the driving factor is human safety and not efficacy or ease of teaching."

That has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with those claims, although
in this particular case, it just so happens that I do.

------
laurieg
I've been teaching classes online since March. Honestly, even at the best of
times it feels like teaching a brick wall.

One of the universities has a rule that everyone must have their cameras on at
all times, so you end up teaching classes to seas of blank faces. You get no
meaningful feedback this way.

One thing I've used which has been useful is Miro [1]. It is a collaborative
whiteboard tool. Being able to get a little bit of output from everyone is
wonderful. Even just being able to see people's mouse pointers move makers a
huge difference.

One of the pluses has been everyone has suddenly got much better at using the
universities online learning system (which existed before). General
organisation and admin has been streamlined somewhat.

[1] [https://miro.com/](https://miro.com/)

~~~
dhimes
I had to teach online during a weather emergency decades ago(back when you
used powerpoint and a RealPlayer product to make movies). No live lectures
though- all we had was dial-up so it was all asynchronous.

One thing that it seems to me would be very helpful would be an instantaneous
feedback channel where you could have premade questions (say, multiple-choice)
and ask students to answer them in real time. This would allow you intersperse
formative assessment into your lectures more like what happens live. It would
go a long way toward helping the class be interactive. They would have to be
graded automatically for large classes, of course.

------
secfirstmd
So I've taught a few thousand activists/journalists in security over the years
in person and a couple of hundred over remote webinars. I've also built online
self paced courses. My takeaway is that the biggest mistake educators make
(and I was guilty of this at early stages) is trying to directly shift things
like lessons plans from the physical to the online world. One way lecture
style stuff which is kind of outdated (or occasionally just lazy) for many use
cases in a physical classroom really fails for a lot of stuff when put online.

To do it well, online courses have to be approached completely differently.
You have to switch your way of thinking, switch how you apply learning (esp
adult) methodologies, switch your time planning and also change your
expectations. For example adults mostly learn and enjoy learning best through
facilitation where possible, stuff like group work. That's very hard to do
well with current online tools. Also attention spans are very different.

Even small things like physical movement. In the training room you the
educator can move around and in most sessions you can integrate opportunities
to get the people you are training to stand up and move around for a bit (for
example get a group to look at a problem and address it on the wall). You
can't do that when someone is looking at a screen. Plus it's tricky to
encourage people to feel able to spontaneously contribute or throw in a
question etc on web. It's obviously also harder for more than one person to
speak. Plus the way that people tend to be zeroed in on the educator means
they are less likely to have positive engagement that spins off from what
someone else is saying. E.g picking up follow up questions, asking their
classmate how to do something or putting forward their own theory on
something.

There are some advantages to using webinars about what you can use - depending
on topic you can draw on a wider variety of material.

Overall when developing online courses I felt at times it shifted to require
more of a Producer mentality than purely an Educator one.

~~~
red_admiral
Group work has its advantages, but possibly my sample is biased in a different
direction than yours - I've always found groups a terrible way to teach
programming, at least to complete beginners. Once they have the basics, then
group work starts to work a bit better.

~~~
dhimes
Same with physics, at least the theory in the classroom. It really became the
blind leading the blind and very inefficient.

Maybe I just sucked at it.

------
helsinkiandrew
My 14 year old son, didn't take to online learning at all well (we're in
Finland - the school already used google classroom and a lot of online
technologies and had all the resources and training they needed). It seemed to
be the lack of attention both ways - the teacher can't really see how well the
students are understanding the information and the students are perhaps taking
less in (maybe the youtube/snapchat use has dulled their perception of video
lessons) and are less inclined to ask for help.

I wonder if video lessons of traditional in-class teaching will ever be
effective long distance to younger pupils. And shorter online interactive
lessons - duolingo/khan academy etc. or something else is required.

~~~
dan_quixote
Unless we solve this early, the problem you describe could be terrifically
self-perpetuating.

Online learning (in its current state) requires lots of motivation and
discipline. These are skills learned from tight feedback loops which
historically happen in-person. If kids fail to pick this up early, they will
be even less inclined to online learning. As a parent of a young kid, I'm very
concerned that we're going to learn this lesson after it's far too late.

------
nanna
The working model of management in at least certain high ranking UK
universities is that it takes less time to run an online course than an in-
person one, while maintaining the same standards. It's a convenient
justification, if one not publicly made, for shrinking the industry's labour
pool. So this year not only do many university teachers find themselves
fighting the uphill battle of teaching online (or 'mixed', both online and in
person), but they do so with fewer hands ready to help out. I despair.

~~~
secfirstmd
That's ridiculous, I would say in terms of preparation and creation an online
course is probably nearly double the time of a physical one at a minimum.

~~~
titzer
There is some truth to this. For in-person lectures I could just show up to
class with a general theme and blather onto the whiteboard, whereas online,
all the students want text lecture notes, slides from the lecture, they don't
ask questions during lecture, so they are confused, taking time later.

If you spend time editing together a pre-recorded video, it can easily triple
the amount of work. Even if you go with the pro-style one take, you need to
rehearse and have a good plan in place to make such a video.

~~~
secfirstmd
Absolutely. I felt like I was documentary producer as well as an educator when
doing our online courses.

------
learnstats2
The author presents a model of learning where the teacher dominates the
physical classroom (and, by implication, the students are submissive): he says
this explicitly when talking about a "dominating professor".

Online learning doesn't allow for that in the same way, so a teacher dependent
on this style of teaching is likely to experience significant discomfort.

Is this really a "Greatest Teaching Technique" though, as the headline
suggests? I am highly doubtful. This is more about having control of a
classroom, than enabling learning. I find it hard to call this a teaching
technique at all.

If you say "Greatest Teaching Technique" to me, I immediately think of the
Socratic method. With the understanding that it is more difficult to read body
language and physical cues, that still works perfectly great over Zoom.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I don't think the Socratic Method is universally applicable. I'm not sure how
one would use it to effectively teach Spanish, or history, or geometry.

~~~
jbullock35
> I don't think the Socratic Method is universally applicable. I'm not sure
> how one would use it to effectively teach Spanish, or history, or geometry.

Doesn't seem hard. Socrates himself used the method to teach geometry:
[http://www.socraticmethod.net/essays/meno_geometry/meno_geom...](http://www.socraticmethod.net/essays/meno_geometry/meno_geometry.html).

------
raarts
I teach in college. In my opinion physical presence beats online teaching
hands down for all but a few use cases. In my experience the last three months
a minority of students thrive by online teaching, another (slightly bigger)
minority stumbles and falls, and the rest struggles.

As a teacher I feel way less effective as well.

I do not think there is a technical solution to this. If online teaching
becomes the norm I will leave the profession.

~~~
aurizon
The main problem with online is the mental agility of the student - smartness.
Some are auto didactic - capable of self teaching. Some are not, we can not
all be an Archimedes or an Isaac Newton. Online teaching needs to develop a
high degree of parallelism. Let us say they break the topic down to a large
number of short modules. Each one needs to be shown and explained and then the
uptake tested. If student fails test 1, he needs to be taken through a
different module on the same topic, explained and uptake tested. Repeat until
the parallels are exhausted and the fails assessed to determine the
composition of the way the student fails. Once assessed, the student needs to
enter a new set of modules with greater detail in the explanatory detail. This
will need an exhaustive degree of preparation, but it needs to be done. Once
done on all topics you will have a huge massively parallel data base that is
capable of teaching a wide range of people. On route, one needs to assess all
manner of supportive skills - keyboarding - is that student capable of reading
and entering the responses the program will demand of him? If not, that
student needs some preparatory modules to deal with all the test and numeracy
issues he faces. In human teaching, this is done via very personally demanding
instruction in person. The program needs to be able to rapidly select from all
the modules in it's repertoire. Ideally, such a system can handle all the way
from a child to a graduate student. Assessing all the way and presenting and
reviewing, remoduling etc all the way. Students vary widely, some are highly
intelligent (but as yet are untaught), some are not so smart. AN ideal system
will also test for what I call 'physical IQ' \- the capacity for detailed
physical tasks, such as fencing or basketball or any sport. They may be
brilliant at physical tasks, not so good at physics or programming. Modern
computers are capable of this. It is a demanding task to program them, but
once done, it can be deployed millions of times amond millions of students. I
hesitate to call it an 'AI', it is just a capable parallel high speed machine.

~~~
empath75
Trying to replicate a classroom online is the primary mistake I think people
are making. Why should there be a teacher delivering scripted lectures to
students at a scheduled time at all. Trying to do classes over zoom is a
terrible idea. Why not just put all the kids on individualized learning plans,
have the teachers act as tutors and counselors and graders, and let the kids
go at their own pace, with staff following their progress closely and making
sure they're getting their work done on time, clearing up learning
impediments, etc. Then you can have the kids that need one-on-one help getting
that time, and the kids that can do self-directed learning being free to go as
fast as they want to.

~~~
raarts
I think generalizing all ages is a bad idea. In fact kids grow and learn so
fast that almost each age needs a different approach, and I don't mean a 5%
difference.

Another thing is that we tend to underestimate how much kids learn 'between
the lines'. What is acceptable, what is valuable.

Lastly I'm convinced individualised learning is a fallacy. We technocrats like
personalisation, but in my opinion that is only good for adults.

I want to recommend books and talks from Katharine Birbalsingh for an entirely
contrarian, but very successful take on elevating underprivileged children.

------
mumblemumble
I get the impression that the author needs to think a bit further outside the
box.

Simply taking the classroom model and trying to perfectly replicate it in Zoom
won't work. _Of course._ But online learning opens up a whole host of new
possibilities that in-person learning is equally unable to replicate.

I earned my most recent degree online, from a fully online program, and really
appreciated some of the thought they put into creating an online learning
experience. One of the key changes was moving toward pre-recorded lectures.
This yielded all sorts of fruit. It meant that I, the student, could listen to
lectures at a time that worked best for me, rather than being tied to a
classroom schedule. Not able to concentrate right now? Fine, take a break and
try again later. Morning person? Never have to struggle to stay awake during
late afternoon lectures ever again. Evening person? Same for morning lectures.
Lecturer's voice dulcet tones and musical prosody make you drowsy, or hard of
hearing, or classes not taught in your first language? You, my friend, are
going to _love_ the new Transcripts feature.

It also greatly reduced the time we needed to spend in classroom sessions,
which, in turn, _increased_ our access to personalized instruction by freeing
up space in the instructors' schedules for small group and one-on-one meetings
with students.

I, personally, didn't have difficulty focusing on class during class. I don't
know that my classmates did, either. My suspicion is that those studies about
students not paying attention were looking at typical online classes, which do
consist of the traditional "classroom lectures, only on a screen" model. In
which case, I am not at all surprised. Traditional classroom lectures tend to
be _boring as hell._ A live classroom environment creating psychological cues
that discourage distraction behavior doesn't fix that problem, it just makes
it less apparent to the lecturer. Moreover, with asynchronous, recorded
lectures, when my attention wanders (as all attentions will), its no big deal,
all I have to do is rewind 30 seconds. In the classroom, if the lecturer says
something critical while you were zoned out, too bad, you missed it.

The real problem here is that the pandemic has taken teachers who worked under
the traditional model, and rudely thrust them into a completely new working
environment that requires a radially different approach to the job, and has
left them them zero time to adapt. But even a baby you didn't ask for
shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater.

------
acmecorps
I think we all know that this is true, that online courses have subpar
experience compared to physically being in the classrooms especially with
younger kids. The question is, how can we make an online classroom experience
be as good as it can get and also scales up?

~~~
heisenzombie
Does “scaling up” have to be part of it? Maybe teaching is better done with
small groups, and being online doesn’t change that. Could the time-shifting
and decentralisation of online learning reduce class sizes instead of
increasing them?

~~~
agustif
You could certainly scale-up the product/solution and at the same time, try to
optimize/reduce the number of students per teacher.

A p2p model where students teach other students just below their baseline
would be an awesome way to make studying more fullfilling/enjoyable

~~~
tsimionescu
For what it's worth, that used to be a very common model of teaching,
especially in early school (and it still is pretty common at university level,
with TAs). It would be common for fourth-graders to teach first graders, as I
understand it, especially in rural schools where there were very few teachers
available.

I think there are problems with he system though, as you can't rely on the
teaching capacities of an 11 year old child, even if they are quite gifted in
that particular subject matter. I think doing group work with a mix of older
and younger children would help a lot though, but it is still probably best if
the concepts are first introduced by an adult who has at least some
pedagocical training.

------
lvturner
I think back to number of classes I slept through in high school and have to
wonder if the problem is strictly confined to online teaching...

------
dehrmann
I agree that learning over a video call is no substitute for in-person
instruction, but I wouldn't give too much praise to the way we currently
teach. Different people have different learning styles, and curriculum is
rarely designed for that. I think teaching others does more for mastery than
standard studying, but it rarely finds its way into classrooms in a meaningful
way. Universities are even worse. Professors often have no interest in
teaching. Even when they have an interest, the lecture format seriously sells
education short. Compare a how high school seniors are taught vs. college
freshmen; they're pretty different, but the kids are almost the same; I'd bet
money that the college instruction is less effective. I guess a video call is
just college instruction on steroids. Sink or swim--it's all on you.

------
Peritract
Teaching online is like flying blind; you have so much less information than
you do in person, and can't read body language, get an immediate overview,
check in on students in the thousand tiny ways that come without thinking in
person.

Teaching virtually is doable, and still valuable, but it's definitely a
degraded experience.

------
jasoneckert
As a college educator for 22 years in technology/compsci, I definitely agree
with many of the early points in this article surrounding the benefits of the
physical classroom.

However, I strongly disagree with the comments regarding distraction and focus
for online and blended learning environments.

In my field, online is not a distraction per se, but something that is
necessary for app development (think StackOverflow and IDE documentation!). It
reinforces what I'm demonstrating and lecturing about, and encourages students
to research and think outside of the box. For example, I actually expect
students to Google topics and documentation while I'm teaching online, and
this process is both motivating for students and key to being successful in my
field.

~~~
neap24
We do High School CompSci without the internet (for our intro course). I do
see the internet as a distraction at this level. Forcing young students to
think through the logic of a problem and come up with their own solution (no
matter how crazy or inefficient it is) has a lot of downstream critical
thinking benefits.

------
tjrider
Sadly I haven't had many teachers as described in this article in my
university career.

I believe those teaching skills will eventually have to move to remote. The
teachers who adapt fastest will be the most successful.

Any good examples for great remote teachers (beyond great presentation)?

------
huffmsa
I think it's a bit disingenuous to call the rushed switch to online learning
during a pandemic a failed or sub-par experiment, as I've seen in the WSJ.

The slapdash system we cobbled together on the fly while trying to figure out
if we were dying doesn't hold up against the decades old, well tested and
vetted in class educational experience? It would be problematic if it did,
wouldn't it? It would mean we were completely wrong about the best way to
educate.

The biggest note I see from this is that maybe it's not a great idea to force
children to sit still and "learn" for 8 hours a day. If the only way for that
technique to work is to have them physically controllable, something might not
be working.

------
codingdave
While I agree that classroom teaching has advantages, and am not trying to
argue the points from the article... online learning is not limited to just
what happens on video calls. That would be like saying that daily standup
meetings are not the best environment to code in. Of course not. That isn't
the point. They are about giving new information and coordinating, then
letting go off to do their work. Online learning is the same - give info,
coordinate, then students go off and do their work. It cannot be compared
directly to 6 hours in a classroom because they are fundamentally different
methods of working. They both have pros and cons.

------
Androider
Just like shoehorning traditional office work into a remote setting doesn't
work, you just end up with various forms of online butt-in-seat monitoring
while losing all the benefits of asynchronicity, perhaps remote learning needs
to be fundamentally rethought for the new medium. What would a remote-first
learning experience look like? Probably more like a Khan Academy course than a
real-time lecture, with the student-teacher time dedicated 100% to helping and
interacting with students instead of going through new material.

------
gridlockd
_" I'm a classroom teacher and I'm totally not obsolete, here are talking
points on effective teaching methods, which only a person like me can
perform!"_

I don't buy it.

I didn't pay attention in class for most of my school time and that was before
any of the more modern distractions existed.

To do well in school, you need to:

1\. Capture and memorize factoids that will be on the test

This _can_ be done the roundabout way by taking notes, which does help with
memory retention. It's however far more efficient to just copy other more
diligent people's notes and memorize those.

2\. Understand mechanisms and systems

This requires you to work on your own, try things, figure things out, getting
error feedback. Schools are notoriously awful at this, with 20+ kids you just
can not spend the time to give meaningful advice, to give enough feedback in a
timely manner. You send kids home with homework and they get results a day
later or worse. The kids that do really well here usually get help from
parents/siblings/externals.

Neither of these require teachers to do any classroom work.

Of course, there's the whole social and daycare aspect of schools which can be
beneficial or oppressive, depending on the teachers and environment. Let's
just not pretend that actual learning needs a classroom environment, or that
it's _better_ in classroom environment, because we don't actually know that
yet. Classroom teachers talking their book doesn't help.

~~~
kilroy_jones
A teacher's job, if they're doing it right, is not to provide continual
feedback to 20+ kids, but to create a space which focuses them on learning a
particular skill or achieving a particular goal. Kids learn best when working
with other kids, usually by modeling one another and taking the best bits as
they go. It's continual exploration with an expert on hand to help when they
get stuck or see some basic skills training.

~~~
rgblambda
I think part of the reason teaching is the way it is currently is because if
you create that space for kids to work with other kids then anywhere from
20-60% of them will slack off or disrupt others. Not that it doesn't happen
with the current system but it's less visible.

~~~
gridlockd
Like you say, it's not visible. We are forcing _children_ to sit idle and
pretend to listen to the teacher, which is an entirely unnatural thing for to
them to do for several hours per day.

I would argue that children would actually learn a lot more social skills by
interacting in this "disruptive" and "slacking off" kind of way, especially
nowadays where children are otherwise locked up at home by overprotective
parents. Those skills are far more valuable than whatever trivia the
curriculum is mostly made up of.

~~~
rgblambda
Increasing break times I think would have a better effect at improving
children's social skills. Perhaps it's a difficult pill for educators to
swallow that the most important skill children learn at school doesn't involve
them.

------
javier123454321
I think this is true, and i agree. However, institutions of (higher) learning
have transformed into giant scams and money sucking administrative monsters,
whose function is gatekeeping rather than education. As a response to this
trend, online education is an excellent antidote for a fraction of the cost.

------
gnufx
I don't teach, but I wonder why people use Zoom and not BigBlueButton, which
at least was made for the job. It also presumably doesn't have whatever the
privacy implications are with Zoom that students have to accept.

------
awongh
I've been teaching in person and had to transition online during COVID-19.

I agree with all of his points that going online can degrade the experience.

 __but __all of this pre-supposes what it means to teach and what it means to
learn.

Some comments mention children, but the OP is a Yale law professor. Seems like
esp. higher ed needs to be a little more open minded in their thinking going
forward given the circumstances.

> it’s important to acknowledge what online learning misses.

It seems to me that by only describing how a zoom meeting is lacking vs. an in
person classroom he's missing what an online learning environment is capable
of creating.

A lot of his arguments seem to be centered around grabbing and holding
someone's attention in a digital environment, which I also empathize with, but
I think some things can also be a symptom of an educational system whose
purpose is not always actual learning- i.e., is the purpose of grade school
educational, or is it day care for working parents? Is the purpose of yale law
school learning about law or is it to serve as a gate keeper in the legal
profession? etc.

When the whole reason people are sitting there has not much to do with what
you're trying to convey, it's no wonder they have trouble paying attention.

That being said, if students are interested and expectations are aligned, some
things that I found that some things were actually improved upon in a digital
setting: (specifically I teach at a coding bootcamp)

\- one-on-one teaching can feel _more_ intimate and effective, (as in a zoom
breakout room) since you are not speaking to that student in the classroom
where others can overhear or that you don't also have to speak to the whole
class at the same time. Sharing someone's screen feels more like you are right
there with them.

\- the asynchronous nature of doing things online means that people can come
more well prepared vs. having to have everyone in sync in a classroom all the
times, in real time.

\- it's logistically simpler to not ask 30 ( 50? 100?) people to all gather in
the same physical location at the same time. I suppose this is obvious, but
when you stop to consider this, physically transporting yourself somewhere
else is, at best, tangentially related to learning something.

\- also obviously, it's easier to convey certain things on a screen than it is
in person speaking / on a white-board. Specifically I mean being able to focus
in on a diagram or example. On a projector or on a white board you simply
become limited by real estate that you get back on a whole screen.

(edit: formatting)

------
maitredusoi
I can agree that Zoom is not the best format for classes, but that doesn't
mean classes can't be online and working perfectly.

For me there is so much room to innovate in EduTech!

Why always trying to go back to the past form of tradition instead of being
the engine of innovation.

There are plenty of talented people here, that are currently reading HN, so
instead of saying please get my physical classmate, ask for change in the
cyber world, you should be served well ;)

~~~
kilroy_jones
The article isn't saying that classes can't be online, just that the medium
doesn't work as well when employing certain teaching techniques.

------
helixhelix
On the flipside, this serves as a demonstration for what is good teaching
practice. The classes that suspiciously see no change go to show you can't
scribble on a whiteboard and call it a day.

