Aside from the irony that Borcherds probably hasn’t graded a homework set in a while, instead let’s examine the purpose of homework. It helps you learn. You can read a chapter and think you understand the material, but doing homework makes you engage more with the material. Recently we’ve used the external motivator of course points to encourage this good habit. But this turns the relationship between teacher and student into a transaction- you do a problem, you get a point. And most young students really don’t care beyond that transaction. They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.
So if we’re not going to rethink the purely transactional relationship schools have with most students, then you probably should stop giving points and grading homework. You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription. That’s possible to figure out. A lot of people have pointed out various equity risks but it’s really just a matter of balancing the AI risk with the equity risk at the weighting acceptable to your institution.
You could also attempt the much more challenging prospect of turning the transactional nature of college into some other relationship which fosters a student’s intrinsic motivation of learning for the sake of learning, but I bet your institution goes bankrupt in the process. So really you should just stop grading homework and put 100% of the grade weight into proctored assessments with some sort of firewall against AI tools. Anyone that faces an equity disadvantage because of this was probably also disadvantaged by the fact that you let rich kids with premium AI subscriptions get better grades on their homework.
No, that's not common at all, nor how the system works. Use of graders/TAs are on an institution basis.
"Grant money" has absolutely nothing to do with it. Grant money is earmarked for specific research and cannot be spent for teaching purposes. When grant money is used to hire graduate students, they are research assistants and must work on the research project which the grant money was given for.
TAs/graders come from separate tuition budgets. Tuition dollars are much more preferred anyway because they're stable and faculty do not have to work for them, they show up based on enrollment.
The fact you have TAs/graders at all is by institution. Large R1 institutions have grad students and undergraduate population to fill these roles. In these institutions, 1 minimally sized undergrad class = at least 1 TA, with additional TAs and graders after some enrollment threshold.
Tenure has absolutely nothing to do with it. Adjunct faculty get TAs/graders all the same.
Grading is part of what it means to be a TA, and being a TA is not some awful exploitation, it's what gives graduate students living money (I was a TA in the 1990s). It makes no sense (except maybe in a small liberal arts school with no graduate students) to have professors grade.
So if grading is part of the development process for a graduate student, then go ahead and continue. But that’s not the claim in the article. And if grading doesn’t serve a purpose anymore, then stop doing it. You can pay your assistants to do nothing for 20 hrs/week, or you can find literally anything else for them to do.
Literally how grants work.
Isn't there a P != NP element to this? Doing the work is hard. Checking if someone did it is not. If a student honestly attempted a problem and failed, diagnosing the failure may be worth the professor's time, but given the bunchiness of undergrad (and frankly, any junior learning) mistake varieties, chances are the TA can identify the issue as well.
Maybe a problem in the long term, but irrelevant here. These students paid (a lot of) money for this service. The provider of the service needs to stop complaining and do their job (grade the homework). If even a single student did the work themselves, anything otherwise would be a disservice.
It was the math class where I learned the most as well as I wasn't doing rote work and was able to talk to him whenever I had an actual question.
I dont like AI destroying some of our systems but if we return back to the sort of learning that college used to be where it was self directed with guidance from professors, I will count that as a win over the factory worker production system that high school was and universities were starting to ape.
Entire math departments at multiple lower profile schools will close their doors before he has any actual concern about his future as an academic.
But your point is correct for other professors, much less secure in their positions, who have similar problems with AI and actually do have to concern themselves about using their TAs and RAs productively.
Thanks for explaining to me how the academic system I work in functions. Just like most managers don't literally pay their employees, the company does. The university pays TAs through funds from their various revenue streams, including endowment, tuition, grants to the university, and through indirect costs collected from research grants to researchers, probably including Borcherds own grants. So really a lot of different things pay the TAs, the university is just the clearing house.
faculty research overhead pays for department TAs. that's why departments with rich professors maintain their TAs even through budget cuts.
> If you have no idea how teaching works in US universities, probably better not to comment on it.
define:irony
The majority comes from tuition budgets, which are assigned per credit-unit. This also pays for faculty salaries. Math is heavily dependent on tuition because they get little overhead. Life sciences is buying millions of dollars of equipment, chemicals, animals, lab staff that incur overhead, none in math.
>departments with rich professors maintain their TAs even through budget cuts
In fact the University of California does not get to keep any overhead. It goes right back into the State of California General Fund and the CA Legislature, as part of the budgeting process, decides where it goes (obviously considering where it came from). During a budget squeeze, overhead can be diverted elsewhere.
Because of this, for a number of years, it was unknown whether the research enterprise at the University of California was actually covering its overhead costs or operating at a loss.
No structure needed, the transaction was always and still is the promise of the social experience and connections for young people. It’s the actual business model; undergraduate education is break even, the only way money is ever made is alums donating to the school due to the feel-good memories they formed when they attended.
Unfortunately, for schools who thought their purpose was to educate, they will be made obsolete in the near future. Expect a lot of schools to close.
But those places that always understood their purpose was for affluent young adults to mingle and connect with other affluent people, they will be just fine.
Post-GI Bill. Before university was universal, there was a strong philosophical angle to the enterprise. (Also meet your generation's rich kids, that's always been a part of it.)
Really? When I'm reading textbooks nowadays for fun, I absolutely do the problems at the end of the chapter. It tells you when you think you learned something but didn't.
He should perhaps ask students if they want it marked and if they do still provide feedback, but be clear it won’t count for grades as cheating is too easy.
Lazy students will do no work all year then fail. Clever motivated students will continue to do well.
More people will fail till they realise they need to do the work, but that’s just the way it is, it’s the only way to be sure (along with vivas) that students know the subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine
He has a youtube channel with lectures in number theory, category theory and other things.
I get what you're saying but credentialism of this kind has literally zero meaning today. For instance restating your opening sentence as "As an aside, the professor in question is Johnny Doe, with access to 100+ unrestricted Mythos agents" sounds far more credible and intimidating at this point.
This guy doesn’t just have credentials. He has record of proven results.
I am not saying this as a black and white statement. I just think there are different cohorts of students based on maturity and self motivation and we might be losing out on one cohort that is at neither extreme.
There are plenty of people who have the innate intelligence and intellectual curiosity to succeed in college, but come out of high school lacking discipline and clueless about what they want to study. They would be better off spending a few years working or serving in the military or something to get their shit together first, and then enroll in college later. Those students tend to have clearer goals and take the educational experience more seriously.
Well, that raises an interesting philosophical question. What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?
Surely you agree that there are a wide variety of teaching styles present among all college professors. If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material? Why is this an issue with the student, and not the professor not being teaching material, or the university not being facilitator-of-education material for failing to match students and professors well?
I agree that people have been pushed into college as a default option due to it being overloaded as both place of learning but also printing salary-granting papers, but it's NOT clear to me that students who need the specific stick mentioned in some cases are broadly unsuited for higher learning.
Half the class was cheating in Ion Stoica’s OS class even when the whole thing was supposed to be a group effort. Like how are you cheating when you’re already working in groups of 4?
Love the optimism, but if you really believe the universe is this fair then you’re too young, too naive or too inexperienced (or any combination therein). The world is absolutely full of people who have cruised through all of that but still manage to get (and maintain) good high paying jobs all the time. “Failing upwards” is a commonly observed phenomenon everywhere, in pretty much every industry.
Truth is: none of that matters in the real world. What matters is how good you are at networking and bullshitting your way through life. Unfortunately for those of us that are terrible at bullshitting, this means a harder professional life no matter how much effort you put into it.
If you think bullshiting and networking are the only things that matter, then I believe it’s your pessimism that’s talking.
In a class of 100, if 50 decide to learn things and 50 decide to complete assignments using AI without learning, I’m willing to put money behind the idea that more people in the first group will do better in life. Of course there will be exceptions because there’s a lot more in life beyond competence, including luck that influences outcomes.
I began my undergraduate in 2020, so it was mostly online and my uni group had a discord server we all used.
I already knew how to program pretty well, so there were plenty of nights where I sat in discord and helped people debug their programs. I wouldn't share answers directly as the professors checked for identical and identical-with-renamed-identifiers. So the incentives were pretty well aligned for a collaboration where the students did learn something themselves.
I was incentivized to teach them stuff instead of just fixing their problems, and they were incentivized to learn too (so as not to be stuck dependent on me and my time), and for the most part they did.
It was also a very easy way for me as a not-very-social-teen to get integrated and accepted into the group. Not in a transactional way: "I helped you so you owe me". But rather in the sense that they had to give me a chance and they spent time with me in an environment where I was comfortable, which made it more natural for them to invite me to social situations where it would have been more difficult for me to go directly without knowing the people in advance.
And just like people came to me for programming advice, we went to another guy who really knew Math and Physics for those subjects, and so on.
That is all gone now. What a shame.
You mean to plagiarize their work. Now finally the nerds also have the option to have somebody else do their work for them.
The responsibility part is just one element influencing the result.
"You may bring one 8.5x11 double-sided cheat sheet into the exam. You may write anything you want on it. And I promise you that if you prepare such a sheet, you'll never even look at it during the exam."
And he was right.
If it's a well-designed course it should be clear what the content of the exam will be. If not, it's the professor's fault. And barring rare emergencies being rested on the day is also generally a matter of preparation, not luck.
> barring rare emergencies
It doesn't have to be a rare emergency. Things happen, loud student parties happen, random bad nights happen.
But it’s hard for me to imagine that for the cohorts in between (who definitely want to be motivated) having some forcing function is just an easier guiding hand to helping them become responsible vs. completely bombing a class and then potentially losing hope or self identifying as lazy/helpless - which I had seen all too often to some of my smartest classmates.
Regardless not saying this to invalidate your experience. Just hasn’t lined up with mine.
The students have made it extremely clear to the teachers
Much cheaper not to train anyone and let the state or pupil pay for training.
See lack of apprenticeships for a case of this.
It confers enhanced future income largely because of the inherent vetting process that asures future employers this person is able to focus for extended periods of time on intellectual tasks, is able to follow through and function within a bureaucracy. I don't think it's as much about skills, at least it's way overkill for the skills that are actually needed on the job for most jobs.
I don't see the rise of LLMs as obviating the "functional cog in the Rube Goldberg machine" training.
If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now. The fact that we haven’t is proof that the promises of neo-liberalism are all lies.
Food. Consumer goods. Telecommunications services. Transportation. Clothes. All things that have gone down in absolute prices and relative amount of family income to be provided.
Education / Housing / Healthcare: all deemed "up to the State" and that takes increasingly more from people at ever diminishing returns.
We can have a long and serious conversation about how hard the Government should be involved in regulating these things, and how we could set up systems that ensure that these become universally available and not just for middle/upper class. We can even have a conversation about things that should be controlled by the Government even if it means a high cost to society. But to deny that things managed by the State are more expensive overall is a clear sign of ideological blindness.
There's a wealth of clear evidence for this in the economic data in Eastern vs Western Europe, East Germany vs West Germany when Eastern Europe was under Soviet rule. The countries under Soviet rule were significantly poorer and to this day most still haven't caught up with their Western European counterparts.
Western Europe didn’t start neo-liberal policies until after the cold war ended, and it went into full gear around the year 2000.
In either case. Is garbage disposal in Europe so much more efficient now that it has all been privatized, compared to the mid-90s? Are trains running cheaper? Is power transmission cheaper now that energy generation, and delivery have been split apart and sold to private investors on the public stock market?
No, the answer to all these questions are no. Because efficiencies in a system don‘t care about the ownership model, and neo-liberalism is a religious like creed that operates out of idealism for a world that does not exist.
To the extent it is I agree it should obviously be replaced by on the job training, because that will be much much better. But to me this is what's happening now anyway, de facto.
Even you do, say, a computer science degree which is one of the more obviously industry aligned fields you're still not really learning how to build software products or even useful software at all really except in the most mechanical sense.
You're learning a bunch of variously useful theory (in the sense that it could all be useful in principle but you won't know exactly for what and at what time until you're out building things in the world) and no company is ever going to be incentivised to introduce you this in a proper environment conducive to intellectual exploration separate from 'the job', because frankly you'll be long long gone by the time any of it pays off often decades hence.
Even the ones that are ostensibly under software engineering courses where you might even work in a group, it's about as far away from working on a real software project in a company with (or without) customers and capital on the line etc as can be imagined. Probably even open source would be a closer approximation / better practice at this.
And all of this is a good thing and is the point. It's a sandbox, for you to play around, mess up, 'waste time' and learn. No company is going to really give you this sandbox in the same way, nor should they. They're paying you, you're not paying them.
They aren't the ones saying it. Parents, government officials and high school guidance counselors are telling everyone they need college to get a good job.
Colleges don't have to say anything thing about it but they raise their tuition abd accept the grant money while expanding their campuses to accommodate the rise in demand. That's exactly how a business would react to a growing market with rising demand and an influx of government money.
People pass through colleges on their way to getting a job and colleges oblige.
What op thinks colleges should be doing is accepting people who they think, with education, could contribute to the college's research fields. Think about the college tracks that lead to PhDs where the student stays with the university for some or all of their career. That's what OP is suggesting colleges become (or revert to, if that's what they ever were).
They'll probably just shut it all down.
With AI, what's the ROI on educating the masses? Paying specialist academics to know things? Just leave them dumb and let save the rich some tax money. Dumb people are easier to control anyway.
On research: If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do.
The generation of Americans that went to the moon had only 5-8% of people go to college. Whether someone is smart or dumb has little to do with formal higher education.
Education is not subsidized only because it's a public good.
The OpenAI math dump showed that it’s not worth paying hundreds of PhD-years if a tech bro can do it with an agent.
In high school (2006) my physics teacher gave credit for handing in the homework (he checked it and handed it back, but no grade was assigned). Didn't hand in homework, you got a zero.
He knew then that if you assign grades to hw, people will cheat.
If I'm paying for Berkeley, the professor have office hours for me to ask questions.
The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences (EDIT: that is, doing poorly on the exam) are still in the future, but less so when they become present.
Then they lash out at the instructor, even if it’s really their fault.
> The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences are still in the future, but less so when they become present.
For me at least, in most of my classes, the homework was a tiny part of the grade. Just enough to maybe get over what you're talking about, but not enough to really matter.
Then an in-class oral exam on a random subject drawn at exam entry.
Works great in my country.
At the end of the day, the responsibility is on the student to study.
So basically a oral pop quiz for math. i think could work well to complement homeworks by making sure the material as taught is actually inside the students heads.
Later on, when I became a TA, there were obvious signs of cheating in the homework, i.e. people handing in the same homework with the same step-by-step solution, with the exact same errors.
In any case, cheating on homework wouldn't help their grade.
At the graduate level maybe this problem is solved by doing Moore-style classes where the students present (on the chalkboard, not slides) and the professor critiques. Students could still have AI generate proofs and print them out or hand copy them, but maybe that's fine.
Upper undergrad level is tricky, because students are expected to prove things, but maybe don't have the maturity for full-on Moore-style.
It's the start of a golden age for those of us who are curious autodidacts. If you're working through the exercises of a math textbook, you can now instantly submit your (attempted) theorem-proof to the nearest robot, and see all your misconceptions and shortfalls of rigor laid bare.
I’ve loved using AI to learn. I made SQL and Python classes of my own to finally get beyond a basic understanding of them. I made an Anki deck to learn a foreign language with very poor existing online resources.
It would give a more accurate impression of the kids understanding, incentive understanding it, be more pleasant interaction for all involved and build the kid up to Vivas and interviews.
In the lab I assist students with implementing and understanding code. Since they know they are not graded, there is no incentive for them to use AI. Sometimes we do try AI for the lulz but it makes as much sense as looking at the solutions (which I do provide already). As I frequently tell them, "AI can replace me teaching you, it cannot replace you understanding the material".
https://epochai.substack.com/p/ai-math-chat-1-thinking-smart...
Now he issues the standard taking points about looms and horses and claims he could not have foreseen it? He is an AI shill, just like Tao.
1) AI is useless.
2) AI helps me.
3) AI replaced me (unless I am a generationally gifted top performer in my field).
While he is, in fact, a generationally gifted top performer in his field, he knows that statistically speaking most of his students will not be which I think makes his apparent angst now understandable.
"So you thought AI was a gift from heaven? Ha, it's your worst nightmare! Let this be a lesson."
I have a solution, but I don't think people will appreciate it, because:
1) it is very analog 2) requires work from both student and teacher 3) there is no AI in it 4) there is not money to made on it 5) all of the above
In short, do what my MBA class did. At home you study the examples, the how behind it and possible solutions. In class, you may be called in front of the class to show that you know what you are doing.
Is it hard? Yeah, but it is kinda the point.
- There's the paternalistic argument that the adults we send to college aren't real adults and need carrots and sticks to learn properly. Making homework part of the grade helps them help themselves. This is a value judgement on what's more important (squeezing knowledge into people at any cost vs giving people agency and accountability), but I have suggestions as to exactly where people can stuff that argument. IMO, letting fully fledged adults limp through the system without the motivation or wherewithal to do a little hard work in their own self interest isn't doing them any favours.
- On the credentialing side of things, ongoing grading from something like homework helps smooth over the effects of a bad day of sleep or test anxiety. I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I think there are tools which are more accurate and less work for the students and the teachers. Start the semester with an ungraded (corrected if students want to take advantage of it, but not affecting their final grade) take-home test of the background knowledge expected for the course. This lets students decide if they're ready or should take an earlier course instead, do some selected reading on weak points during an otherwise relatively light workload in the semester, and learn the teacher's testing and grading style so that there's less anxiety leading up to a real test. Your grade in the course reflects your best demonstrated mastery on the final, which is arguably closer to what people expect from the credentialing aspect of things; nobody cares how well you executed epsilon-delta proofs during the week you studied them, they care whether you're ready for the next course or ultimate job using that skill. Allow a makeup/retake exam (new questions), maybe two, and take the maximum score. To the extent that your test has any noise, this inflates the overall score, but it mitigates the effect of a single bad day, anxiety, etc, and gives you an easy framework for handling legitimate life events. Still assign homework. Still correct it for students who want feedback. Don't let it influence the grade.
In the event that the cascading metal mining yield declines aren't solved by new tech and we do lose AI, we are now in the state that we will probably also lose calculus, liberalism and the ability to design a steam engine.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001632871...
There was constant change in the palaeolithic, change of the form "which tribe controls which valley" and no further. The range of possible changes is gonna shrink back to that small range without a stable climate and/or a solid tech foundation.
In-class exams are anyway a proxy for grading homeworks, because those who don't do them will get lower grades.
And as a TA, I liked the income, and there’s a knock-on benefit that you’re learning to read with a critical eye which will help as a reviewer in the future.
* or in mine own obsolescent field, a measure of accuracy that indicates a student need think** longer before writing in the future
** I know, I know
I had never taken an anatomy course prior, and thought that the flipped classroom worked very well for the younger students. People who hadn't quite developed the knack for studying were now forced into preparing before class, and active recall was embedded into the lab practicals so that the cumulative exam wasn't testing things they'd memorized and forgotten.
For me personally, as a student, homework has only ever been for grade-padding.
This is only true for subjects where there is only one answer to a question.
Plagiarism in other subjects tends to show itself. But AI has made plagiarism more viable in all sorts of fields.
I did all my studies in France, and every single grade was ALWAYS for work done in class, regardless of the subject.
Making homework a part of your grade is like making attendance a part of your grade. It's something that teachers who aren't capable of teaching do, so they can give students who haven't learned a thing reasonable looking grades. Students have always cheated when homework was graded, it's just that AI makes it so flagrant that it can't be conveniently ignored.
I'm overestimating people, though. There are clearly teachers who are still pretending like students don't cheat when it's like five clicks now. It was much, much harder when tons were still cheating half a century ago. You had to actually meet each other. Admitting that you're collecting a check for nothing is tough, especially because now you're going to have to work.
Who am I kidding? Teachers will just start talking about how grading is bad or racist or something, or saying that using AI is actually better preparation for the future. Hell, they should have done that half a century ago: in real life, being able to cheat well is the best skill.
It’ll be like you’re studying under Aristotle while AI is doing cold fusion next to you - incomprehensible on any level.
Just wondering whether it’ll be before money/jobs collapse or after.
Example: If you want to learn to do something with your hands, it normally needs to be taught in person, so you can try to do it, fail, the teacher tells you what you did wrong, shows you how, you do it again and it works. But this can now almost entirely be done with AI. A YouTube video shows you how. You practice it on camera. An AI watches the video, tells you where you went wrong, and shows you specific clips to improve. You do it again until you get it right.
The piece of paper you get from a University doesn't need to come from "A University". Any organization that can give you a test in person can see whether you do the thing right or not and give you a certification if you do.
So really all we need now is an AI Khan Academy and independent testing/certification.
professors needs to be life coaches and motivators, less of a oral/written book reproducer. That part will be automated. Evals also will be in a locked room, do you home work, bi-weekly do the check, correct with agent what needs to be repeated. Measure if you on course/off course doing better/worse. If you are not doing good, escalate to your coach(professor).
I mean, sure, charisma can engage people into several classes, but also, lets be honest what % of professors really got charisma? If it helps lectures are great, the active work should be done with agents, individually and in the team. of human, and other peoples agents. That's the future of work.
Assume they use AI and grade them based on where they can take it form there.
I had two classes like this, zero grades over the semester, they were among my favorite. Though we didn't really ponder what we were doing there and the means for final grades, for the admins, were both interesting (final test too long and hard, you already know what your grade is)
Could have also just been a bad professor though.
Grades are a way for teacher and student to check their learning, but teaching still needs to happen regardless of checkpoints. Some subjects require practice, like pre-proof writing in math and many other introductory to intermediate level courses. This is where homework comes in handy.
For my set theory class, the professor still assigned problems, he just never collected or graded them. For my Data Sci 2 seminar, it was only seven of us and we did several presentations and a papers.
Brian> Students learn best through intrinsic motivation, not through force. What you learn under pressure doesn't last past the exam. Everyone says these things, and yet almost all teachers continue to give grades. Why? "It's required"; "The colleges need grades"; "The parents wouldn't stand for it"; "It's the way things are." In short, the reasons for grades are political.
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/freedom.html
At Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School he built a computer course of self-paced units with no grades, and about 50 kids had keys to the computer center and used it evenings and weekends without adult supervision. In his Snap!Con 2025 talk for the ACM Karlstrom award he said why the no-grades part mattered:
https://youtu.be/pDK2PE_pkqQ?t=1917
Jens> Okay. I've I've got one more question, Brian. Um, when you showed that picture of Sbury High of the Computer Lab users, computer center user Society Society, you very carefully and conscientiously mentioned every name with the title my friend, Jonathan, my friend. And that struck me as something uh that there might be a deeper message from you behind that.
Brian> Yeah. Yeah. Um, everything conspires to make teachers the enemies of kids. Not because any teacher wants that, but because institutions have a lot of weight. And when you're giving somebody grades, you can't be their friend. It just doesn't work like that. You're not their friend, you're a hurdle they have to overcome.
Brian> So yeah, it was really important to me that they let me not give grades and I think that made the whole thing possible and I couldn't have done it otherwise.
And on AI in the same talk:
https://youtu.be/pDK2PE_pkqQ?t=510
Brian> Mostly, people who talk about AI in education see it as a threat: kids will use it to cheat; or maybe AI will replace teachers so we won't have jobs anymore. Or sort of the best of these views is we don't know yet what skills kids are really going to need in an AI dominated world. Supposing that we have one. I'm pretty confident that AI won't replace teachers for rich kids -- and computers already replace teachers for poor kids, long before AI. The poor kids sit in front of computers that give them arithmetic problems. So it's not as if uh we're opening up a can of worms that's brand new.
AI didn't create the problem with graded homework. It just made it impossible to keep pretending the grade measures the learning.
I went to Montessori school as a kid then I was in private school briefly till my parents went broke. Then I went to public school for the remainder of my career before I went to college and graduate school. I’ve taught at the graduate and undergraduate level and sat on academic boards for Purdue.
Graded and ranked assignments do nothing other than act as a filter for the structural organization to determine who they want to give resources to
The “educational” system has nothing to do with platonic or frankly any other thoughts of education for the polis
Good riddance
And why are you being downvoted to oblivion?!?
Break down the learning objectives to measurable experiment replication then:
Show one, do one, teach one
If you can’t do one or teach one you dont move to the next step.
It’s literally just how apprenticeship works and there’s no reason you can’t do that for calculus or intro to economics and especially applicable to EE, ME, CE
Teaching in academic settings is absurdly inefficient and counterproductive in my experience