The reason AI is usually a bad teacher is that it explains. You ask how something works, you get a tidy answer, you nod along, and an hour later you still can't do it. Explaining feels like learning without being it.
Five of these six make you produce something instead of read something. That's the whole difference.
You provide a skill and your real goal. This performs a crash course, live error drills and a spoken exam. You receive a seven day plan and a named list of what you actually don't know yet.
You have four hours to make me functional at [SKILL]. Not knowledgeable, functional. I need to be able to do the thing badly but independently by the end.
Give me:
- The 20% of this skill that produces 80% of real results
- What I should deliberately ignore for now, and why it's safe to ignore
- The four hours broken into blocks, each ending in something I've made
- The first thing I should do in the next ten minutes
No reading list. No history of the field. If a block doesn't end with me having produced something, cut it.This is the one that changes everything, and the one most people skip because it's uncomfortable.
I'm learning [SKILL]. Do not explain the concept to me.
Instead, put me in a realistic situation where I have to use it, and where someone at my level will probably get it wrong. Give me the scenario and the decision I have to make, then stop and wait.
When I answer:
- Don't tell me if I'm right or wrong straight away
- Ask me the one question that reveals where my reasoning broke
- Let me try again
- Only after my second attempt, tell me what actually happens and why
Then give me a harder version of the same situation. Keep going until I get two in a row right.I'm stuck on [CONCEPT] in [SKILL]. Explain it to me in this exact order and stop between each one:
1. One plain sentence, no jargon at all
2. An everyday analogy from normal life
3. What it looks like when it goes wrong
4. Only now, the technical explanation and the correct terminology
If I still look lost after step 2, give me a different analogy rather than repeating the first one louder.My real goal is [THE SPECIFIC THING YOU WANT TO BE ABLE TO DO]. I'm learning [SKILL] only as far as it serves that.
Build me a seven day plan where each day is 45 minutes and ends with something I've produced. Tell me explicitly which parts of this skill I can skip entirely because they don't serve my goal.
For each day: what I'm doing, what I'll have made by the end, and how I know I've actually got it rather than just feeling like I have.Ask me five questions about [SKILL] that sound almost insultingly basic, but that people who half-learned this skill consistently get wrong.
Ask them one at a time. After each answer, don't just mark it. Tell me what my answer reveals about how I'm modelling this in my head, and whether that model will break later.
At the end, name the specific thing I never properly learned, and give me the one drill that fixes it.I'm going to explain [SKILL] back to you as if you're ten years old.
Your job: stop me every single time I use a word I haven't defined, or lean on a phrase I can't unpack. Don't be polite about it. Ask "what does that mean" and make me answer before I continue.
At the end, tell me which parts I explained from real understanding and which parts I was reciting. Be specific about which sentences gave it away.🤖 Claude: claude.ai
📁 Claude Projects, so the six prompts live in one place: support.claude.com