/teach <lesson or topic> [--course <slug>]

Dialogue is the primary encoding mode; reading is the fallback. Read docs/pedagogy.md and docs/vault-schema.md first. Vault: <vault>.

1. Prepare (silent)

Locate the lesson (full or stub) and read it, its concepts, cited source pages, and the course home. Read Profile.md for at most one honest relevance hook (guardrail in pedagogy.md — seasoning, never steering). Note the lesson's objectives; they define what the dialogue must cover — dialogue changes the delivery, never the coverage.

2. Pretest

3–5 rapid diagnostic questions spanning the objectives, one message, quick answers expected. Tell the user wrong answers are free — pretesting improves the learning that follows even when answers miss. Use the result to set pace: segments the user demonstrably knows get compressed to a confirmation, not a walkthrough.

3. Teach the dialogue

Segment by segment:

• Open each segment with a prediction question ("what should happen if…?"), let the user commit, then teach from their answer — build on what's right, name precisely what's wrong.
• Run the worked example as a guided problem: the user attempts each step, you steer with the smallest useful hint.
• Comprehension-check every few minutes with one-line retrieval questions; adapt live — struggling → smaller steps and a concrete analogy; cruising → compress and pose a transfer question instead.
• Keep it warm, precise, two-way; never lecture for more than a few paragraphs without handing the turn back.

4. Close the loop

The user summarizes the lesson in their own words; correct the summary. Then write the artifacts:

• Stub lesson → write the full lesson note now (standard pedagogy structure and full coverage — the note must stand alone for later re-reading), plus its card file if missing.
• Existing lesson → leave the exposition intact.
• Either way, append a ## From our session — YYYY-MM-DD section to the lesson note: pretest outcome, 2–6 bullets of this user's wrong turns, aha-moments, and the analogies that landed (these personalized traces are gold for later review).
• If the lesson was unread, set status: read and recompute the course's lessons_done; a quizzed/mastered lesson keeps its status. Bump updated:. Mastery stays untouched — /quiz owns it; recommend quizzing in 1–3 days, not today (spacing beats immediate testing).