Open YouTube on any evening before an examination and the menu is ready.
Complete Integration in One Shot. Entire Class 12 Maths in 9 Hours. Probability: Zero to Hero, Full Chapter, Maha Revision. The thumbnails are red, the arrows are yellow, and the teacher’s mouth is open wider than a parabola with a very generous latus rectum.
Scroll a little further and a second menu appears. Solve this in 5 seconds 🔥. The trick your teacher never told you. 99% students get this wrong. Each lasts less than a minute, and each is followed, without anyone asking, by another.
Welcome to the pedagogy market. Two shops stand on the same street. One sells mathematics in bulk; the other sells it in sachets. Business is excellent in both.
I am going to say something that may seem unfair to both shopkeepers. The one-shot and the short are not opposites. They are two doors into the same room, and the name of that room is illusional understanding.
The Bulk Shop: One Shot, No Aim
Consider the one-shot first. A chapter that took the NCERT sixty pages, your school teacher six weeks, and Newton and Leibniz a lifetime of quarrelling is now delivered in three hours and forty-seven minutes, with two ad breaks and a reminder at 2:15:00 to “smash the like button if you are still with me.”
The student is still with him, technically. Eyes open. Notebook open. The mind is somewhere near the second ad break.
To be fair, a one-shot does one thing well. It does what a good summary does: it shows the shape of a chapter to someone who already knows the chapter. For a student who has already struggled through the exercises, it can be a decent revision.
The trouble is that this student rarely watches it. It is watched by the student who has not started. He watches it the night before, at 1.5x speed, in place of the weeks of work it was meant to revise.
Mathematics is not poured into a mind. It is grown there.
Every idea needs a problem the student attempted and got wrong. A one-shot has no room for that. The teacher solves; the student nods. Four hours of nodding is excellent exercise for the neck. For the mind, not so much.
The Sachet Shop: Sixty Seconds of Genius
The short is more modest. It does not promise a chapter, only a trick. Derivative of x^x in three seconds. The music rises, the answer flashes, an emoji explodes, and the student feels a small electric thrill: I know something now.
Then the thumb moves. The next reel is a cat. Then a trick for the area of a triangle. Then someone’s breakfast. Then IIT topper reveals his secret. Forty minutes later the student has met eleven tricks, two recipes and one dance, and by dinner can recall none of them.
There is a name for what this does to the mind. Sophie Leroy (2009) showed that when we switch from one task to another, part of our attention stays behind with the first one. She called it attention residue. A feed of shorts is a machine that manufactures switches.
One reel leaves a residue; sixty reels leave a sediment.
Then we sit the child down for homework and wonder why the mind will not settle. It is not lazy. It is crowded.
And the trick itself? A trick is a conclusion without its journey, and in mathematics the journey is the content. Take the favourite reel trick for limits: “just differentiate the top and the bottom.” Apply it to
limx→0 (x + 1) / (x + 2)
and the trick confidently gives 1/1 = 1. The true answer is 1/2. L’Hôpital’s rule works only for the indeterminate forms 0/0 and ∞/∞, but that condition never fits into sixty seconds. The student who learned the trick without the condition will use it with full confidence on exactly the question where it fails.
One Room: Illusional Understanding
So why do both feel like learning?
Because watching someone solve a problem fluently feels almost exactly like being able to solve it yourself.
Karpicke, Butler and Roediger (2009) asked students how they actually study. Most named re-reading; very few named testing themselves. The authors call the result an illusion of competence. While the material is in front of us, we judge that we know it. The examination, unfortunately, does not keep it in front of us. A video lecture is re-reading with background music.
Sloman and Fernbach (2017) describe a cousin of this, the illusion of explanatory depth. Ask people how well they understand a zipper or a flush toilet and they rate themselves high. Ask them to explain it step by step and the ratings fall. Our students rate their understanding of integration by parts the same way, until the pen touches the paper.
That is what I mean by illusional understanding: a feeling of clarity borrowed from someone else’s fluency. The one-shot sells it in bulk. The short sells it in sachets. It is the same product.
Watching a teacher solve is to understanding what watching a cricket match is to fitness.
The Scorching Screen
Now add the hours.
India Today reported in 2025 that, according to a streaming-trends report, Indians spend more than four hours a day on average watching content on their Fire TV devices. The same article noted that Sweden is spending €104 million to bring printed textbooks back into its schools, after a decade of screen-first education weakened children’s basic reading and writing (Bhowal, 2025).
In many of our homes, “study time” and “screen time” have merged into one glowing rectangle. The screen that warms the evening also scorches it. Not in a day. It browns slowly, like toast left in the toaster while you scroll. Patience goes first, then sleep, then the ability to sit with a single problem for twenty quiet minutes, which is precisely the ability mathematics needs.
Meet the Solve-Keepers
Every market needs shopkeepers. Ours has solve-keepers: teachers who keep all the solving for themselves and leave the watching to the students.
Some years ago I noted in my journal that three new kinds of teachers had evolved over the last decade. The pedagogy market has since bred a fourth.
- The Informer knows everything about the exam except the subject: which chapters carry weight, how many questions will come, why the board delayed the date. You ask, and he informs.
- The Explainer can explain anything that lives in his memory, and mistakes his familiarity with the subject for understanding it. His favourite sentence is “This is not necessary to know,” and with it he puts out a student’s curiosity.
- The Networker has a web of senior students and like-minded colleagues, knows how to bend the system, owns every gadget, and uses most of them for the wrong job.
- The Anchor is the newest arrival. He has learned from the evening news that volume is pedagogy, so he teaches like a breaking-news bulletin:
- Every theorem is BREAKING NEWS, and every formula is a scandal.
- Every chapter is “most important for 2026”, including the one dropped from the syllabus.
- “Bachcho, ye question pakka aayega!” is announced with the urgency of an election result.
- The answer appears on screen before the question has finished loading in anyone’s head.
- The board is red, the thumbnail is redder, and the voice is the reddest of all.
The old-fashioned misfit who informs well, explains well and connects well, and does it quietly, is now an outlier.
When everything is important, nothing is. When every sentence is shouted, the student stops listening to sentences and starts listening to the shouting.
A line I wrote for myself years ago fits here: don’t show off your expertise; show them how to think. A teacher who shouts the answer proves that he knows. A teacher who waits for the answer lets the student discover that she can know.
In fairness, many teachers on YouTube are careful, patient and genuinely good. The problem is not the people. It is a format that rewards the loudest thumbnail and the fastest reveal, and slowly trains all of us, teachers included, to give it what it wants.
What Can We Actually Do?
For parents who allow
- Ask “show me”, not “did you study?” After any video, ask your child to close it and solve one similar problem on paper, or explain the idea to you in their own words. If they cannot, the video was entertainment, however educational it looked.
- Treat the one-shot as a revision tool, not a first lesson. Allow it only after the chapter has been learned from class and attempted from the book.
- Keep the study screen and the scroll screen apart. The phone stays in another room during homework, and breaks should be a walk or a glass of water, not “just five reels.”
- Notice what the house watches. If the television runs four hours every evening, a lecture to the child on screen time will not land.
For teachers who scream like the new anchors
- Lower the volume and raise the question. After posing a problem, pause. Let the class attempt it before you reveal anything. Silence is not dead air in a classroom; it is thinking time.
- Stop selling “pakka aayega”. Sell why. A student who knows why will handle the question that does not come in the expected shape.
- If you make videos, end with a task, not just “like and subscribe.” Give one problem to try without you.
- Make your short a doorway, not a destination. A good short poses a question and sends the viewer away thinking. A bad one hands over a trick and sends them to the next reel.
For students who watch
- Pause before the teacher solves. Try the problem for two or three minutes, then press play. The video becomes feedback on your thinking instead of a performance you watch.
- Take the blank-page test. After watching, close the video and write the solution from memory on a blank page. Whatever you cannot write, you have not yet learned.
- Watch a new topic at 1x. Speed is for revision, not for first meetings.
- Treat every trick with suspicion. Ask two questions: Why does this work? and When does it fail? If the video answers neither, find out yourself.
- Keep shorts out of study hours. Not fewer reels while studying. None.
The Only Shot That Counts
Mathematics is not something you watch. It is something you do.
The screen can show you the door; it cannot walk you through it. The one-shot claims to carry you through the whole house in one breath. The short shows you a keyhole and calls it the view. Both leave you standing outside, quite convinced you have been inside.
So close the laptop, pick up a pencil, and take the first problem on your own.
That is the only shot that counts.
Stay Mathactive.
— Ashutosh Kumar
Sources
- Bhowal, T. (2025, January 20). As Sweden shifts back to books, is India next in the digital learning struggle? India Today.
- Karpicke, J. D., Butler, A. C., & Roediger, H. L. (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practise retrieval when they study on their own? Memory, 17(4), 471–479.
- Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181.
- Sloman, S., & Fernbach, P. (2017). The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. Riverhead Books.
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