Content for science education commonly mixes aspects done with great care, aspects done with less, and aspects that are... artistic license and trippy psychotic

Content for science education commonly mixes aspects done with great care, aspects done with less, and aspects that are... artistic license and trippy psychotic bogosity. Regrettably, students are often unsure which aspects are which. Unsurprisingly so - they're new to the area. This feeds and diversifies their rich ecologies of misconceptions. So some lecturer might think of themselves as demonstrating only friction. But they're also demonstrating how to present material, how to do lab safety, and perhaps also how to silently subordinate observation and data to expectation and narrative. When doing a demo, one can easily acknowledge and flag a divergence with a "<expectation>... more or less". And it's not just a problem for students. In the context of science education research, a first-rate stone-cold-empircial experimental physicist, when thinking about their teaching, might be "like, I have gut feel for what works - I trust my gut". Sigh. I know a biologist, who does respected work, but get them started on <other thing that's not their research focus>, and it's a bizarre sidestep into earthy-crunchy crystal-crazy land. Pity the poor student trying to figure out which of all these are the behaviors to emulate, and which not.