How do you teach mastery in a classroom, not as information, but as a way of thinking?  

This short book answers that question through a vivid analogy drawn from a single location on the Kentucky-Virginia border: the Stateline Overlook. By examining its railroad, river, and highway from both ground level and mapmaker’s view, the entire attention mechanism of modern Large Language Models becomes visible. The terrain is fixed. What flows through it changes. That is the core of how LLMs “think.”

From that insight, the book extends into a practical method for teaching mastery. It shows how experts form mental models, make their thinking visible, and guide students through the “question behind the question.” It explains how metacognition, recursive reasoning, and systems thinking, skills once common in Cold War-era computing, create intuitive AI literacy today.

Designed for teachers, computer science educators, mentors, and anyone trying to make AI understandable, this book offers a clear, accessible, and transformational approach: teach students how to think about thinking, and you teach the foundations of both mastery and modern AI.

This book is free.