What does contemporary neuroscience offer educational practice? The promise seems immense, as we come to understand better how the brain learns. However, critics caution that only a few concrete implications for practice have emerged, nowhere near a rewrite of the craft of teaching and learning. How then can we understand better the relationship between neuroscience and educational practice? It is argued here that to speak to the classroom neuroscience has to shout across two gaps. The first and most familiar are different levels of explanation. The second concerns the epistemological contrast between explanation theories and action theories, roughly the contrast between basic science on the one hand and engineering science and craft on the other. Just as we do not expect Newton's laws in their fundamental generality to deliver specific designs for pocket watches and grandfather clocks, neither should we expect fundamental neuroscience to radically redesign particular practices of teaching and learning grounded in educational research and experience.