What the correct answer says What the teacher model says
Told only the correct answer, a model learns that the picture is a dog and nothing else. Told what the teacher model actually thought — dog 78%, wolf 12%, fox 6%, cat 3%, teapot 0.4% — it also learns that a wolf is nearly a dog and a teapot is nothing like one. That extra shape is what distillation transfers.

Both columns describe the same photograph. The correct answer is a single spike: true, but almost empty. The teacher's answer carries a shape — the residue on wolf, fox and cat is its accumulated sense of how the world resembles itself, and it is the part a student model actually learns from.