It's not until now, over 20 years later, that I realize what a magician my E&M prof was. After months of careful development of basic E&M, Maxwell's equations simply fell out. As I recall, it was capacitance that was the impetus. It was as though we had struggled in a dark tunnel for months and suddenly came around a turn and there was light. Not a little, but sheets of daylight and all the equations just fell together, one from the next. All the equations revealed themselves from the middle of one lecture to the middle of the next lecture.

And then, in E&M 2, with a different professor, I spent the entire semester coming to grips with the fact that the implications of these formulas would challenge my grasp on reality for the rest of my life.