Every time I understood it less.
I even watched some videos where people interviewed physics professors, to explain what it really is, and the explanations only got more convoluted.
Seemingly not because those people were bad at explaining, but because if you want to explain it as correctly as possible, it just isn't intuitive at all.
"Lock it up, they're starting to catch on."
;-)
Gravity is a thing, and we can feel it under us. But we can’t touch it, or see it.
Intuitively things that we can touch and see should be qualitatively different, but this intuition is wrong. Turns out it’s just big weak fields like gravity, and small strong fields like electromagnetism.
I think that we don't feel gravity directly, just our atoms resisting being squashed.
Sometimes, things are just hard to understand. Sooner or later students are going to have to face that, so why do we delay the inevitable?
Very few people need to know the subatomic behaviour of electromagnetic fields that make electricity work, but all of us need to know that it travels in wires and it can kill you.
I see this as well when it comes to teaching programming to freshman CS students. For some reason, we've strayed away from lower level languages like C and don't introduce the low level details until students are quite far into their curriculum. Abstracting away the details just muddies the waters in my opinion.
If you're trying to learn "class, method, extends, static, var/Integer/int, interface, abstract, virtual, different exceptions, recursion and loops, etc" having to also learn about memory is not helping and if you try to do basic pointers first it becomes kind of like spell chanting. You just start trying different combinations of * and & until it works. Partially because you're a bit overwhelmed and partially because it seems like useless knowledge.
The more I worked the more I started to appreciate subjects like operating systems, algorithms, etc but at the time of doing them they seemed too theoretical since they were way above my practical knowledge and useless to the projects I was doing. "Why would I need to know how to build a file system/compiler/etc? Why in the hell would I ever do that?"
The other aspect is that if you start with learning the theoretical side you end up worrying you won't be able to code by the end after a bit. For example you've been there for 2 semesters and while you can talk about low level subjects you've barely done a todo list/calculator/chess. If you start with the more high level things by the third semester you can definitely be working part time.
This is from the POV of doing CS to start working as a dev and not do academia.
But there is an accessible video that explains electricity pretty well. Veritasium - The Big Misconception About Electricity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHIhgxav9LY
There is one commonly used concept that requires understanding electricity correctly, and not just as a combination of waterhoses and gizmos. It's impedance, and it directly corresponds to the "controversial" experiment that Veritasium is proposing in his video. Impedance breaks the pipe-of-electrons analogy.
You would have to start with alternating current water, since "DC" water maps to DC, where impedance =resistance.
Once you've got alternating water, you can add inductance (inertia) and capacitance (rubber diaphragm tanks) and I think it all works out.
It's just that we don't have a good intuition for alternating water current so it's not a very useful analogy in that case.
Sounds bizarre, right? That's why this is mostly ignored unless it can't be, for example in very fast circuits.
One way to look at this is that there is no such thing as a hose for electricity. It cannot be confined to a conductor, even if it is also wrapped by an insulator. It is only mostly confined. And this is not some failure of materials engineering that we may overcome one day, this is just how this stuff works.
BTW, the answer in the video is 1/c seconds, i.e. one meter worth of speed of light. And the lightbulb will experience current determined by the impedance of the transmission line. Then the fields will do a full wraparound the ends, at which point the circuit will start stabilizing around the resistance of the load. It can take a few back-and-forth iterations to stabilize the current.
Sometimes its a whole lot easier to speak the truth than to speak in analogies.