Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1989)
I think more than half the time I spent earning my EE degree has been spent unlearning the intuitive (but wrong) things that I was liberally taught. I was fortunate enough to have an exceptional Physics teacher in high school, who managed to avoid a lot of the bullshit that less fortunate students were fed; sadly, I compensated that with some of my own (misguided) self-study.<p>This experience also taught me to actively mistrust "intuition" and "common sense". Not that there isn't value in intuition (quite the contrary, it's priceless, from design to maintenance), but it's only useful when it rests on a solid theoretical foundation. <i>Prior</i> to earning that foundation, it's nothing but a (very bad) shortcut that people take because they want to feel knowledgeable, but don't want to invest the effort of going through all that math mumbo jumbo.