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Thanks for your thoughts on this. They reminded me of my own experience "learning" about action potentials (and the related membrane phenomena). Yep, "rehearsing a concept that was tricky enough the first time around twice (or even three times) can be frustrating ....". On the flip side, I didn't in fact "get it" the first time, or the second, or, for that matter, the third. And, deep down inside, I knew I didn't get it.

That feeling of not quite getting it didn't begin to go away until I had heard at least four different versions of the story, and started trying to tell my own. That one drew from commonalities and complementarities in the ones I'd heard but also from thinking about what didn't work (for me) in each of them and about why different people tell stories in different ways.

I am, of course, still working on this particular story. I'll tell it differently in the future because of what I've learned from peoples' reactions to it this time around, both frustrations ("its not a REAL battery") and insights ("it stores energy") that hadn't occurred to me. Yep, "it would be very easy to assume that this event [or any other] can only be thought of" in only one way. But it turns out to be a lot more fun to look for new way of thinking about things. Maybe that's better "science" as well?