Why do students (in Australia at least) get taught several incorrect versions of the electron shell model before moving onto the correct version?

I attend a high school in Melbourne, Australia just for context, in case this isn't common anywhere else. Sorry if I'm making basic mistakes, we're not examined on this topic this year so I'm a tad rusty.

• In Year 7 I think we learned the order of electrons as 2, 8, 18, 32.

• In Year 8 we learned 2, 8, 8, 18 or something strange like that

• In Year 9 we learned 2, 8, 18, 8, but the third shell gets stuck at 8 until the fourth shell gets to 8 too or something. I think this is an attempt at simplifying subshells filling in non-intuitive orders?

• I have no idea what people get taught in year 10, I skipped that grade

Throughout all of this there's all this weird misnaming with calling shells orbitals and vice versa.

• In Year 11, the last year we really touch on this, we finally learnt the Bohr model with subshells and orbitals and that good stuff.

What exactly is the point of all of this? I understand not throwing 12 year olds into the deep end withthe Bohr model, but at least keeping the naming of orbitals vs shells correct would help. In Year 7 they even teach us the correct 2, 8, 18, 32, only to throw that down the drain until Year 11.

This doesn't even seem like an attempt to simplify things, it's just creating pointless confusion. We dedicated a bit of a class in Year 11 chemistry to unlearning all the incorrect info that we got taught before, and I just don't see why this kind of thing has to happen.

Submitted June 08, 2018 at 06:24AM by JoseDzirehChong https://ift.tt/2kXZCmu