[aeternum]

Saying it behaves as a particle is wildly misleading, we should really remove it from the curriculum. If electrons ever behaved as particles or even if the wave function 'collapsed' into particles, they would immediately crash into the nucleus and the universe as we know it would cease to exist.

Quantized fields is a much better term. Also collapse of the wave function never happens, only increased entanglement.

[caf]

Treating an electron as a particle is the most natural way to understand the operation of devices like an electron synchrotron or a cathode ray tube, though. Not helpful for atoms or molecules though, I agree.

[aeternum]

I'm not sure about even the synchrotron, most people have the very incorrect perception that a single electron is being circled around rather than a continuous beam. This is so far from reality where we're doing something like 600 million collisions / second that I question the value of the analogy entirely.

The concept of a single particle as a point charge that isn't really interacting with everything around it is similarly flawed. We learn from a very young age to conceptualize that as the building block of matter, and entanglement as something weird. Instead it's the other way around: a single particle with a pure (unentangled) wavefunction is pretty near statistically impossible.

[Retric]

Particles unlike waves bounce off each other. For all the wavelike behavior in QM, bouncing just doesn’t fit.