My proudest moment in high school was getting a 5/5 on the calculus based AP Physics C exams at 15 with no calculus and only rudimentary algebra knowledge at the time. That experience permanently colored my thinking, and made me much more open to practicing thorough visual imagination as a way to solve problems. I found that practice useful all the way through my EE degree's vector fields courses a decade later.
I think that's the modern fundamental difficulty in Maxwell's reworked equations - the 4 we all know and love, not the 20 or so he originally published. To even begin to get a true intuition for them, you have to get really really good at visualizing idealized objects with flows running through surfaces, and (if you're lucky) symmetries that cancel each other out. You can't be afraid of imagining the infinitely small and the continuous to really get the most out of it, even if you "know" on some deeper level that the continuity of spacetime is a convenient approximation.
14 years later I am still grappling with the beauty of saying "yeah yeah, this area of interest is technically discrete, but let's pretend it's continuous and see what kinds of stuff falls out." If you have examples of things like this in other areas like mathematical finance, I'd love to hear about them.