I hate the circling ball model because it gives so many people completely wrong intuitions about what is actually happening in the world of particles.
After that kind of education people tend to imagine particles as little balls traveling through space and bouncing and occasionally doing something magical that normal balls don't do (like not having a radius or interacting with itself).
While what actually happens (according to better models) is that paricle is a nebulous object that evolves moving and reshaping and when we interact with it with it our measurement devices we reshape it and get results as if there was at given point in time some mass with some charge and spin and whatever at some region of space with some momentum and energy limited to some range. And to guess what will be similarily vague result of the next interaction with that object we in many cases can't draw a line and say "the ball flew throug there". And the lines we draw when we can, represent the motion of the whole fuzzy cloud that actually is the particle as it evolves in space.
I think we should start teaching model of the atom starting from the orbitals and treat classical model of the atom only slightly better than "raisin model" of the atom because what it gets right it gets right only because wave function evolution equations in some very specific cases simplify to classical equations of motion and we learned them first by observing macroscopic objets that are that special cases of motion.
The image of p orbital should suffice to explain to people why the circular model is wrong.
The circling ball/shell model is extremely useful and intuitive for high school chemistry though, so changing one without the other probably will cause more harm than good. I am a physicist and to be perfectly honest when I have to understand some kind of chemistry, my mind still uses the shell model.
Real chemistry starts with orbitals. Everything below is just excessive simplification that makes no sense when you go beyond very simple cases (taught in my country at the level of primary school).
You really could start with orbitals instead of shells and it would be as simple as the shells but made more sense and getting familiarized with them early would give you the right intuitions for tackling those more challenging cases.
Can you give me an example of a chemical reaction that is more intuitively understood with orbitals than with shells?
One aspect relevant to chemistry I can think of that can be better understood with orbitals is why shells have the size they do, but for that you need to understand Legendre polynomials, which I only learned in my second year of university, I think.
Orbitals tell you why the number of valence electrons is what it is, or why bound atoms form certain angles or why aromatic molecules make sense. Or they can even tell you why periodic table is like it is. [1]
To get introduced to them you don't need to know the math they are ruled by. Just seeing images of that model rather than shell model give you better intuitions about what's happening and more complex stuff isn't surprising and countrintuitive.
After that kind of education people tend to imagine particles as little balls traveling through space and bouncing and occasionally doing something magical that normal balls don't do (like not having a radius or interacting with itself).
While what actually happens (according to better models) is that paricle is a nebulous object that evolves moving and reshaping and when we interact with it with it our measurement devices we reshape it and get results as if there was at given point in time some mass with some charge and spin and whatever at some region of space with some momentum and energy limited to some range. And to guess what will be similarily vague result of the next interaction with that object we in many cases can't draw a line and say "the ball flew throug there". And the lines we draw when we can, represent the motion of the whole fuzzy cloud that actually is the particle as it evolves in space.
I think we should start teaching model of the atom starting from the orbitals and treat classical model of the atom only slightly better than "raisin model" of the atom because what it gets right it gets right only because wave function evolution equations in some very specific cases simplify to classical equations of motion and we learned them first by observing macroscopic objets that are that special cases of motion.
The image of p orbital should suffice to explain to people why the circular model is wrong.