Huh. Electron shells were one of the first things they taught us in our first-ever chemistry class, and to a 13-year-old I have to say they don't make much sense. I mean yeah, they shed some light upon the periodic properties of the table of elements, most of us could get that at that age, but man was it a pain in the ass to do the computations for them.

Then again maybe someone else would have reacted differently to exposure to the same info at the same age; maybe there's nothing that could make me in particular like chemistry. Well into college, I still have to take chemistry-like classes, and I still hate them.