It's my opinion that students who treat coursework like that are missing a lot of opportunities to better understand things in general by way of metaphor. I have no proof for it, but a number of my professors felt the same way about my hypothesis. I think a lot of what we want to understand becomes much easier if we have a huge metaphorical repertoire - kind of like an internal language of comparisons. Trying to learn things that are difficult for you expands that repertoire the most, much like learning a new language expands one's ability to learn additional languages.

I read the chapter in the Rhetorica ad Herennium on memory once upon a time in order to better understand how the method of loci works. If you're not familiar with it, the general idea is to translate things that are difficult for people to remember into things that are easy to remember. Humans are excellent at spatial memory. You probably know where thousands of objects are located at home, work, and other places. You can probably close your eyes and remember where a lot of objects were placed in your old home(s) too. Translate numbers into images you can picture clearly and place them in an order mentally through some physical space you know well and you can remember them too. That is the technique employed by people who memorize decks of cards, pi to ridiculous numbers of digits, and so on. It is an almost lost art that is only experiencing a minor revival for memory competitions.

I think that something was lost when we moved away from classical education. That kind of thinking engendered a vivid imagination. Some of our very brightest thinkers used imagery and metaphor to describe complicated ideas in memorable ways.

I will never forget Richard Feynman's imagery for combustion.