My first semester of grad school we all took a course called "Bonding". Simple enough, right? I seriously did not understand 90% of the lectures, and couldn't figure out what the book said much either. I would look around the class and no one else seemed plussed, I figured my graduate career was going to be a short one. First test, I made a 57 or somesuch, and was third highest grade in the class. Huh.
The irony of course is that later I got pretty deep into "bonding", but I didn't learn much of anything about it from that class. I finally read Pauling's book "The Nature of the Chemical Bond" which is remarkably well written and coherent and it started to make sense.
Incidentally, what they teach in freshmen chem is all lies, lies I say.