Comment by Jach

Personally I think the whole wave-particle business shouldn't be touched upon until the student understands that in reality those things are just complex vectors in a configuration space, not a little ball bouncing around. Equivalently you can think of them as outlined in Feynman's QED (which anyone interested in physics should read), as arrows. The word "wave" shouldn't ever be mentioned in introductory quantum mechanics.

Then once that's over, you explain to the students this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7OEzyEfzgg it's a duality of interpretation, not reality, we use wave mathematics for simplified calculations. Plus if you interpret it as a wave (as Feynman shows) you run into problems with experimental results not coming out as expected that a particle interpretation doesn't have problems with. (And for some reason I can't think of color in terms of waves, it makes much more sense if I think of it in terms of the energy of a photon with the brightness as a function of how many photons there are, which then ties back to a probability point of view where it's obvious that it's brighter where there's probabilistically more photons.)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ remains for me the best introduction to thinking sanely about the subject without becoming confused from the get-go as you start talking about waves vs. particles.