Of course its a simplification. You are talking to a kid! Not a graduate with high-school physics.
How else will you even attempt to simplify it to 10 years old?
It seems that you are also blaming a school teacher for not being a domain expert with PhD and up to date knowledge.
Most of teachers with decade or more are just that - teachers. Its their 9-5 job.
> The electron cloud model says that we cannot know exactly where an electron is at any given time, but the electrons are more likely to be in specific areas.
How is that a simplification? and do you really think their eyes would not glaze over as they start daydreaming about icecream as you talk.
Er, at least by the standards being thrown around in this thread it absolutely can be and regularly is. You can't have less than zero of something, it only makes sense to take the root of a positive number, any time we avoid generalizing the area under a curve or rates of change because calculus won't come up for a few years...
I hated school precisely because there was no mystery. Everything was known. It wasn’t till later that I found out many of the models taught on the blackboard were lies.
Even most of history class; Columbus should have died on his voyage, because it was known at the time that his calculations for the size of the Earth was wrong, but this is rarely mentioned. Same for the lie that the other types of protohumans died out because "they were worse at using tools" rather than because we brutally murdered them. The latter is a nice example of an uncomfortable idea that we deliberately lie to kids about so that they don’t have to know.