I never understood what office hours were for. In college, I felt like it was better to just spend a few hours working on homework problems, how could anyone explain this stuff to me if I couldn't learn it on my own?

I TA'd some classes also (as an undergrad and grad student) and tried to help people with their homework, but in the back of my head I couldn't help but feel that it wasn't the the most effective approach.

I can imagine some things that I don't grock yet (like some computer graphics algorithms that I just cargo cult, or machine learning in general), maybe this is blocking me from learning them, I just need to ask someone who knows it to explain the intuition to me?