I think best for most people, is to translate everything to mechanics, because it is more visual.
This is called analogy between electronics and mechanics.
A capacitor behaves like a spring, the mass of a object is like an inductor and a damper works like a resistor.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Engineering_Acoustics/Electro-Mechanical_AnalogiesBut there are a million other resources to be found on the web.
The beauty of this is with control theory it doesn't matter if you're talking about train mechanics, an electrical circuit and even certain chemical processes.
It all has similar behavior with very similar formulas.
(and yes, professors have a tendency to make everything overly complicated, boring and even missing the whole point)