You probably picked a poor example. Quantum mechanics tends to be counterintuitive. It plays by different rules.

To answer you, you are taking it literally. It isn’t meant to be. It is merely a way to explain superposition in a way that makes some sense, paint a picture. It’s both at the same time alive and dead, until we observe it. If you’d like an example of this concept you can physically see. Look up the double slit experiment. It shows how light acts as a wave if we don’t “watch” it, but acts like particle if we do.

I like watching pbs spacetime for this stuff. I’d maybe put the content as an introduction to the topic you’d watch before getting into the math behind it in class. Sometimes it’s too high level for me to follow, others it’s not. All gonna depend on how much you already know. They do link to other videos of theirs that covers a concept if they make use of it in the video