There's a little toggle along the bottom of your screen that toggles see-through on and off.
fifth one from the right hand side (camera looking icon is no. 1)
if you hover over it it says "Activates transparent view of sub selection" and it's set to transparent by default.   (sowwy, can't do a screen capture at the moment)

Yeah, tessalation you have to do by hand on a cube. kind of a pain, but for some reason I seldom start making things with a tessalated cube.
Another approach is to start with a grid, then extrude it vertically.

Usually there's several ways to model something... ;)

Hi, my namez: "NO, Bad Kitteh, NO!"  Whaz yurs?
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