I second the proper teaching of pointers. However, make sure you explain variables just as well, for they too introduce a level of indirection¹, which is almos

I second the proper teaching of pointers. However, make sure you explain variables just as well, for they too introduce a level of indirection¹, which is almost always overlooked. C doesn't syntactically distinguish rvalues and lvalues, so this level of indirection often goes unnoticed. I strongly suspect this is why learning pointers is often hard: trying to grasp an additional level of indirection before having comprehended the first one is nearly hopeless. [1] Variables are containers for values. This is isomorphic to a constant pointer to a mutable cell.