Years ago, I tried to teach git to my (college) students, and it was a complete disaster. Like a lot of technical things, it's easy to get them totally confuse

Years ago, I tried to teach git to my (college) students, and it was a complete disaster. Like a lot of technical things, it's easy to get them totally confused with a single off-the-cuff sentence (and to be honest, I think I underestimated how difficult it would be to explain it and the kinds of pain points they'd encounter). Reading this article, it occurs to me how useful the idea of a "staging area" would be to helping them understand. I don't think of it that way myself when I'm working with it (I suppose I do, but not in those precise terms). But looking back, that's what was tripping them up. If you're just talking about local and remote repositories, you're not really giving them the right idea of the workflow.