I tend to agree with you here. I taught an introductory course in Perl, and it was someone's bright idea to stick a complete novice to programming in the class. Quite frankly, it was a mess. TIMTOWTDI is a great guy and all, but he confuses the heck out of new programmers! ;)

That being said, I'm at a loss as to why newbies are being taught mod_perl (or are they not newbies???). Perl itself will be enough for these students to handle without the complexities of mod_perl thrown in.