Is Teaching Functional Programming Wrong?

People who are successful at learning and trying out haskell fall into two groups. One group is unbelievably determined, and they just keep like, banging their head against the wall. The other group is people who had a background in graduate level computer science. It's always a big deal when you learn something new that everybody else struggles through it on their own somehow. You don't get any feed back about what percentage of the audience understood anything i just said....