And what's with the name-calling? Aren't you capable of having a normal, polite discussion?
You keep talking about "the subject matter" and "programming" like it's one topic. It's not, hence the "you're an ass" comment - you're just repeating your argument ad nauseam and ignoring everything everyone else has to say.
It's possible to be a good programmer without knowing how linked lists work in excruciating detail - get over it.
It looks like our definitions of "good" and "programmer" are somewhat different.
And I've seen people who were the opposite of what you're saying - people who knew lots about low level C/Assembly stuff, but who couldn't write clean, maintainable high level code to save their life.
But to get back on the original topic - none of that is relevant to learning how to program. Loops, variables, data structures, managing state, functions and classes are more what you want to teach to start with, and are far more relevant to most programmers than malloc or linked lists.
What makes you think insert is important anyway? The typical use cases for an array/list are pop, append and indexing. Python's list implementation uses arrays, not linked lists, internally for exactly this reason: indexing being O[1] is more important for most purposes than fast inserts. (http://docs.python.org/faq/design.html#how-are-lists-impleme...)