Grinnell alum here - our first CS class is in Scheme. I expected the class would be a breeze because I already had a few years of programming experience in Java/Python in highschool. Turns out that lisp is way different, and I was about as challenged as people with 0 programming experience. At first most of us were annoyed at having to learn an esoteric language without real 'industry' use, but by end of semester we all were super into it. It helped that our curriculum focused on fun problems like using recursion to draw things using a faculty/student developed scriptable gimp library.