I remember a time when teaching someone HTML was much easier. You just find a website you like, hijack their code and learn by replacing this or that. Now it's like trying to teach someone a foreign language. CSS and HTML5 has changed so much. The learning curve is insane.
You can't even really rely on ganking code because you need so many scripts and stylesheets it's not worth it. However, because of places like Themeforest there is an abundance of template you can alter. Maybe the best way to teach someone now is to get a basic HTML template and throw them in head first and see what happens.
I'm guessing it will go something like this:
