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My one friend from high school who's now getting her ph.d. in social psychology also keeps saying she has the hardest time getting her students to understand abstract concepts like that you can look at behaviors from different theoretical lenses in attempts to understand them, some better and some worse, and that these ways of looking at behaviors are socially-constructed/cued -

- that is, until she hit on her "spit" explanation -

- where -

At the beginning of that lecture, she asks for a volunteer for 2 extra credit points, then has them "deposit saliva" in a spoon, and then for 10 minutes she talks about the health benefits of saliva, and reads off descriptions from the American Medical Association about how good saliva is, how you'd die without it, etc., all while walking around the lecture hall holding the spit in a plastic spoon and people are wondering what she's going to do with it, and then finally right after a "raise your hands" poll where she asks people if saliva is a good thing and everyone pretty much agrees, she walks to the seat of the person who volunteered and is like, "Well, you know, since this is so valuable, I feel bad I deprived you of it, so why don't you eat it" and tries to shove the spoon in their mouth, and at that everyone goes "Yuck!" and gets grossed out, and she explains that what's in the spoon hasn't changed, but what we call it (spit vs. saliva) and our reactions to it has.

Then, the rest of the semester when she's offering different theoretical explanations for behavior, she's like, "You know, spit or saliva!", and she says students get that a lot more, and she has better answers on tests now.