"It teaches you ways of thinking about problems that are useful even when you aren't using C."
That's a strange thing to say considering that, as a C programmer, you're much more concerned with implementation issues rather than expressing high level ideas. In general, when I'm given a problem, I care about the organization of my data. I'm not concerned with memory management.
I'm not sure why you're getting defensive.
And I guess "organization of my data" was a bad example.