Upside-down Genetics Curriculum

I feel like a really sensible idea was proposed about genetics curricula in the American Journal of Human Genetics last year.  Michael Dougherty points out that the genetics unit of freshman biology typically uses a historical narrative: Mendel noticed that something weird was going on with his peas, proposed the existence of a genetic unit, these genetic units helped analyse pedigrees and crosses, genetic units segregate on chromosomes during meiosis, genetic units are made of DNA, then molecular genetics was finally understood and all was right with the world, hurrah!

Dougherty's idea is that framing genetics in this way and focusing almost exclusively on Mendelian disorders makes the introduction of complex, quantitative traits at the end of the module seem token; just an afterthought, rather than the real prize.  He suggests that this can only fuel the naïve genetic determinism that is prevalent among the public.  What we could do instead is to start with what students already know or can easily observe - variation in phenotypes and an incomplete tendency for phenotypes to be inherited - then build the gene concept up from that basis.  For instance, students would learn about additive polygenic inheritance and the influence of environmental factors before they learned about Mendel and Punnett squares.  For some reason this makes perfect sense to me, and I can't figure out why we haven't always done it that way!