Well, being a master of JVM internals does give you a very strong grasp on a very useful basket of concepts for GC and programming language implementations, so I'm not sure I would necessarily agree that there's no transferable overlap. But regardless, neither of these are applicable metaphors for a 101 level CS class—at the introductory level, you're better getting a broader survey of lots of different languages, because learning the transferable fundamentals is more important than learning the specific "trivia" of any particular language.