I'm teaching programming with JS at the highschool level, students have some prior experience with programming with different languages but are still mostly beginners, and we're working through some core language concepts. A few times now the situation has come up where I introduce some new concept, and a student suggests it's similar to something encountered before. The analogy initially seems like it doesn't work, if I ask them to elaborate, they usually do find some connection between the ideas, but it seems (to someone with more experience) like a pretty convoluted relationship.
A concrete example: we ran into attaching multiple event listeners to a single DOM element in a browser context. A student suggested that event listeners are like arrays. After discussing it, the connection the student saw, was that you could add or remove items from arrays and you can add and remove event listeners from elements. Nothing the student said was incorrect, but I was concerned saying "yes, event listeners are like arrays" wasn't a terribly useful analogy in reasoning about either construct.
What is a good way of dealing with this situation? I don't want to shut students down who make connections like this, it seems like a very productive way of thinking in general, but I also don't want to propagate misconceptions or encourage a questionable mental model.
