There's a good video series called "Programming Paradigms" by Jerry Cain, taken from his class at Stanford. I'm not sure how long ago it was, but it was before whiteboards, when they were still using chalk. He just started including Python that year when it was the up-and-coming thing, as an example of a higher-level language that does a lot of stuff for you. It probably seemed like a breeze for the students after the previous weeks spent on C, assembly, and Lisp, but at least they got some of the fundamentals of how things worked first.