I agree that you shouldn't make the classes too easy, but you have to get something out of the extra difficulty. The reason that we should teach Python instead of C is the reason why we teach Arabic numerals instead of Roman numerals. Roman numerals are more difficult, but you get no insight out of this time spent learning Roman numerals. It is extra human created tedious difficulty.

You get a much better understanding of pointers and memory from learning a machine language. In C you'd be spending your time on syntactic issues like & and * in expressions and in types. This is what makes pointers difficult. In assembly there's only STORE x INTO y and LOAD x FROM y.