Nick. I think you should realize that I—and a number of the other people who dislike your elliding the difference between equality and identity—also teach beginning programmers.

1. You could use "is", and say "It's most proper to use "is" when comparing to certain values, including None which we will explain later. For now,you just need to know that "is" plays a role similar to == here - testing if the thing is None." That would be fine. "I'm going to explain that later" is not that rare a thing to say in this course.

YES. This is the obvious and correct approach.

2. You could just use == like you do with strings and ints, and mention "it's more proper to use "is" with None here, and we'll start doing that when we get to "is" organically."

If you don't forget that footnote every time you show code, I guess this is a less-good, but not horrible, approach.