I also find it more useful to teach something real, not a toy.

Even PASCAL was never a toy, though it was designed motivated by teaching purpose, it became professional because it was capable of that.

When I told some friends I was going to teach 11-year-olds to program, and that I was considering some BASIC versus Python, they suggested Scratch. But 11-year-olds aren't babies. They can understand a lot, and they should be enabled to talk about their code (which textual representations enable, but not Scratch-style visual programs).

So I picked Python (with pyturtle for easy turtle graphics), and it worked well.