A question of style (finding item in list of tuples)

Mon May 21 08:37:29 EDT 2012

I've got this code in a django app:
 CHOICES = [
 ('NONE', 'No experience required'),
 ('SAIL', 'Sailing experience, new to racing'),
 ('RACE', 'General racing experience'),
 ('GOOD', 'Experienced racer'),
 ('ROCK', 'Rock star'),
 ]
 def experience_text(self):
 for code, text in self.CHOICES:
 if code == self.level:
 return text
 return "????"
Calling experience_text("ROCK") should return "Rock star". Annoyingly, 
django handles this for you automatically inside a form, but if you also 
need it in your application code, you have to roll your own.
The above code works, but it occurs to me that I could use the much 
shorter:
 def experience_text(self):
 return dict(CHOICES).get("self.level", "???")
So, the question is, purely as a matter of readability, which would you 
find easier to understand when reading some new code? Assume the list 
of choices is short enough that the cost of building a temporary dict on 
each call is negligible. I'm just after style and readability here.