[dllthomas]

"[T]he combination of (IO, bind, return) is the monad. It only makes sense to say the above in Haskell where there can be only one instance per type."

This is very important, and something that took me a bit to grok, and definitely got in the way of understanding for a while.

One thing you can do - and I don't know whether it makes sense to teach it this way - is think of the typeclass constraints as actual arguments (absent optimizations, that is literally the case anyway - GHC passes instance dictionaries). In that case, "the monoid" is that dictionary, and the type referenced is the carrier set, and a value of that type is an element of the carrier set.