Just thought about something that I think is analogous to explaining monads. I remember reading few articles about &quot;core math&quot; in the States and it had example problems related to addition, subtraction, multiplication.<p>The complaint was that those problems where incomprehensible gibberish and kids and adults alike had really hard time figuring them out.<p>From what I recall the core of the issue was that the question authors had some specific mental model of how addition and multiplication works and the questions were structured in a way that required figuring out what that model was (otherwise it was very hard to understand what was being asked).<p>Why does 2 + 3 = 5? Well, because it does. I don&#x27;t even know what my mental model of addition is. I just do it. I stared at it long enough as a kid and I developed neural circuits that compute the result.<p>Instead if I asked:<p>I have two stars in a box. How many squares do I have to put in the box to have 5 shapes?<p><pre><code>    | * * | + | ??? | = | * * # # # |
</code></pre>
Which is how I recall those weird maths questions were structured.<p>Now you a have a (terrible IMHO) model of addition. That&#x27;s what I think those monad tutorials do for you.