I'd sort of like to see 'return' explained earlier, rather than used without explanation in the IO monad example. Also it's weird to hear that a monad is a design pattern, and then hear about the monad deciding things; that implies something more concrete than just a design pattern. It's only vaguely clear that "the monad" in that sense is the specific choice of bind/return functions (if that's even correct!). But while it's a bit rough around the edges, I can see this becoming a really good explanation. It explains how the goals of monads relate the implementation, which seems to be the tricky part, in a way that makes sense to me.