It's more like facilitating than instructing.

I just wrote this in an e-mail to a friend:

I've begun structuring my 9th grade boys' history class much the same as I would a team building activity. Today I did minimal front-loading (introduced the concept of absolute monarchies) had a group initiative (a race with the subject being Philip II of Spain) and then basically did an AAR (after-action-review.... a debrief) where we talked about what happened in Spain, so what were the effects, and now what does that tell us about power and ruling. Any teacher that was in the hallway probably heard my class and thought I had completely lost control, but the result was a filled out section of notes in the binder of each student and a group of 14 year old boys who actually engaged in history class even though it was the last class of their Friday afternoon.

By the end of my 80-minute block I had lost my voice, and had run approximately 15 circles around my room, but I was smiling, especially because the boys each high-fived me on the way out of the class.

Don't get me wrong, this definitely does not even come close to happening all the time. But, it's the times that success does occur that makes teaching worth it. And when a student in the middle of the activity goes "Oh, I GET it!"

Another teaching anecdote for a Friday afternoon: Yesterday, one of my students asked, "what are the suburbs?"