I think of myself as a life-long learner/mentor. I don't think of myself as a teacher per se. Yes, I have regularly scheduled classes with syllabi and graded homework assignments and lectures or at least mini-lectures, but mostly I model how I read and how I pose questions, how I seek answers, how I write, and how I think, so my students can see learning as a way of being rather than merely a means to a degree. I try to get my students to think of grades and course credits as epiphenomena of learning.
When in a computer lab, I try to keep my hands in my pockets, to resist the urge to say, "Here, you do it like this." Similarly in the seminar room I try to keep my mouth shut, to resist the urge to say, "Here, think about it like this." Even when I am working with undergraduates I try to make them do the thinking and writing. I had this hands off attitude toward teaching before I came across Carl Roger's Personal Thoughts on Teaching and Learning (1952), but he said it well:
Carl Roger's lutheran theses about learning are why I changed the name of Georgia State's Center for Teaching and Learning to The Center for Instructional Innovation when I had the opportunity, because I understand universities as composed not of teachers and students but rather as communities of inter-connected learner-practitioners who have varying degrees of experience. As a consequence, rather than seeing tests and exams as a way of assessing what a person has learned (to say absolutely nothing about how "smart" they are), I see them as opportunities to assess the efficacy of the methods employed, a sort of usability test of the learning objects, recognizing, of course, that each student engages and experiences the material differently as a result of their different personal, social, and cultural contexts and so their results offer only partial assessment of the efficacy of the objects themselves. The student is ultimately responsible for the grade, of course, but we can learn from observing them learning.