Choices and Decisions

In a recent blog post, Seth Godin distinguishes between choices and decisions. It’s a provocative post that has lots of applications for disciplined teaching and learning.

Choices, he claims, are neutral-value options that are not that big of a deal.

  • What kind of shake to get at the local Cook Out
  • What book to take to the beach
  • What kind of wrapping paper to put on your wife’s birthday gift

Decisions, on the other hand, are loaded and important and demand all sorts of additional time and effort.

  • What car to buy
  • Whether or not to take a new job
  • Where to send your kid to school

According to Godin, the problem is that we conflate the two.

First, we turn every choice into a decision and grapple for days with something that’s not really that important. The effect of this is to deplete our resources for making decisions that really matter.

Second, we turn every decision into a choice and don’t take anything seriously. We’re just as haphazard with our house-buying decision as we are with what kind of cereal we picked up that morning at Publix.

In the classroom, this has some immediate ramifications.

1.     Students should use the parts of class where they have options—about what to write about for their research paper, for instance—to figure out what it feels like when something is a choice vs. a decision. Even in my Shakespeare survey, a class filled with English majors and minors, the topic of their research paper is not always a decision. If that’s the case, they’re better off picking a play randomly—alphabetically or by length or because we’ve already read it in class—then to agonize over the decision for a month and lose the time they could spend working on it.

2.     Teachers should invest as much time in deciding how they present material as what they actually present. I have made choosing the works I teach a decision and then been completely choice-driven about the actual mechanics of my classroom time, and that’s a recipe for disaster. It actually works the opposite way. One semester, I stopped presenting work in a chronological way in my British Survey because students had always clamored for more Gulliver’s Travels at the end of the semester. When I made GT our first assignment, however (I organized the course thematically), they complained about it’s difficulty and then ended up praising Beowulf for its clear poetry. This is despite the fact that in previous semesters, when they had to start with Beowulf, students had claimed its language was too difficult.

Godin argues that the more you can discern and treat choices accordingly, the more time and energy you’ll have to make the really crucial decisions that come your way.

Something that Godin doesn’t mention but that deserves consideration? The ability to tell the difference is a sign of wisdom and is something that only God can give. One reason that I tend to freak out over small decisions is because of the weight of Paul’s command to do everything to the glory of God. If I have to do the calculus on that equation for everything I do, I get paralyzed. But Paul’s admonition is not meant to inspire the kind of fear that something like the law would evoke. I believe we are supposed to take heart in the fact that God gets glory from our eating food as much as he does from how we spend our money. The Christian disciple can model this for students, and I will pray for the clarity and focus to do so.