Some jobs that I have had, for example separating die-cast zinc parts from the mold by putting them in a punch press, involved very little or no decision making. The only decision that might occur would be to reject a defective part or not. Everything else, from the design of the part to the method sheet telling the worker how to insert the part into the press, how to lay it in the bin afterwards, how many pieces per hour are expected for quota, and even what defects are rejectable or acceptable, had already been decided on in the office.
 Teaching is quite different. Although there are some decisions, such as what the curriculum will be, which textbooks will be used, and how many and which students will be in the teacher’s classroom, which the teacher has little or no control over, basically everything else is up to the teacher to decide. That’s a lot of responsibility. I think that most of the issues to decide fall under two main questions: What to teach and how to teach it.
 In determining what to teach, an obvious place to start is with the curriculum mandated by the governing authority, if there is one, be it state department of education, local school board, or congress of school teachers. A beginning teacher will likely have very little control over this, but decisions can bring one to a position where questions about the curriculum can be effected, for example on the local school board or city council, or as a respected expert in curriculum. Even when two teachers teach from exactly the same curriculum, their lessons will most likely be at least a little bit, if not a whole lot, different from each other. This is because teachers also decide how much time to spend on each item in the curriculum, what supplemental media-trade books and journals, videos, movies, songs, etc.-to use to enrich the given curriculum. I know there are some curriculum designers out there who dream of developing a “teacher proof” curriculum that no teacher can mess up. That presupposes that a curriculum which could be used by all classes in all situations without modification could possibly be developed. I do not believe that it can. Maybe it is possible for some very technical subjects, such as learning the proper way to install a modem, but for all other subjects I believe that the decisions made by the teacher regarding what to teach are paramount in the effectiveness of the lessons.
 When I was getting ready to go in the Peace Corps to teach English as a foreign language, I told my step-mother, a twenty-year teacher of reading to children who have difficulty reading, that for the first three months I would be in training to learn the Hungarian language and to learn “how to teach.” She said, “Uh-huh.” Wouldn’t you like to learn how to teach in three months? Actually, we did learn a lot. There are many different methods of instruction available, following many different theories about how people learn. Now we know that different people learn better in different ways. Given these facts, it seems to me that the decisions that teachers make about how  to teach their students most effectively are even more important than what to teach. I may teach all of the subject matter in the curriculum, and get through the whole book, but if only a small percent of my class actually learns the material, I have failed. These decisions are made both before the lesson, planning if it will be a lecture, discussion, workshop, or whatever, and during the lesson, changing elements that are clearly not working, following a worthwhile tangent idea, and guiding the lesson so that it stays on track. Teachers also need to make decisions on evaluation of student learning. How should they be tested? How often, and what about?
 Another very important part of how to teach is classroom management. Of course it would be wonderful if all of the students were little angels all the time and teachers did not have to think and make decisions about discipline, but let’s get real. If you don’t make some decisions about how you are going to handle classroom management, they are going to be made for you by the students as they walk all over you. Here again, decisions made both before and during the class are important, although I would say that the plans a teacher has before the problems start about how to prevent them and how to deal with them when they do happen are more important than decisions made during “the heat of battle.”
 Deciding how to feel about students is just as important as deciding what and how to teach them, and fortunately it is totally in the control of the teacher(well, kind of). Of course if all of our students were the perfect little angels so ardently wished for earlier, we wouldn’t have a problem feeling wonderful about them, but again that’s just not the case. Hopefully most of our students will be normal kids, who have normal kid problems, but from experience I believe that there will be some kids who lie, cheat, steal, and are mean, both physically and verbally, to other kids. Personally, I really dislike adults who behave that way. How will I decide to feel about, and deal with, my students who might? I may try to understand why the student behaves that way, for example he or she might be trying to satisfy an unfilled need for self-esteem or sense of power. However, even if I do understand it, I still don’t like it. I try to take the idea from theology, “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” to heart when I think about potential problems like this with students. It’s hard. Some things are not so hard to forgive, others, for example all of the shootings of the past few years, are for me impossible. I sincerely hope that I never have to make such a decision about one of my students. I don’t know what I’d do.