By James M. Lang

A friend of mine recently attended a presentation about Advanced Placement courses with her daughter, who is a sophomore at the local high school. Several students who had taken the courses gave brief speeches. Afterward, my friend leaned over to her daughter and said, "Maybe they should offer AP courses on how to speak without using the word 'like.'"

When she told me that story, I'm pretty sure she expected me, as an English professor, to sympathize. I would imagine that, had I been there to witness the onslaught of "likes," I may even have reacted as she did. But, in theory, I would be hypocritical to take someone to task for a linguistic usage that I frequently deploy myself.

From my teen years into my present professional life, "like" has always been available as an easy substitute for "says." Even my closest friends on the English faculty, the ones within a handful of years of my age on either side (late 30s to early 40s), rely on it when we are speaking informally to one another: "So this student was like, 'Professor Lang, what's your policy on late papers?' and I was all like 'If you have to ask that on the first day of class, we're going to have a long semester!'"

But our use of the word in that sense does not make it right. An older former colleague of mine, now retired, considered the misuse of "like" one of the absolute banes of his teaching life. He made a habit of correcting students who used the word, and lamented the linguistic sloppiness in hallway conversations. I often wondered, when he spoke about it in my presence, if he was indirectly chastising me for my use of it.

And, indeed, it would be hard to dispute the fact that swapping in "like" for "says" violates every conventional linguistic authority.

So what do students think when they hear one faculty member upbraiding them for an expression used freely in class or during office hours by another faculty member? Do they notice the conflicting standards? Do they draw larger conclusions about the nature of teaching, learning, or knowledge?

Questions like those strike at a more fundamental issue about teaching in a department, or in an institution, or even within the broad system of American higher education: Should my colleagues and I establish shared standards for speaking, writing, or presenting in our classrooms? Wouldn't it make sense for all faculty members who teach English composition anywhere in the United States, for example, to abide by the same principles on the use of colloquial language in students' written work, presentations, or even classroom discussions?

And as long as we are heading down that road, wouldn't it make sense to have all students produce a roughly equal amount of writing over the course of the semester? Or what about establishing standards to ensure that all students have mastered a fully articulated and testable set of basic writing proficiencies in order to pass any English course?

The fact that we don't have such national standards often leads to confusion among our students. I can't count the number of times I have handed back a set of papers only to have students come to my office and say, in genuine puzzlement: "But my teacher last semester never said anything about that" or "But that's not how my last professor told us to do it."

I don't doubt them. I know perfectly well, from hallway conversations and department meetings, that I have colleagues who emphasize aspects of English composition that seem trivial to me, and who barely touch on things that strike me as essential. I would imagine that to be true in other disciplines as well. Do we do a disservice to students by not speaking more openly to one another about such discrepancies, and not establishing common standards to which we all aspire?

Those questions seem likely to dog public discourse on higher education, especially since the debate over educational proficiency standards has been reignited by Diane Ravitch's public renunciation of her former commitment to such standards (and to charter schools) in American primary and secondary schools. She outlined her position in a new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (Basic Books), and in an opinion essay published last month by The Wall Street Journal, Ravitch argues that the idea of establishing proficiency standards for all students, and punishing or rewarding schools for meeting those standards, has been a failed experiment in the American educational system.

Instead of raising the bar for students, as she had hoped such standards would do when she advocated them as the assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush, they have contributed to "dumbing down our schools" by lowering standards to the least common denominators and "giving students false reports of their progress," she writes.

As the husband of a public-school teacher, I am happy that Ravitch has finally seen the light on the folly of universal proficiency standards in the public schools. Setting classroom standards is something that every teacher should do individually; mandating them across a wide range of geographical, economic, and biological variations has always made little sense to me.

Teachers are not miracle workers. Anyone who expects an intelligent child of educated and committed parents to meet the same standards as a child with a learning disability raised by a drug-addicted single parent—well, they should have to spend a few weeks in my wife's classroom and see for themselves how all of the "extracurricular" factors in a child's life impinge upon what happens there. Every child can be taught, and every child can learn, but they cannot all be taught at the same rate, or learn the same things, or meet the same standards.

And although intellectual and socioeconomic variety in the student population is less extreme in higher education than in schools, it still exists. I have students who are enjoying four years of leisure time on Mom and Dad's dime, and students who are working 40 hours a week to pay for their own schooling. I have students who can go from A to Z intellectually in a single semester, and others who can only get from A to B.

The messy realities of students' lives outside the classroom, the immense variations in their intellectual abilities, and the wide range of prior educational experiences they have had make the idea of establishing universal proficiency standards of any kind—within an institution, state, or nation—a gesture that will lead to nothing more than additional bureaucracy and unhappy teachers.

At the same time, I would hate simply to throw in the towel on this issue and leave students fumbling around in the dark as they try to decipher why they might meet very different sets of expectations from one course to the next. So I want to conclude by articulating one step we may be able to take to help students better understand the variety of standards they will encounter: Speak to them more explicitly about audience.

I spend plenty of time in my composition courses talking to students about the importance of writing to your audience—knowing how to decide, for example, when a technical term needs explanation in an essay and when it does not. Or knowing when your audience will accept a basic premise of your argument and when you will have to take a step back and argue for that premise before you can move on to your next point. Awareness of audience, I tell students, should help determine everything from the content of your argument to the choice of vocabulary in any piece of writing.

That's a lesson that we should help students understand about their experiences in our classrooms as well. If we, as faculty members, conceive of ourselves as distinct audiences to which each student's learning performance is communicated, then our differing expectations become a more easily comprehensible and justifiable norm for students.

Indeed, the ability to recognize and respond to individual professors may even be one of the most important lessons our students can learn. They are not only learning the content associated with any given course, they are also learning to recognize and tailor their work to different faculty members and different sets of criteria in any given semester.

And that's something they will do for the rest of their lives. A sales rep walking into a room of potential customers has to determine the nature of the audience quickly, and the extent to which the pitch needs tailoring. A consultant comes onto a job site and must make the same determination. Not to mention job interviews, of course, where the ability to understand your audience and respond appropriately will make all the difference in the world.

Helping students understand that may not be the sort of lesson that makes it into our everyday course plans. But it may make sense to discuss it with them at the start of each new semester, or when we are first talking about assignments, or at the conclusion of the course.

Regular readers may recognize my argument here as stemming from perhaps the most fundamental conviction I have about teaching in higher education, and one that I have discussed before: transparency. The best teachers, in my estimation, articulate not only what they expect of students, but why.

It may seem like one more lesson to fit into an already overcrowded agenda, but it may also be the lesson that helps a student make sense of the otherwise confusing experience of trying to please too many masters.

James M. Lang is an associate professor of English at Assumption College and author of "On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching" (Harvard University Press, 2008). He writes about teaching in higher education, and his Web site is http://www.jamesmlang.com. He welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com.