Much ado is made about the value of individual teaching styles, and rightly so. No one is interested in churning out generation after generation of robotic parrots, all thinking the same way and mimicking each other in day-to-day life. What a dull world that would be. Variety is the spice of life, right? I could not agree more that variety is essential to quality education. It does make a difference. Having a variety of instructors bringing to bear such diversity in ideals and angles from which to approach life, with its nearly infinite pathways to consider, is distinctly American and synonymous with university study. Sometimes, though, variety can be more of a hindrance than a favor.
Where I get a little hazy — and even a little annoyed — is when I encounter diversity and individuality in an area of my education that is supposed to be standardized and universal no matter where I am in the country, what class I’m sitting in, or who is standing at the chalk board.
Take, for example, MLA (Modern Language Association) and APA (American Psychological Association) standards for college-level writing across any curriculum around the nation. Pick up any MLA/APA handbook — “The Curious Researcher” by Bruce Ballenger, “The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers” (both standard texts here at NSU) — or peruse the Purdue OWL website and compare the wording of these national collegiate/professional writing standards. Do you know what you’ll find when you do? You’ll find that these research paper writing standards are worded in a nearly identical fashion with only the slightest variations no matter where you find them. The school book publishers have gone to great lengths to see to it that the information stream being fed into the field of education is as universal as possible when it’s important that everyone is to be talking the same language.
Why, then, do you suppose it is that I have personally encountered three singularly unique interpretations of a particular MLA standard being taught right here at NSU. Regrettably, I can’t tell you — because no one seems to know. That’s right. There just doesn’t appear to be a “last word” or final authority on this issue. Of the four composition professors I’ve consulted, only one does not appear satisfied with leaving students to discern on our own exactly how each professor is uniquely interpreting and applying what is supposed to be standard across the nation.
The writing standard in question here is the MLA quote-formatting rule. Ballenger states, “Quotations that run more than four lines long should be blocked, or indented ten spaces from the left margin.” I polled four professors, two agreed with my interpretation. We three feel that the MLA standard is saying that if the quote was standing by itself, and it is typographically longer than four lines on a page, then the rule applies. One of the professors consulted insists that this is not the case and that the rule actually means that if the quote extends to a fifth line, even if it’s less than four lines long when standing alone, the long-quote rule applies. This is no joke. I can’t make this stuff up.
I decided to go straight to the source and get to the bottom of this. I wrote to Ballenger, professor of composition at Boise State University and author of the required text for composition courses here at NSU. Ballenger maintains that we’re all incorrect in our interpretations. Apparently, the word “line”, as it is used in the MLA rule, actually means “sentence.” In other words, one of the premier authorities on teaching MLA standards in colleges across the country was grateful to me for bringing this apparent confusion to his attention and plans to retool the text of the rule to make it abundantly clear in the next edition of “The Curious Researcher.”
Quality education is a masterful blend of the many unique characteristics of individual instructors coupled with education industry standards designed to ensure that students are not only graded fairly, but also poised to enter the highly competitive working world well-equipped with the knowledge-base that our future employers expect we’ll have by virtue of the degrees we’re all working so hard to achieve. What doesn’t seem to work – in fact, what occurs downright counterproductive – is when instructors take liberties with education industry standards by applying their own unique interpretations on them and then present such interpretations of the standards in class while claiming that theirs is the universal manner in which the standard is being taught by everyone in the field. This is particularly annoying because it simply is not the truth.
There is a very big downside when some instructors are teaching national standards one way while others are teaching them in different manners. Toleration of such practices leaves students ill-equipped to move from 1000 to 2000 course levels and beyond when we are being told that our previous instructors were wrong and then we take hits to our grades as a result. This is neither fair nor just and I am sending out the call to our administration and faculty to put in a little overtime, do the due diligence as I have done, and support the student body by bringing a standard to our standards.
Formal education lays the groundwork and sets the foundations upon which we shall all take our first steps out into the great unknown. So, yes — bring on the diversity, as much as can be mustered. As we begin to focus on our majors, let us see to it that we include in our deliberations the intentional selection of as many different instructors as we can manage within the challenges of course selection and registration process. There’s no downside in this. Let’s all just get on the same page where it’s needed.
