I suppose what I am giving you is the distillation of over 30 years of my own schooling, work, teaching and thinking about the subject.

Firstly, I am pedantic about spelling and try to be the same way about grammar. My parents didn't ensure I got a good education, but I was a voracious reader. After finishing high-school I earned every last cent of my university fees and educated myself. Got a great job and kept on learning. Over 20 years I completed eleven degrees in communications, electronics, mathematics, physics, bio-medical engineering and history. For 20 years I essentially worked in research, but when I started lecturing at universities I got a rude shock. My entire career was about doing the research and commununicating the ideas to others. But as a lecturer I found this was not so important. In 1992 I resigned my third part time teaching post (one in UK, one in US and then one in Australia) after having been taken to the faculty board three times with complaints of unfair treatment when I expected dissertations to be intelligible and was challenged when I marked them down for poor English.

Each of us, coming from our own place, will perceive things differently. I don't doubt that your colleagues have different experiences, they start from a different place and got where they are by different routes I would expect. To be honest my samples may not be too large either. I don't think any of my classes had more than 15, maybe 20 students, my fields of specialisation being quite esoteric. My work experience was always in small groups, researchers tend to be that way! But within LARGE research institutes or institutions where the lunch room talk amongst my colleagues and I was often the problems they saw with rooky graduates. I was usually in the fundamental/bleeding edge team that had no more than 6-10 people at any given time.

I had best stop, you got me onto one of my hobby horses!

jdtoronto