I wish I believed in anything as much as my students believe that there is a 10 per cent leeway on essay word counts

We don& #39;t have one! We& #39;ve never had one! And yet students talk about it with such authority that for the first three years of my job I also believed that it was real!

(Starting a new academic job means that you absorb a lot of information from students, because nobody ever actually inducts you beyond telling you the photocopier keycode. They also explained to me: how essays are submitted / how the library works / where Costa is on campus)

(At my old job at York I had one class that had been scheduled really late in the day because I was hired in July, and it was in a different building in a different time slot every session. My students ended each seminar by explaining patiently where we were the following week.)