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't have one! We'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.)