> no one had explained to them basic notational conventions. They didn't know that the bold and italic variables in the textbook actually meant something. This

> no one had explained to them basic notational conventions. They didn't know that the bold and italic variables in the textbook actually meant something. This was compounded by professors using different notations on the blackboard during lectures - typically lowercase letters with overbars for vectors and poorly-rendered double-struck capital letters for matrices. That's a deeper issue than debugging or troubleshooting what went wrong.