- he/she :Of all the solutions offered to the dilemma posed by the implicit sexism of the traditional usage of singular masculine pronominal forms to refer to personal positions unmarked for sex, the one which I feel best preserves the flexibility offered by standard English usage is one once offered by an editorialist for the New York Times: Such pronouns should be accorded to the sex of the writer. Most other solutions are unsatisfactory for long texts. In particular, it is a major theme of this book that "the teacher... he (or she)" is, rhetorically, a very different statement from "the teachers... they." The latter cannot be substituted for the former.

- The passages excerpted from the fieldnotes (the "texts") have not been edited. They are reproduced as they were written soon after observations, at a time when the direction of the analysis was not well specified. They are thus stylistically extremely rough. I consider it important that this roughness not be hidden as it usually is.

- All texts that are transcriptions of statements by participants are placed between quotations marks. Other texts were written by the fieldworkers.

- *"..." An asterisk before a statement in indicates that the statement was not produced by the participants. /xxx/ indicates a unit which has -emic status in the original sense. It is a unit that is derived the analyst as significant within the participants' communicational system. It is never a simple restatement of "the natives' point of view."

- [xxx] indicates that the statement in brackets is one possible realization of an -emic unit.

- [XXX] indicates that the statement in brackets should be understood as a pure act, before mediation by any kind of symbolic identifications.

AN ARROW FROM LEFT TO RIGHT indicates that the statement on the right of the arrow is a rewrite of the statement on the left using a different system of conventional representation.