Shef, For me drawing or creating vector art in Illustrator & Flash which have the most awkward drawing tools I've ever used is most difficult. Illus is so backwards thinking & working from the Draw-Xara path. I had a similar learning curve spike when switching from CADDAM to PC's CorelDraw back in the day.
If you can get your students creating vector art in Illustrator & Flash first, then Corel & Xara secondly as These seem to be the two schools of vector programs. Not shure where Fireworks fits in the picture. If your students learned from these 2 schools, they should be able to handle/create in any Vector app that they may run up against.
I suspect that starting your students with Illustrator would open more doors to mainstream graphic jobs in the states though. It seems like the west coast is more Mac entrenched than eastern US. Perhaps less so as time goes on since Mac lost the OS war to Microsoft. I'm not an expert on this subject but it seems that Mac had to adapt to the microsoft way to survive. Mac can run a Windows OS & Linux etc. Where as windows can't run the Mac OS. Didn't Microsoft bail out Mac OS?
Our dream to see Xara a household name in the graphics industry as it should be! I hope it happens one day.
With 3d & animation becoming such a dominant force in Hollywood. I wouldn't discount the career possiblities there. They use 20,000 dollar software though so it's a different path than the static art path we are on.
----------- _~o
----------- '\<,, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep
><>____(_)/ (_) - in order to gain that which he cannot loose." JE
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