Pager Pain Points

User would like to see how many students (or announcements, assignments, etc.) there are, rather than how many pages of those items there are
Symbols such as |<, <, >, >| are frequently used in paging. But are they sufficient, or do they need to be accompanied by wordings such as "Previous" and "Next"? If so, what do we call |< and >|?
Depending on the context, |< could be called either "First" or "Newest", >| could be called either "Last" or "Oldest". Are there any other cases?
Should each list remember what the user set as the preferred page size (number of items per page)? Or should there be a global setting for this that would affect all of the tables?
How do we determine real estate available for page links?
How should we calculate page links to display for the mid-range.
Where does save function live in cases like gradebook where data has been edited but perhaps not saved before user pages forward?
Meta data type formatting -- is this just a configuration for integrators or do we make suggestions?