I appreciate your thoughts there, Kevin! Thanks very much. And yes, physics.SE would be a good place. Maybe later.

A certain college professor insists that holes and the current flows from the anode to cathode in a vacuum tube. (Bullfeathers!) My question was part of trying to wrap my brain around this also.

Do you know Jim Garland? He's the distinguished professor at a university in Ohio. I have great respect for him. He's built some beautiful linear amplifiers that were featured in QST a few decades ago. But I (and others) have a problem with that concept.

Maybe he's right, I don't know.

"Which direction is the real current" is an argument about the meanings of words which is not useful to actually understanding either physics or electronics.

It's just got a minus sign in there where people might think it would make more sense not to have one. The math still works.