conventions - Sign of the vector (especially $g$) while calculating

I'm a high school student and I'm studying Newton's second Law. While my teacher is calculating a net force of an object he always treat all vectors as positive numbers. I think what he meant is the magnitude of the vector which is always positive, but the problem is that he didn't use the magnitude symbol, for example like $||Fg||$. He said the acceleration due to gravity , g, is positive, but shouldn't it be negative since it is pointing down. This also cause a problem: every time when I calculate the net force I can't add all forces together, instead I need to choose to use minus sign when the vector is pointing down. So in general which way is correct?