All universities have their distinctive cultures and bureaucracies related to teaching—their own, sometimes quirky, procedures for everything from allocating teaching assistants to determining the start and end time of class periods. Harvard may be even more unique than other universities, however, in the number and diversity of procedures and acronyms which have sedimented into its “teaching lexicon” over the four centuries of its existence.

This survey is an effort to create a living document—created by current students, instructors, and staff—that will make these insider terms more legible and, when possible, explain some of the assumptions behind them. With those collaborative goals in mind, our plan is to borrow and adapt responses gathered by the survey as the lexicon's content; the survey itself is anonymous, but we hope that the layered voices of the respondents echo throughout the the lexicon itself.