teaching dinosaur

Definition

A tenured professor who refuses to update teaching methods or course content, still using yellowed lecture notes from decades ago and dismissing pedagogical innovations. They survived the academic meteor but haven't evolved with changing educational landscapes.

Example Usage

Professor Williams is a teaching dinosaur who still uses overhead transparencies and assigns textbooks from 1987.

Origin

Faculty culture observations, modern academic slang

Fun Fact

Some teaching dinosaurs achieve cult status among students for their anachronistic charm, even as learning outcomes suffer.

Source: Faculty peer observations and student evaluations

Related Terms

Beginner

graduation rate

The percentage of students who complete their degree within a specified timeframe (usually six years for a bachelor's), serving as a key metric of institutional effectiveness. Conveniently excludes transfer students, part-timers, and anyone who doesn't fit the traditional narrative.

🎓 Education / Academia

Intermediate

indirect assessment

Measuring learning outcomes through proxy evidence like surveys and self-reports rather than direct demonstrations of skill, because sometimes you need to ask students if they learned something rather than actually testing if they did. The educational equivalent of asking people if they're healthy instead of running blood tests.

🎓 Education / Academia

Intermediate

satisfactory academic progress

The minimum standards students must meet to remain eligible for financial aid, including GPA requirements, completion rates, and maximum timeframes. Fall below these metrics and discover that 'satisfactory' is carrying significant financial weight.

🎓 Education / Academia

Beginner

cribbing

The academic art of borrowing passages, references, or answers for your own work, dancing on the fine line between research and plagiarism. In educational contexts, it means creating cheat sheets or copying from others, which institutions frown upon while simultaneously teaching proper citation methods. It's essentially the scholarly version of "I'm not copying, I'm being inspired."

🎓 Education / Academia

Beginner

study abroad

A program where students take classes in another country, theoretically for cross-cultural learning but often functioning as an expensive semester-long vacation with occasional lectures. Parents fund it; Instagram documents it; transcripts barely reflect it.

🎓 Education / Academia

Beginner

Syllabus

A document distributed on the first day of class that contains every answer to every question students will ask for the rest of the semester, which is why no student has ever read one. Professors spend weeks crafting it; students spend seconds losing it.

🎓 Education / Academia

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nfbsk

not for british school kids...