OK. You could well be correct.
I typed my post at about 7am, when i had only just climbed out of bed. My irony detector was not fully powered up.
I have to say I have absolutely no idea what this sentence says.
Well, changing the course schedule is one thing (on my syllabus, I always list it as tentative simply because things are never perfect) and maybe a tweak or two in assignments; that’s fine. I always think of “syllabus” more as the formal policies of the class, including the things like grades and the scale, as well as attendence and the like, and those are the things that you just can’t go through and change on a whim on students (as far as my understanding goes).
If it’s just a change in the semester schedule, then I agree it’s a thing of little merit. If the professor is trying to change something more substantial, like a pre-announced grading scale, then I consider that different.
This is the British system of honours degrees: “2:1” is second class honours, division one (the level that I got from an Australian university).
I really don’t have an opinion on the matter, only the opening of packages can be distracting. However, this post did bring back a memory for me of watching this girl in front of me eating her bagel.
The lecture hall was quite steep, so I had a decent veiw of her workspace. During the lecture she took out of her bag the fixings for her bagel and the bagel itself. She had four of those little jam packets that you get at diner’s and she used two on each half of the bagel. The jam was everywhere, falling off the bagel, on her hands, and on her napkins. I watched her eat it, getting the jam everywhere, and then she licked her fingers. It was amazing to watch in a sick sort of way. I kept imagining the sticky feeling on everything she touched and how it would feel. It didn’t help knowing that it’d be an hour or so until the end of the lecture when she’d be able to wash her hands. So it would be an hour with drying jam on her hands which would then be transferred to all her other lecture related gear. That would just be awful, and she must have known that, and she still did it. It was fun to watch in that sick fascinating way.
My art history professor last spring, a couple weeks before the final (i.e. after the midterm) decided to change the grading scale completely. The midterm and final were each worth 20% of the final grade according to the syllabus. He changed it so the midterm was worth 35% and the final only 15%. He also retroactively made the quizzes worth 30 points each, instead of 20 points each. There were students who were screwed out of a letter grade by this practice (i.e. before he changed it, they could have done well on the final and gotten a B or a C, but when he changed it, they had no chance).
Things that should not be changed, as the syllabus IS akin to a contract between teacher and student: grading policies and breakdown, major (ie, worth more then 5%) assignments and their due dates, test dates, reading material as a whole (ie, don’t add any other books). I feel very strongly about this issue.
I’m with the “no eating in class” group. I can’t stand all the assorted noises, both from opening/preparing the food and actually eating/drinking. If you’re chomping so loud I can’t hear the professor, it’s harder for me to take notes. And don’t you dare come up to me and ask for my notes because you were too busy eating to take any yourself.
There are still people who teach about Postmodernism with a straight face? And two people who can agree on its meaning? That is, except for those of us who see it as a way of making, writing, or saying any old shit while pretending it has meaning?
That’s just the thign, though…it drives YOU crazy, not everyone. I do sympathize with you that it makes it harder for you to concentrate, but there are times when some people need to eat during class. Exploding Kitchen mentioenmd a day from 8 AM till 9:50 PM. While I’ve never had a day that bad (ok…I ahve, but thast was including extra-curricular things, so I eon’ty count it), I have known many peiople with schedules like this. Of course, they then get to ahve three days a week with no class whatsoever, but that one (or two) day(s) is/are hell, and even more so if they couldn’t get a quick sandwich in them in the first ten minutes of lecture. As hard as it may be for you to pay attentino when he’s eating, I bet it’s harder for him to pay attention having gone more than 12 hours without food. Jsut because we can go days without eating, doesn’t mean we want to.
Regarding changing the syllabus well into the course.
My last semester in college was a summer semester. There were two types of summer courses, six week courses and nine week courses. That summer I took two six’ers and a nine’er. Needless to say, I was busier than a one legged man in an ass-kicking contest.
The nine week course professor gave out, on the first day, a syllabus outlining the class schedule and grading policy. 25% would be homework, 25% would be tests given throughout the course, and 50% would be the final. I quickly realized I couldn’t quite give everything to all three classes, so I let the homework lag on this class.
The sixth week of the semester, as I’m in the middle of finals on the short classes, the professor of the nine week class issued a revised syllabus. He had decided against having a final, and instead homework would now be 50% of the grade, and the tests (of which we had had two to that point) would now be 50%. The last test would simply be one of three and thus count for only 1/6 of the overall grade, rather than a final counting for half.
I aced the final test, but ended up with a “D” for the class because of the grading change. I’m still pissed about it twenty years later.
I have a different viewpoint. The rest of society typically does not function in accordance with rigid structure and non-negotiable rules. Likewise in the classroom. As a teacher, if I find that a particular reading list, set of policies, isn’t working, I would definitely reserve the right to change them whenever I please. If one class performs very strongly and I want to raise the bar by overweighting a final project, I will do so. Likewise, if another bunch of kids needs more positive reinforcement, I might do the reverse. I think that undergraduates and especially students on the graduate level should cope. Hell, I probably won’t even put grade breakdowns on the syllabus. I will reserve the right to give my students as many quizzes and writing assignments as they need and to balance the university scheduled exams at my discretion. My commitment to the student is that if you take my class, you will fucking learn.
Don’t like my style? Go find someone else to take a Lucan & the Poetics of Violence or Game Theoretical Models of the Political Economy of Late Roman Egypt class with. 
A lot of students have a really hard time dealing with ambiguity and change with respect to anything that is expected of them. This is not a healthy mindset for both potential academics, who need to deal with such ambiguities on a daily basis, or for people who will one day populate other walks of life. The sooner students abandon structural crutches, the less painful it will be for them.
I see, after reading Diosa’s reply, that I left something out. This professor said she has no problem with us bringing drinks. She herself has a soda addiction so drinks are totally fine.
I wish I got three days off.
Right now, I’m carrying 21 units, a couple of academic competition style teams that’ll look good on transfer paperwork, and a (brand new) on-campus job… and that doesn’t include the non-school related stuff I do.
Class is seriously the only time I get to eat most days, because any longer breaks are spent catching up on sleep/homework in the library. 
Sadly, yes. And I’m being “taught” by one of them. Argh!
Are you actually a professor? Wow, do I ever feel bad for your students. You must be an awful instructor. An inability to establish a basic framework for a class is something I’ve seen in professors a few times, and the disorganization it reflects always shows up in other aspects of their teaching as well. Deciding to change the rules on your students by altering grading criteria that they have been counting on, and making decisions based on, is a shitty thing to do. Dramatically altering your grading criteria is a strategy that covers up a multitude of sins - giving tests that are ridiculously hard or easy, setting unrealistic goals for the amount of material to be covered, and so on. Professors who need to do such things shouldn’t be teaching in the first place.
It’s interesting that you cite the outside world and its ambiguities as an excuse. In the real world, people are expected to be able to make commitments and stick to them, and when others depend on you to do something, you will be expected to follow through. I wonder if this kind of completely scattered, incompetent teaching style would ever survive in any other field.
These are big words? “Aesthetics”? I hope you’re not in college.
I HATE THIS ONE.
My intro world lit teacher last fall term was a “fisher”, and it drove us all INSANE. She’d ask a question; we’d all think about it for a minute; I’d raise my hand and give thirty seconds or so of my answer, why I thought so, a few examples of textual support, etc.
“Well, yes, Tracy, that’s one way to look at it. Anyone else?”
Repeat three or four times until she gave up and told us what she wanted to hear. Why didn’t you just start out with your conclusion and ask us to discuss it? ARGH!
This happened in one of the classes in my senior year, and I didn’t think any worse of the professor for it.
I majored in Linguistics, and at my university, our department was…not very robust. They were only just adding a Semantics course in my final year, and as it was being taught by a prof I liked, I took it. About two or three weeks into the course, the prof and the class finally came to the conclusion that the books we were using were shit. I don’t recall what he said as to how they got past him in the vetting process. So for the rest of the semester, he photocopied from another book so we wouldn’t have to buy it, taught out of that, then used the original books for study questions.
Later in the semester, he ended up shuffling the grading scheme around as well. He presented the issues he was having to the class, and by consensus we came up with an alternate grading scheme that worked better overall.
I do think the prof was a bit disorganized, but as a result of the shuffling I got more out of the class than I would have otherwise. This obviously isn’t so for all cases, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.
Maeg, you know I love ya, but DAMN. Guess I’ll have to find someone else to teach me about the economics of Roman Egypt 
BayleDomon, I think there is a difference when there’s class consensus. But I would only do that in the case of a real problem.