I'm going on my fourth year in college and have yet to see something like this. This morning I had a professor hand out his syllabus, which is customary for the first day of class, and it was just a single page listing the grading scale and tentative schedule. He held up our book for the class, and I was annoyed when I saw it was something different than I picked up from the bookstore. The book from the bookstore was a big, fat Norton Anthology, the book he held up was some old book for like ten dollars.

He then kept bashing the big, fat Norton book, saying it's excessive and expensive. Then he talked about the literary canon and how the newer book (the one he had was from 1966 and was basically all white, male authors) had more diversity. He asked which book the class wanted to use, since the book he had wasn't available and was on order, and most people wanted the cheap, thin, simple book. "As long as all our readings are in the small book, let's get it," people said.

He goes on talking for 25 minutes about how he's going to go to the bookstore and fix the book they have labeled for his class. Then finally, he says, "Well what if this was a fake syllabus, and the real syllabus is for the Norton book." Then, turns out it was, and he handed out a real, typical 5 page syllabus for the book I already had.

He was a fairly good actor, saying that he would 'change the syllabus' if the class voted to use the big book (which no one did). It was also suspicious that the original, fake syllabus was only one page, didn't have his email address, and had a 15-17 page paper on it. I was thinking, "Wow, this teacher sucks. I may have to drop this class."

By the end of the class I really liked the guy, so hopefully he's not too bad. I need to remember this for if I ever become a teacher.