Cliffs Notes were okay but I preferred Norms.
Posted on 12/31/2024 8:36:43 AM PST by DallasBiff
Alright, real talk.
I know most of you reading this have likely always been relatively bookish. You were probably in your high school’s AP class, loved summer reading assignments, and were thrilled when you got to show off your knowledge of Dickens, Chaucer or Shakespeare. I mean, you’re spending your free time reading a website called Book Riot. But, let’s be honest…
You TOTALLY used CliffsNotes at one point. You know it, I know it, and (sorry to inform you of this, but) your teacher knew it as well.
Whether it was to supplement your knowledge of a book for a test or to fake your way through an entire thesis paper, you possessed at least one copy of that iconic yellow and black book. You clarified plot points that you didn’t quite get (or completely glossed over), you discovered symbolism that you didn’t previously see (can’t a red hat just be a red hat, Holden?), and you searched for interesting insights that would be sure to impress your teacher.
(Excerpt) Read more at bookriot.com ...
Cliffs Notes were okay but I preferred Norms.
No, I never usewd Cliffs Notes. You would never catch me reading Dickens, Chaucer or Shakespeare without a threat of bad grade in school. And I detest poetry.
There was a teacher at my high school who would mark a paper with diagonal yellow and black stripes and a big red F if she thought the student had used Cliffs Notes instead of reading the assignment.
my teacher also read the cliffs notes and nailed anyone who quoted it
That is not true.
The purpose of Cliff's Notes was to allow a student to bag a "C" out of a course he had not attended all semester.
My AP English teacher warned us against using Cliff Notes. Assignments and tests could not be passed without reading the actual book.
Nope. Never did. I don’t believe in studying before a test. If you know it, you know it. Trust your brain. (Bad advice for some people but that’s part of natural selection)
That said, I did master the art of reading five pages at more-or-less random and write a book report. I had (and have) a big problem with procrastination.
I HATED Dick and Jane in first and second grade because it was so thin and simple.
I never read a book whose title had “for dummies” in it. I am not a dummy and I won’t lower myself. Same with “complete idiot’s” guides.
Me neither, but I did copy from some of my class mates that did use them:)
Maybe, but my experience was that even if I read the book, I didn't have a clue what to say about it, so perhaps Cliff's notes might have helped.
Walden’s books... OMG, I scoured used book stores, they had them all and they were well thumbed and dirt cheap. Sometimes with good notes penciled in. I still have a few. Joyce’s Ulysses demanded a copy on hand.
Same here, in all respects. All six of us kids learned to read by age 4 (our mother taught us, using phonics), and I read everything I wanted to read, including my siblings’ school-assigned reading. No Cliffs Notes needed, and no Classic Comics either.
We had several thousand books in the house, including a great many of the classics. There was no nonsense about a book being “too old” for a child. If you didn’t understand everything in it at the time, you’d pick up more when you reread it a few years later.
I still remember finishing my second-grade reader on the first day of class and wondering what we were going to read next.
Plus my little community had the advantage of a library that had been initiated and continually kept up-to-date by Andrew Carnegie's Trust Funds. Also, one wing of the library was sort of a museum of the past history of the town, once the county seat. Spinning wheels, historic furnishibgs and tapestries, flintlock and percussion rifles and muskets, and swords from the Revolutionary and Mexican and Civil and Spanish Wars.
Head of my 6th grade class, with my 99.6% grade average, 0.2% more than Doris Cairns, whose dedicated striving only got her disappointing 99.4%. No "Cliff's notes for us in those days, everything earned.
That was June, 1948, a great and glorious time for our nation, before the coldness of the Cold War and Korean and Vietnam Wars turned our attention away from the very professional highly honored school teachers who demanded the exercise of one's intellect, an age wrapped up and put away when unionization of the NEA turned public schooling an intellectual slime pit.
Except for my own children, with me snapping at their heels to keep them moving through and past Ed-degreed but inept teachers (except for athletics, can't fool that realm where performance is everything).
i still liked the tantalizing but upright characters of Zane Grey's Western love stories. No effeminate men, good or bad, in them. Didn't learn even what the term meant, from either Grey or Tolstoy novels.
(Later on, my kids and I read just about all of Louis Lamour's Western pot-boilers, as well. Great character-building influence, for the boy or girl.)
mark
“I just took the D.”
Even “Ds” get degrees.
Must be like “A computer for the rest of us”??
Never knew there was such a website as Book Riot. Never used Cliffs Notes. They were unavailable where we were stationed. If it did not arrive in The Box it might as well not have existed.
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