The Sparknotes Problem

A few months ago, I gave a routine reading quiz to my ninth graders, which yielded some suspicious results. My antennae perked up when five of the students in my class of fourteen used the word "big-headed" to describe Curley, the antagonist in Of Mice and Men. It was an unusual word for anyone to use, much less a fourteen-year-old boy, and it's certainly not an adjective favored by Steinbeck. So, it seemed likely that my students had picked it up from somewhere else - like an online summary. I pulled up the Of Mice and Men page on the website Shmoop, the most popular of the sites that specialize in these summaries. And sure enough, the first sentence of Curley's character analysis page read: "Curley is the son of the ranch boss, so he's got a big head—which doesn't quite match up with his body."

Some of my more literal-minded students had taken this to mean that Curley literally had an over-sized dome. As though being a sadistic, abusive bully weren't enough.

My kids had been using online summaries alright - and on the first book of the year, a one hundred ten page novella with an action-packed storyline and, save for a light sprinkling of Depression-era slang, an eminently accessible vocabulary. These guys weren't turning to the summaries because they had tried and failed with the original text: they were going there immediately, without having even cracked the book. It was depressing. And worst of all, I really wasn't sure how to make them stop.

As much as I'd like to (or perhaps just feel I have an obligation to) denounce them, the fact is that Sparknotes, Shmoop and other online summaries are, after all, awfully convenient. They save time and, although we English teachers often like to complain that they oversimplify great works of literature, the truth is that many of the summaries are pretty comprehensive. Most of the writing on Sparknotes and Cliffsnotes is rather bland and dispassionate, but  I've been downright impressed by some of the material I've read on Shmoop. It can be witty and insightful - and why shouldn't it be? Its writers, after all, aren't some dopes who wandered in off the street. They're academics themselves - from the "crème de la crème PhD and Masters Programs," according to the site itself.

But hold on: I just admitted to having spent time on these sites, didn’t I? I wish I could honestly say it was only for research purposes. But the shameful truth is that I have used Shmoop on occasion, both in my role as a student and a teacher. As a Master's student in English, I read plenty of difficult texts - Paradise Lost, Vanity Fair, Prometheus Unbound - and online summaries helped me to reinforce the material, and keep track of characters and plot. As a teacher, although I almost always keep up with the readings I assign, I've found that a quick glance at these summaries before class can help jog my memory about what happened in the previous night's reading. So strong is the stigma attached to using online summaries that I have until now never admitted my secret to classmates or colleagues (and certainly not to students), even though I doubt I'm the only one who does it. To tell my secret would be tantamount to outing myself as a fraud, undeserving of both my degree and of the purported authority that comes with teaching English. Even now, I'm only partly joking. There really ought to be a confessional booth for English teachers to relieve themselves of burdens like these. Bless me professor, for I have sinned. As penance, I shall recite Portia's "Quality of Mercy" speech eight times.

Of course, my guilt over having read online notes for Paradise Lost is tempered somewhat by the fact that I have also read Paradise Lost - three times, in fact. Twice as an undergrad and once in grad school. Still, since I have used online summaries myself, it has always made me feel a little hypocritical to present a wholesale denunciation of them to my students. I tried it once and I practically choked on my words. I think I referred to the sites as “evil,” which may have been overstating my case somewhat.

I wish I didn't feel as ambivalent as I do. Ninth graders don't always do well with ambivalence; in my experience, hard yesses and nos are much more effective. Whether or not I agree with it in my heart, "Thou Shalt Never Use Sparknotes" is direct, unambiguous and easily digested by the fourteen-year-old mind. What I'd really like to tell my students is something more like this: "If you have closely read the assigned text, and you've made an effort to process what you've read to the best of your ability, then you may, on occasion, read the Sparknotes summaries - but if you do so, you need to do it discretely, and never in school, and obviously, you should never steal phrases and sentences from these sources for your own work. Oh, and certain works like Of Mice and Men, which fall well within your reading abilities, should never require the use of Sparknotes or any comparable sites. Using them for Shakespeare is marginally more understandable."

This is a mouthful. And I worry that my message is too subtle, too nuanced, too mealy-mouthed, and too easily misinterpreted as outright approval by my students.

Recently, I've tried a different tack: I've stressed the illegality of these sites (at least in reference to school rules) rather than their supposed immorality. The use of online summaries is, after all, a violation of our school's honor code and, though truth be told, offenders are punished only slightly more often than jaywalkers, I can at least recite this rule to my classes with a straight face.

The problem with the rule, as both my students and I know full well, is that it's virtually impossible to enforce. It will generally stop all but the most careless students from reading the forbidden material right under my nose, but if they want to access it at home, there isn't much I can do about it. In this way, my policy toward online summaries is not unlike Major League Baseball's attitude towards the use of pine tar, as I understand it: Officially, you can't use it. But if you are going to use it - and let's face it, you probably are - at least have the decency to be discrete about it. Otherwise, I'm going to have to call you on it, and that will be embarrassing for us both.

When both the moral and legal arguments fail, I try the personal approach. I tell an anecdote about a blind date I went on about ten years ago in which, upon hearing that I taught English for a living, my companion proudly informed me that she had succeeded in graduating high school without having read a single book in its entirety. "I just read Cliffsnotes and it worked, like, every time!" she boasted. Both the date and our potential as a romantic couple, I knew, were dead on arrival; nonetheless, I spent the next hour making awkward small talk over a frozen margarita and some chips and salsa, before we said goodbye for the first and final time.

I always assumed the moral of this story was that people who didn't read actual books would wake up one day to find, to their dismay, that they were actually pretty boring, and that others - like potential romantic partners, for example - would judge them accordingly. But a colleague pointed out to me that high school students are liable to interpret it as something more like: "Don't read Cliffsnotes if you have any interest in dating an English teacher. And if you do read them, then certainly don't brag about it."

Not to be defeatist about it, but I tend to think that kids will continue to use Sparknotes, Shmoop, et al., for as long as teachers continue to assign them challenging books. The sites save time and energy, and they come with very low risk of tangible negative consequences. In trying to convince a teenager not to do something so expedient, any teacher will face an uphill battle. It’s hard enough trying to convince them to put their phones away at the beginning of class. And for some teens, the “forbidden” nature of these resources is bound to make them even more appealing.

I don’t know if I have a strong anti-online-summaries argument – at least, not one that I can reliably sell to all of my students. But what I think I do have is a strong pro-books argument. Books – even the ones I don’t enjoy – have the potential to fill me with a sense of wonder. That’s why I got into this line of work in the first place. I’ve never gotten anything remotely close to this buzz from Sparknotes. I can talk to kids about that scene in King Lear – Gloucester, after his blinding, speaking to Lear on the heath – that never fails to gives me chills. I can tell them how Gene in A Separate Peace has helped me to understand some of my more complicated friendships, and how “The Dead” has helped me to understand marriage. I can argue, persuasively I think, that the poetry of Walt Whitman will make you a better person. All Sparknotes will do is help you pass your next reading quiz. When you put it like that, the decision should be a no-brainer.