Supposedly, Cliff's Notes were (are) to be used to help a student write a report or a term paper. Actually...well, I'm sure you know the reality of the situation.

Do you think there's a constructive use for Cliff's Notes?--or do you think they all should be burned?

Last Edited on 5-Jun-2007 8:24 PM

Since from my point of view, the entire value of Cliff Notes, assuming there is some, depends on being able to highlight things and make notes in the margins, I don't see any value in keeping them in the library. If you're going to really use Cliff Notes, you have to use them way harder than a library book should be used. But maybe there is another legitimate use for them that never occurred to me that doesn't involve destruction of library property.

Kathleen

Last Edited on 6-Jun-2007 7:50 AM

Nowadays, I suppose Cliff Notes are probably becoming somewhat redundant. Anyone who wants to get the gist of a major work without reading it can readily find summaries and even critiques on the Internet. Indeed, Cliffs Notes has its own website, and there is a similar one called Sparks Notes. If I wanted to find out whether a student is "fudging" about doing the reading, these are the first places I would look.

On the one hand, students have it easier today to scrimp on doing the required reading, thanks to the Internet. On the other hand, as instructors become more adept at using the Internet and devising assignments for which mere plot summary is not sufficient, slackers are more likely to be detected.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

We did have something similar - a Latin "trot". This little booklet gave side-by-side translations for the classical Latin writers. However, being caught with this aide, resulted in severe chastisement.

Since then I guess I've become less of a purist or less of a snob or maybe just more tired. I definitely think there's a place for such organized and condensed study aids. I think they can serve a good review function and also provide a helpful overview--a kind of bird's eye view of the work as a whole, which can be difficult to see from the ground level, as it were.

Also in my later years I sometimes find that I want (not need) to get a sense of a particular work without reading all of it. For instance, I recently went through Plato's Republic in brief by means of a published summary that outlined main themes and so on. For the work that I was doing with it, that was sufficient. It helped me zero in on the parts I needed to read (in several translations so I could get a good grasp) while supplying sufficient context to orient me to the development of the ideas.

I appreciated the mention elsewhere of Classics Illustrated (the comics). I was a great and faithful fan, and to this day I can coast through discussions of some works (a couple of Dickens titles come to mind) on what I remember from reading them. They were faithful to the original and contained a lot of direct quotations, and the illustrations, though artistically a bit crude, were very helpful in understanding the action. Nothing of the kind would sell today, I am sure, and that's a shame.

Last Edited on 20-Jun-2007 8:20 PM

Last Edited on 20-Jun-2007 8:39 PM

Originally priced at 15 cents, the new series book cost $4.00. This is way out of line with the candy-bar standard, by which loose rule of thumb it might have gone for, say, 50 cents to a dollar now. At $4.00 it was too steep for the kid audience. Was it intended for adults? Do adults who seek out graphic novels want to read 19th-century verse? I thought the whole project reflected a gross miscalculation.

You are right that the popularity of graphic novels ought to set the stage for this to be done once again and done well. I would love to see it happen. But it's got to be done by people who know their audience--and also their audience's price point.

If you want to experiment with HTML coding, you may use the test board called The Workbench.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

Last Edited on 23-Jun-2007 6:41 PM

Yay!! Thank you.

I was using that kind of code to format text in Scripsit on a Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1980. It just didn't occur to me now.

Put center and /center each (along with < >ed i and /i) inside < >s.

Last Edited on 25-Aug-2007 11:36 PM

My son majored in philosophy, and so did one of his closest friends. Both are now in law school, and the friend was teaching Latin to fifth-graders while she was still an undergraduate. Two of his best friends majored in classical languages. One of them is now in grad school, and one is teaching college-level Latin. I don't think they are all that unusual. Youngsters who are not afraid to read Kant or to tackle the poetry of Catullus in the original know how to find meaning and relevance in literature that was written before they were born, and they can do it without the aid of graphics. Some of these youngsters are out there scattered amongst those who take their life lessons from sitcoms and couldn't pass a fourth-grade spelling test. I'm not worried yet.

I observe not only a lack of knowledge of the past (anything that happened before their lifetimes) but a lack of interest in it. True, there are exceptions, but the vast majority display their indifference to or ignorance of the past by labeling anything traditional not only as old-fashioned but also as irrelevant. Allusions to "classics" (from Greek mythology to twentieth-century novels) are meaningless to them, and they don't seem to care. At a very simple level, they have not even heard sayings that have been passed on through generations for centuries (e.g., "Too many cooks spoil the broth"). Few have any interest in classical music or a desire to give it a try. They are only vaguely aware of major historical events, even within the past century and may not be sure whether they occurred fifty or three hundred years ago, let alone what the significance of these events was.

To be sure, those who have been raised in homes where some awareness of history, classics, and the liberal arts in general exists may not fit this pattern, but I think it is a distinct pattern. I won't call it a phenomenon but a trend. What's most discouraging is that is likely to continue and intensify as these young people raise children with the same limited perspective as they have. Yes, all generalizations about groups are false in that these generalizations ignore the exceptions. Nevertherless, when we are compelled to cite a few cases as exceptions, we imply that many or most of a given group are not like the few cases that we have cited.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

Last Edited on 26-Aug-2007 1:40 PM

My husband and I have repeated this thought aloud to ourselves fairly often as our sons were growing up.

[Caveman acquires speech, going suddenly from guttural grunts to articulate utterances as if by the stroke of fairy godmother's wand]

First words: Holy smoke, I can talk!
Second words: The younger generation is going to hell in a handbasket.

Because I train and supervise court-ordered community service workers, some of whom are high schoolers, I have witnessed what you have--kids who have never heard of the Battle of Hastings or who don't know what a preposition is, but, in under ten seconds, they can reset the clock on my cell phone and add themselves to my phone address book. Certainly that will take them somewhere in life.

The Asian students in the county where I live are mostly children of professionals and raise the bar for everyone else. It seems to be "no biggie" any longer to ace the math section of the ACT or to get all the questions correct on the SAT. Competition has been stopped at many schools, not because of the fear of bruised egos, but because once all the good students pile up at the top, there's nowhere else to go.

The conflict isn't mom's wanting the kid to finish high school vs. the kid's wanting to drop out at sixteen, but the parents' wanting the kid to attend Harvard and become a doctor vs. the kid's wanting to go to MIT and become an engineer.

Maybe it's okay that these kids don't know the saying, "Too many cooks spoil the broth" and that Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities. At least one of them is on the path to discovering a cure for muscular dystrophy, and India and China and Japan don't care about spilled broth anyway.

I posit that Mudge's students are the exception and that teens and young adults will graciously inherit the earth from us geezers and will intelligently care for it.

Last Edited on 28-Aug-2007 8:44 AM