You’re just coming home from football practice and you need to shower, eat dinner, and do homework before
hopefully falling into bed before midnight. You’ve got a test tomorrow on 1984. Crap. You’re on page 10. Nevermind
that the book started on page 7. Nevermind that you had two hours before
practice to do homework instead of playing dollar flip (you won $2, so that was
time well spent). Chances are, when you sit down and open up your book you’ll
find yourself falling asleep by page 11. But wait, there’s a savior for you: Sparknotes.
Sparknotes
is a widely used resource for “too busy” students everywhere. Its fan base
alone is testament to its power and quality. The hard job of thinking is done
previously, by people who have time to do so, and all you need to do is use
your meme-filled, twitter-condensed mind to lap it up, from the comfort of your
own home. Surely, if it’s found on the internet and free, it must be
worthwhile!
Instead of spending the next three
hours reading a book you won’t enjoy for a test riddled with trick questions by
your conniving English teacher who hates you anyway, Mrs. Jackson, you could
spend two hours on Facebook and perhaps 20 minutes skimming through the chapter
summaries for this book. It hits all the important issues and is written,
probably, by underpaid expert English teachers who need to sell their souls for
rising costs of living, so it’s got all the answers. You could even spend ten
more minutes on Yahoo answers jotting down some of the more important quotes
which might be on that test, if you really want to impress someone. By that
time, you’d be in bed a half an hour early, and it’s widely known that students
need their beauty rest, because teenagers’ growth hormones need sleep to
generate (www.facebookfeednews.com).
Pesky
morals may haunt you. Students have moments of weakness when they think that using
Sparknotes might be dishonest, but in the long term you need to go to college.
You know you could do it, you know
you would do it, if you had to, if
you were in college, if you didn’t have to sleep/go on FB/read all these BOOKS
you don’t have time to read. That’s what matters. You just need to be able to
do it, and you are a completely capable person with a lot of skill. You got a B
on the last test and you only read the first chapter anyway. That shows you’re
doing something right. What’s dishonest is getting grades based on what you know
because you don't have time to show what you really know.
You are
important, and you are worth it. Your future is worth a little untruth. You still
clearly know the difference between right and wrong and when it matters, you
will make the decisions that matter. Just like you will know the answer when it
is important for you to know the answer. The only people that actually read the
book have no lives and are not well-rounded, so it’s completely fair that Johnny,
who you know read the book, got a B on the last test, too. He is obviously not as smart as you.
Reading books is not what makes you
smart. What makes you smart is getting passable grades without even trying. If
you really tried, you would get A’s. Talent and brains is what makes millions;
Bill Gates was so lazy he dropped out of college (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates).
You can almost hear Mrs. Jackson lecturing “It’s
the thinking that’s important, not just knowing what the answer is!” or similar
silliness about education being more important than grades. You can’t go about
life worrying about what other people think.
Isn’t that what she taught you?
