“The Right Understanding”: Teaching Literature in the Age of SparkNotes

At the start of nearly every class, I assign a mini-essay. Call it a quiz. In fifteen minutes, students respond to a question based on their homework reading, making comparisons and synthesizing ideas from several different texts. For years, this technique yielded the desired outcome: students came to class having not only completed the assigned reading but also thought deeply about it. This, in turn, led to more thoughtful discussions and a more productive class.

Recently, however, I noticed a shift. The mini-essays still indicated a broad understanding of the homework readings, but when pressed during class discussions, many students were unable to provide details to support their general assertions. Sometimes, when I asked students to read a section of the text out loud, they were unable to explain the context of the paragraph in the larger whole. One such student, by way of explanation, admitted he had not done the reading at all. After class, I checked his miniessay. He’d earned a passing grade.

A few weeks later, my students were working in small groups to discuss “No Name Woman” by Maxine Hong Kingston, which they had read for homework. As I passed by one group, I overheard a student say, “Well … I read the SparkNotes on this one” as a kind of disclaimer before presenting an interpretation. When I called her on it, she protested. “I read the story, too,” she said. “I just read SparkNotes to give me extra ideas.”

SparkNotes bills itself as “today’s most popular study guide” (slogan: “When your books and teachers don’t make sense, we do”) and it offers hundreds of free summaries of novels, plays, and short stories by authors as iconic as George Orwell and as contemporary as Edwidge Danticat (SparkNotes). Analysis is broken down into several related sections—chapter summaries, character analyses, themes, motifs, and symbols—that perform the summative and analytical work we are trying to get our students to do themselves.If by some chance you have managed to assign something obscure or new enough that SparkNotes lacks a summary, students will simply turn to one of SparkNotes’ less popular clones: Shmoop, Gradesaver, Pink Monkey, or Book Rags.¹ These websites are ubiquitous and easily accessible. There is even a SparkNotes app for your iPhone.

Despite the growing popularity of these websites, many of my colleagues remain unconcerned. After all, some tell me, we’ve always had SparkNotes, but under a different name: Cliff’s Notes. Yet SparkNotes, while similar to Cliff’s Notes on its surface, is fundamentally different. For one thing, the use of Cliff’s Notes required advanced planning. One needed to travel to a book store to make the purchase, which might even involve asking a parent for a ride, at which point, the parent might ask, “Wait a minute, why am I buying this for you? Didn’t you read the book?” With SparkNotes, however, students can be walking to class, suddenly remember that they were assigned reading for homework, and pull up the SparkNotes app to read a quick summary—enough to fudge their way through class discussion and maybe even convince a professor that they completed the reading. It’s an easy, fast, private interaction.

The question, then, becomes not, “Why do students use SparkNotes,” but rather “Why wouldn’t they?” Nevertheless, let’s begin with the first question. To find an answer, I polled students in my composition and humanities classes at Hudson County Community College, an urban public access institution, to determine how and why they were using SparkNotes and similar websites. Over 90% of my students stated that they have used SparkNotes at least once in the past, and more than two-thirds said they use SparkNotes at least once per semester. However, fewer than 10% admitted to using it instead of reading the actual text. If they aren’t using SparkNotes to avoid doing homework, what are they using it for?

Here are students in their own words. Significantly, many of their responses contain the words “understand” or “clarify”:

• • “SparkNotes is my backup if I do...