At some point you realize that many of the classic books are just... really good books! The terrible part is what they do to them in literature class. But many of those old books have become classics for a reason.
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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Some teachers allowed coles notes and some didn't but was anyone else a member of the gang whose parents couldn't afford coles notes so you never had that leg up and only had the source material or a friend you could borrow off if you were lucky?
Before the internet, Cliff Notes were popular books that summarized and provided insight into meaning for classical literature. Students used them in place of reading the actual book.
Thank you. This joke completely went over my head.
Chatgpt from yesteryear.
Some teachers would take the cliff notes for a book their classes reading, and make sure none of their questions were mentioned or relevant to the cliff notes themselves. So you could have real bangers of tests that ask weird ass questions that no reasonable person would remember from the book. What color was the dance card given to the main protagonist and The Great Gatsby dance scene?
So you end up with tests that are just trivia, and don't talk about any thematic issues, or generally recognize themes or takeaways. Crazy times
As a kid who loved reading, the one and only time I read the cliffs notes was for the Diary of Anne Frank. I just couldn’t stand to slog through it and nobody else in class wanted to read it either.
Ironically, I got a perfect score on that test with an average class score of 60. Every single question was addressed in the cliff notes while I skimmed them the night before the test. My teacher treated us to an extended rant when she handed back the tests. “CLEARLY nBodyProblem is the only person who actually WORKED HARD and bothered to READ and UNDERSTAND the material. You all need to learn to be more like nBodyProblem”
Every single question was addressed in the cliff notes while I skimmed them the night before the test.
And you suddenly realized what your teacher used to make the test questions.
Ya know, that never occurred to me. That makes it twice as hilarious if true.
Now you've got teachers and students fighting over whether or not their paper was written by AI, so students need to jump through hoops trying to prove (or convincingly lie) that they didn't use AI to write. Which can mean writing in weird ways that don't 'feel' like AI.
I absolutely hate this boring dystopia, but emerging dialects due to a need for humans to sound distinct from bots is probably the coolest idea to come out of it so far. It has great parallels with the American vs. British accent situation too.
Just have people write in class...
So what color was it?
Green!
I completely missed that on the table until you pointed out, and was highly confused as to what he actually did
I just kept thinking that it was supposed to be condoms for some reason lol.
I vividly remember getting the cliff notes for "Of Mice and Men", realizing it was nearly as long as the actual book, and begrudgingly hammering through the book the night before the test.
Steinbeck had a knack for saying a lot with a little. "The pearl" is another of his works that is also incredibly short but you could easily discuss it well past its length.
I highly recommend the "grapes of wrath" to anyone who hasn't read it as well. Its account of the brutal knock on effects of the dust bowl and the nature of human kindness and sadism left a mark on my life that never left.
The only reason I know the contents of most classic literature is because of "So You Haven't Read" series on YouTube.
I just watched Wishbone
Me with Thug Notes. I wish I had discovered it during highschool :(
My biggest problem with Thug Notes is all the people (closet racists) taking the Thug part seriously and saying dumb shit like thanking them for making literature available to "people of color." Now I'm wondering if they ever tried to branch out and have the presenter drop the caricature.
The actor drops character from time to time when he's using long sentences and you catch a glimpse of exactly that. I'd love to see him do other stuff as well though. Thug aside, he's legitimately awesome at breaking down subtext for dumb dumbs like me to get.
Cliff’s Notes*
Psh this guy must’ve cheated so much he never learned how to properly attribute! Give Cliff the respect and credit he deserves!
In Poland, we still do read this type of things instead of the actual book, because it's better at preparing you for the exams
A lot of classics, especially those from the 19th century were initially serialized in newspapers, and the resulting doorstopper of a book was never meant to be read in a short time frame that teachers usually give for reading and report writing.
Next thing you're gonna tell me I'm not supposed to binge an entire 22-episode season of The Office in one sitting.
I just read Frankenstein, published in 1818, and it's originally in 3 volumes even tho it's not that long in total. My assumption was that printing and binding big books was a problem back then but maybe people didn't read it as one
Your assumption might be the case for frankenstein, it's a relatively short book.
The parent is most likely talking about books like the count of monte cristo. It goes on for more than a thousand pages, but was originally serialised over a couple years.
Similar things happen to older books. Current day editions of don quixote include don quixote part 2, which was a sequel published a decade after the first.
I don't get it
The book on the table has the telltale Cliff Notes branding imagery. Cliff Notes is a company that was real big in the 90s and 00s (not sure how big these days) for making short summaries of famous novels, including plot points and themes. Everything you would need to write a competent essay on the book. They're notorious for allowing high school kids to get through literature classes without actually doing the reading work.
The Cliff Notes
??
The yellow book with black stripes. It's a summary of a novel with a breakdown of the plot points and the themes.
In Germany we call that Königserläuterung
I’ve never heard that before in my life
Maybe it's out of fashion but when I went to school, this was the goto. I never had one because I wasn't even ambitious enough to read that small booklet.
Link to the direct comic in case you want to share with easier credit: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/hard-read/
How does the book suddenly appear on the table in the second frame? It could not have been obscured by the the man's jeans, because he is still wearing them in the first frame.
That’s actually the entire joke of the comic, that he had her cliff notes in his jeans. He’s trying to explain “I was just supplementing my reading and understanding” when she cut him off and walked out for reading her cliff notes in the first place
I miss peanuts. I could follow peanuts, or just think snoopy was cool.
I'm assuming it fell out of the jeans.
It's falling out of his jeans, but movement lines don't really gel with the artists' style
Cliffs notes... Fell out of his jeans is my interpretation
Even now, I remember much more about those books where along with which I read the Cliffs Notes, than whatever halfbrained notions I came up with on my own about books like Animal Farm.
Kind of confusing to read, but I hope you get the gist.