Don't use study guides!

We’re talking about SparkNotes, Cliff’s Notes, York Notes, and all such similar shortcuts used by lazy and/or desperate and/or insecure students.

Inspired partly by an online discussion among IB English teachers and partly by my own students, I’ve added a page to my English A1 class blog that makes things as clear as I can make them. It begins like this:

Study guides WON’T HELP YOU! In fact they will harm you, in several ways:

1. They often are inaccurate and of poor quality.
2. They prevent you from thinking for yourself.
3. They encourage you to think – wrongly – that the goal is to discover THE ANSWER or THE MEANING and then regurgitate it on an exam.

The rest of the page is here.