icarusancalion

"Yes, but describe the setting in the Lord of the Rings," I ask.

The student gives me a vague recap of the entire setting of Middle Earth, including stuff he shouldn't be able to know from the first two chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring.

"No. I mean in the first chapter. Where do the first scenes take place?" I reel in the net.

He couldn't do it. He couldn't tell me about The Shire, or the party field, or even Bag End. A book that is nothing but rich, detailed description of scenery, he could describe nothing.

With a nervous laugh, he admitted to reading SparkNotes.

His SAT reading scores, of course, were crap.

After three years of SAT tutoring, I've learned to expect this. When I see a low reading score combined with a startlingly low vocabulary score (about 43-53% on the vocab sentence completions is very common) I know I have a student who's short circuited his or her education with SparkNotes.

Some have never read a single book assigned to them.

SparkNotes dumbs the vocabulary down and explains the plot, setting, theme in simple terms. No complex sentences, nothing tough. As a result, these student can't handle college level reading. They don't do well on the SAT and get exactly the score they earned.

At my school, if you were caught using SparkNotes, you got an instant F.

In tutoring high school students I've learned that most parents don't know their kids.

One parent who wanted her son to get 2000+ on his SATs just hit reality.

His parents were wondering if he were making progress. I sent him home with an essay he did five months ago, and an essay on the same topic he did last week.

The original essay was incoherent. The new one is simplistic, but understandable.

I thought she'd be pleased at his dramatic improvement. His scores have increased by 300 points and are now within striking distance of his peers.

Instead, she's pissed. At him. She read the original essay and was floored. She said, "This doesn't even make sense!" She had no idea.

Actually, he's doing much better than five months ago. I'm really quite pleased with him.

She's finally getting it though. The initial test scores were not an aberration. Teaching him is a delight, because he's so enthusiastic. But it's a bit like trying to keep a grasshopper on the table.

That shattering sound was the (highly durable) parental fantasy. Good to see it in pieces before they force him into some inappropriate college major.