No Fear Sparknotes

This is a class full of college students, so I would be shocked if no one has heard of this spectacular resource. No Fear Literature on Sparknotes breaks down older, classic texts that have difficult language, such as Shakespeare or Charles Dickens, and allows students to engage with the text in a way that helps them create a deeper understanding of the meaning. Now I know what you’re thinking, is a future English teacher really going to tell her students to log onto Sparknotes to do the reading assignment? Shouldn’t she be advocating for students to engage with the original text because when it’s translated into modern English some of the information is lost in translation? My answer for you is yes, yes I am. However, I strongly believe there is a way for teachers to encourage students to use Sparknotes as a supplement to the reading experience and not a substitute, such as administering reading quizzes that can only be answered with information from the original text. No Fear Sparknotes makes this possible. By displaying the original text on one side of the screen, and translated text on the opposite side, there is no longer a way to give students a free pass on their failure to do the reading because they “didn’t understand it.” This website is not a “cop-out,” it’s not cheating, it’s a resource to help students learn because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that they learned something, and not how they learned it.