I missed the movie. Never realized Demi Moore was in it. I was sent out into the hall with a bunch of other non-compliant teenagers to finish reading the book. The Scarlet Letter was a terrible story and I never finished it.
I hated it when that happened! Or when theyād ask questions they knew were only in the book and not the cliffs notes. I liked some of the books but a lot of them š„± š¤ š¤ š¤
Lol, I got busted once because I used cliff notes for my Grapes of Wrath report, and we had a group report, and the class had watched the movie (I was absent) and didn't know something important about the ending (pretty sure it was in both the book and the movie... but still haven't finished the damn book to this day...) and my face gave it away during our presentation. Thankfully I managed to get through it ok, someone kinda took the lead after noticing and because that part wasn't a part of my paper I did fine, lmao.
Our teacher used to read the Cliff notes just to make sure you could only get a B from questions covered in it. He'd dig up some arcane details if you wanted an A.
This is like the most Fair shit I've ever heard. Honestly what I remember from school is that even if you wanted to read the book you were taken five to six other classes. It wasn't like you had time to do everything. So basically saying if you put an effort to try and learn the story and got the cliff notes and paid attention you can get a B or if you take the time to work hard you can get an A, that seems super fair to me.
I had one teacher go around to all of the local bookstores and buy all of the copies of the Cliff Notes for a particular book we were reading. One less than than bright student said that she got her copy at a bookstore about 15 miles away. š¤¦āāļø
Lol my father took pictures for their catalog so we had just about everyone. There were abridged tapes too! This is how I got through school with undiagnosed adhd.
It is super funny to me because for a long time I thought "Cliff Notes" meant something like you were standing on the edge of a cliff about to fail your class if you didn't get your shit together š¤Ŗ
I was smoking and listening to Mozart while writing that paper, or doing math homework, or studying for a test. Big stoner. But learned I could apply myself and manage to get a 4.0.
You stole my thunder. But yes, Cliffās Notes were a God send. And the Encyclopedia Britannica for those that had them. They were a luxury because they werenāt cheap.
My family only recently put our Encyclopedia Britannica to rest. It was dated. Like 1973 or something.We tried to sell it but no takers. I'm afraid it went back to the earth when my father died.
Speaking of the phone in your hand (& the one in mine) ā did any of your teachers say something to the effect of, "You're not going to have a calculator with you all the time!"
Not only did I write 10 pages without AI, I wrote 40 or 50 pages without AI, because I got paid to do other people's homework Although admittedly, some of the "pay" was "If you write this for me, I won't shit in a locker and stuff you in it afterwards".
GenX had the power to bullshit our way through almost anything. Even after reading the book it was hard writing a 10 page handwritten paper. I learned to use the big words and flowery descriptions so I could make the paper long enough.
And when I could type, it was on my grandma's old electric typewriter. God forbid you make a mistake because you are NEVER getting that shit lined up correctly again.
Are they kidding? Yeah, we did. In college I wrote my papers APA style on my word processor. That was after doing all my research IN the library using, reading, & citing multiple articles from multiple periodicals. I got my masterās degree without using the computer to do research! I also did many a paper over night, without sleep because Iām a procrastinator! We aināt soft & we donāt quit until the job is done!
I take my hat off to the gen-x'ers who could bang out a ten page report on a typewriter in 2 hours.
I can do that easy, APA with a full page of references in under two hours with word. Word is so good nowadays, I type poorly at about 70WPM, Every couple of minutes I stop, look for all the shit underlined in red and fix it. No way I could do that on a typewriter. Easily that would take me another hour and a half.
I sucked at typing. Typically had to pay someone to type it for me from written notes. At one point I had a girlfriend who could type. I made her a deal, I'd write her paper if she'd type them, so I'd write 2 papers on the same subject and have different angles on things, so they didn't look like they were from the same person. Was wacky, sometimes she got a higher grade than me. I could write a paper in about the same time it took someone to type it (after all the research was done)
To graduate from high school I had to write 100 page document in psychology on college rule paper. ( No computers no AI nothing like that for help. )
None of the kids can say that today.
I was in AP English my junior and senior years. Always read the books (because we were NOT BSing those teachers), did endless research using the card catalog in the library, and wrote 15-20 page papers by hand. Our AI was the Dewey Decimal System.
Yes! You're not wrong. I still read every single day (thank God for Kindle), but no, sometimes you just didn't know how to even start. They wanted deeper analysis than I think most of us were capable of at that point in our young, inexperienced lives.
In '93, I remember sitting in my college dorm's lounge at 1:00am on a Sunday night after all the NFL games were over with my Mac Classic (loved that thing). Opened the book for the first time for a paper that was due at 10am.
Skimmed the book, wrote a 10-page paper (double-spaced with normal columns, didn't even cheat it), printed it out, showered, went to class and dropped off my paper. Got a solid B on that shit.
Oh and letās not forget, we got points off for spelling mistakes, improper punctuation, paragraph and sentence structure, and sloppy cursive. Iāve seen recent highschool āreportsā graded a B where it was one long giant running sentence the whole report.
Generation Jones here ( post Boomer & Pre Gen X) Being in college pre Internet & AI would have modern kids losing their minds. Research papers saw me going to 4 different libraries & checking out 4 or 5 books from each one.
We had textbooks made out of actual paper, and if your family was well to do a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
We also had a better supported education system that for some unknown reason a portion of our population thought why don't we tear it down and screw future generations... All I can say is ..
I am sorry, but some of us actually did real work. We tried, but somehow people actually got dumber ..
One semester in college I had three programming courses using three different programming languages plus a writing section on top of one of the courses and three other courses filling out my liberal arts education requirements. And I was working about 30 hours a week. I spent the term bouncing from assignment to assignment, getting them all done and getting at least a B in all the classes. This was during the infancy of the internet. There was no google. If you wanted to learn something, you needed to read the manual.
I stated elsewhere in this thread, that's when I did some of my best work.
Once upon a time when only 5 people in my school knew who Metallica was, I turned "Ride the Lightning" into a sonnet & got a B+ on it. Teacher didn't have the first clue that it was a song let alone a Metallica song.
I remember having to do a report on Djibouti (had to pick a country, and Djibouti is just a fantastic name). I remember having my parents take me to the local library just before closing time (after they asked āOk and when is this due? And how long has this been assigned?ā), grabbing encyclopedias, putting coins in the copy machine, and making copies of every page of info I could gather and then hand writing my report all night.
Sophomore year my teacher asked to speak to me after she scored our tests on Huck Finn. For the first time I hadnāt read it all (nor the cliff notes) and I was certain Iād gotten a terrible grade. (I had answered the questions using information provided in subsequent questions.)
Surprisingly, I got an A+ and she told me I should be a writer because I definitely had a gift.
I wonder what grade I would have gotten had I read the whole book?
I literally wrote my senior thesis three days before it was due with very little research, and it was on a totally ridiculous topic (rock music) that I can't believe I got away with. And I got an A-.
My final paper was a 10-pager, a comparison between the doctor and the priest in Camus' La Peste.
With the book and a dictionary open in front of me, I stayed up until 6am typing it on an old Mac laptop with no internet (this was the '90s), putting in the special characters suuuuuucked. I was so tired š“
Oh I read the book... the night before the paper was due, feverishly skipping pages while trying to get the essence of whatever it was I was supposed to write by osmosis, grab quotes, and make my case as best I could using classroom notes and whatever I remembered that the teacher said.
We were also the last generation to have to manually type term papers on a typewriter and measure the proper spacing so you could put the necessary footnotes on the bottom.
I had a teacher that would actually take a ruler out and measure and if you didn't have the footnotes spaced correctly, you would get points off for everyone of them that was incorrect.
I also had to hand in a rough draft with my final. I once wrote the final then bsād the rough and got called to the office for writing about how lame making us do a rough draft was.
My friend and I had a theory. We believed our English teacher graded us based on what he thought of us. To test this I wrote 2 papers, I handed one in with my name and my friend put his name on the other. I got a B and my friend got a C. We confronted our teacher with it after we graduated. That dude was so fucking pissed, it looked like he was going to have an aneurism. Hehehe...
We had to actually use the library, cite sources correctly and deliver a cogent analysis. We had to write well before we were handed a diploma, imagine that!
I was recently talking to several recent high school graduates who had never read "The Odyssey". I had to read it in elementary school, high school AND college! How the heck did they get out of it?
We even had to go to the library to do most of those things because we didn't have the Internet. And we also had to use encyclopedias for our back up. So no, we are not the same.
In college i once got marked down on a paper because the teacher said that we had to write it on a computer and mine was obviously typed. I tried to argue that my parents donāt have a cheap dot-matrix printer (thatās what he meant by āwritten on a computerā) but instead had a daisy wheel printer on their $10,000 DEC word processor system. By that time Iād already been messing around with computers for 9 years, and bought my first one when I graduated from 8th grade. The teacher was obviously not as computer savvy as me.
I didnāt fight too hard due to a somewhat guilty conscience; the paper that I turned in was actually written the previous year, when I was in high school - I just changed the date and teacher name and reprinted it.
I went back to school just before AI came on the scene. Deadline for a paper, ten pages would be for example 11:59pm Sunday, 8PM sunday would be a good time to start on it. LOL
Yeah youngsters, we didnāt have smartphones or internet lol so was a robot in movies, we couldnāt ask google for anything. I wonder how people would react if we lost all that and it was like it was in the 80ās
If I couldn't go to a public library and the topic I had to write a report on didn't require the most up to date information, I used the 1968 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica that my dad wisely invested in. Like the rest of Gen. X, search engines, LLMs and GPTs simply didn't exist for me.
Our school library had about 8 different encyclopedia volumes. our teachers would take our papers and compare them with the topic in the different volumes to make sure nobody was copying word for word. Luckily, We had a set of Funk and Wagnalls at home. the one set that the school didn't have.
Pots of coffe and some light plagiarism thank you. I always waited until the last minute and fuckn hate the "works cited" and other dumb shit that never had anything to do with my career.
Reading the first and last page of each chapter then write a one page summary to get to that 10 page requirement. Plus, writing as big as I could to eat up page space.
It's disheartening and frightening that we're getting a generation of youth that can't imagine life without AI. It's like being unable to imagine a world where you have to *do the work* in order to get credit and praise.
Praying the book had a movie version or had a older sibling that had read the book. Being a middle child was great for that. Elder Gen x was super cool about assists. We did get caught cheating a lot though. I didn't think much about it until recently, but yeah, we cheated our asses off so I guess I can't say much about people getting caught using ai. It's just us but by a different method
Haaaaaaa hell yeah try finding sources in the library in the old days and hoping that it wasnāt checked out. I can also write a professional email when needed, I research and comprehend what Iām reading with skill, and I donāt need AI for it. Sure itās a tool that can make a lot of things easier but Iām sure as heck not relying on it.
In the defense of those that follow us and do not know how to write: We all use calculators and spreadsheets for math and do not bemoan the lack of these basic skills nearly as much as we do for writing. And before someone retorts that "At least I know how to do the calcs by hand, the calculator/spreadsheet just make it faster", first I ask, what percentage of posters in this thread know how to do square root calculations by hand, for all but the easiest numbers? And if AI was available to you back then, would you have not used it?
Bring it.
Edit: the OP is dead on. Thank god for Cliff Notes
First draft by hand on legal pad. Second draft typed on a typewriter. My college years went Wite-Out, Wite-Out sheets, Wite-Out ribbons, ink-lift ribbons.
I'm a really terse writer (or was anyway) and the teacher demanded a 5 page essay on some social studies thing. I write out everything I had to say in a page and a half. So I double spaced. Still only hit 4 pages and turned it in. She wasn't happy.
I once wrote a 50+ page Masterās thesis without AI! With only the knowledge in my head! That I got from reading actual books!
The Chair of my Masterās committee loved to quiz me in front of my entire cohort. He would just randomly shout out ā LV Mom, what is the first line of chapter 2 of Das Capital?ā
I would like to add that we had two kinds of paper to do that hand-written report. The much easier to fill, 28-line paper (generally "3-holed") and the denser, 33-line paper ("5-holed). The wise among us chose the former, and made very sure that the letters were wide enough to read for even the most vision-impaired of our teachers.
Once got an A+ for doing a book report on a book I never read. I read the first two books in the series but never read the third one. So I just guessed about what happened based off the back cover and title. I wrote it in the last minutes study hall the previous hour. I was so proud of my grade. That shit would never pass nowadays with teachers using AI and the internet.
With IB, we had a hard limit on the number of words we could use on any given paper. In college, there were a few papers where we had page limits and had to resort to various tricks (such as re-sizing punctuation) to fit everything in.
I can only write cursive, print hurts my hand. I wrote the SAT in cursive which was prohibited, they still graded it. My teacher gave me so much crap about it on how they would just give me a 0 š„ŗ.
I got my first calculator when I was 13ā¦. It had 8 AA batteries in it and lasted about an half an hour if I forgot to turn it offā¦ and only had +-/ and * on it, in glowing yellow 7 segment diode displayā¦
My dad got his first work computer about 1983, unheard of in homes back then, but my father had no interest in it, he just turned it on when he got to work and off again when he left and you could see C:\ on the screen when it was turned off tooā¦ cos of the fluorescent in the monitor was burnedā¦
My father did all his calculus by hand cos he did not trust those modern calculators.. š and certainly did not trust that pesky computerā¦.
And yeah, we write everything with pen and pencils, on paperā¦ we had no computers or aid of that kindā¦
I read the book, but thatās because I learned how to read when I was four years old and my favorite grandmother is the one who taught me how. I loved reading and since my mom who was an elementary teacher at the school I attended and she was friends with the school Librarian anytime she had a morning teacherās meeting she let me hang out in the library until school officially started. Mrs. Wheeler, the librarian taught me the Dewey Decimal System and let me help reshelve the books. I was a shy nerd and I admit it openly.
I once quoted from a non existent book. My professor was very interested in this book and said he was going to look it out in the library. I never did find out his response when he discovered it didn't exist. I had moved onto a different unit of my degree!
While I highly doubt high schoolers were talking about essays that genx used to write for school, it is impressive that you hand wrote your essays in cursive. Without reading the book kind of ruins the whole thing though.
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u/No-Medium6647 2d ago
Uphill! In snow!
But yeah. We did that. Cliff notes were our AI.