With the Internet around, who reads books anymore? Certainly not high school (or even college) students.

Why would students read a book that is 200 pages when they can know what happens in one brief, accurate summary?

SparkNotes has been around since 1999, providing study guides, summaries, and even flashcards to study any subject.

However, by far, it’s most popular tool is the summary that it provides for books that students read in their English classes. SparkNotes provides its users with chapter-by-chapter analyses and summaries, symbols in the book, and character analyses.

I think that students should be allowed to use SparkNotes to get their homework done.

On any given day a student has the potential for six subjects’ worth of homework. Let’s do the math.

There are 24 hours in a day and students go to school for six hours, are supposed to get around eight hours of sleep, and have to eat dinner and do chores at home, which, let’s say, takes three hours. Then there’s commuting time, and the time it takes to get ready or go to bed, so there’s another two hours at least.

Altogether that’s 20 hours of stuff they have to do, which leaves only four hours for homework, and that’s not even counting any extracurriculars that students might participate in.

SparkNotes is an invention that lets students get through a tough book or assignment faster than if they had to read all of it. They still get the same content from it, it’s just cut down into simpler language.

Students should be able to use whatever resources they can to get through school and life because that’s how it is in the real world. In college, they will use it to get through textbooks and novels, so why not let them use it now?

Ultimately, SparkNotes is just a tool like a calculator or a dictionary. Why get down on students for using it while at the same time encouraging them to use a dictionary to look up a word they don’t know?