Teaching Against Google

Nothing has impacted my teaching more in the past few years than the rise of Google. I’m shocked that many of my colleagues still live as if Google didn’t exist, assigning oral presentations and at-home compositions. I have had to get rid of all the activities where Google might be used because they are a complete waste of time.

When I was doing my BA, it still made sense for a professor to assign a presentation on Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo (that was the very first presentation I ever did in the one and only Spanish language class I ever took) or Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (and this was the very first presentation I did in the very first literature course I ever took.) Back in those days, students would still have to go to the library to research the topic. Even if their presentation was nothing but a compilation of material gleaned from sources they found at the library, one could still be reasonably sure that they had engaged with those sources intellectually.

These days, however, this kind of assignments is dead. Students just copy-paste vaguely related paragraphs from websites Google suggests to them, and that’s it. In my courses, they also put the resulting jumble of data through Google Translate. The result is, of course, a completely meaningless collection of words that students don’t even try to comprehend.

I have now come back to teach the courses where I had been substituted by other people during my sick leave and I have to grade a mountain of Google-translated compositions and several Google-generated presentations that students read in mechanical voices from their PowerPoints. This is all a massive waste of time both for me and for the students.

We need to remember that the second we get distracted a new student, called Google, will sneak into the classroom and steal the course away from us.