INSTRUCTION — Foil Google, Baidu, and Cliff Notes by Making Different Classroom Reading Choices

Look for something with immediacy or obscurity.

BACKGROUND — I might not be able to beat City Hall, but I have managed to put a wheel clamp on teen students’ tendency to avoid the required readings by looking for summaries, spoilers, and answers online. Trying to teach One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Catcher in the Rye? By the latest count, Cuckoo has close to 3 million links on Google. Catcher has 17 million. The student-in-a-state-of- avoidance can scan and copy whole synopses, analyses, or reviews and never crack the cover of the actual book.

I’ve become a master at finding the source of student plagiarism. The key, as you know, is finding a literate content phrase, copying it, and inserting it in Google between quotation marks. In a nanosecond, up pops the exact source with the relevant phrase in bold. Sometimes it’s an article, a review, a quiz, or an analysis. However, with 20 students in one class and 14 in another, that could turn out to be a lot of checking. Much better to just avoid it.

FUNCTIONAL LOSS — With millions of shortcut options, many students don’t bother to read essential course material, and, as every teacher knows, reading is the “Open Sesame” for not just literacy, but a myriad of other skills as well, including:

1. The ability to follow plot through…