by Jake Lee

Nearly every high school student knows backpacks are the most efficient way to carry school supplies. For ages, textbooks, pencils, binders, and paper have been crammed into a bag pack to be carried around to prevent holding everything by hand. Along with the unchanging backpacks, school supplies have also not changed, and are heavy as ever.
Some students believe that teachers are the cause for this because they are so oblivious to the fact that students have other classes, and thus other books.
“It seems like most teachers don’t pay attention to the load they put on students. Literally,” sophomore Karley Woods said. “We end up carrying around multiple textbooks at once because we’re required to have them each and every day, and sometimes stopping by your locker isn’t always an option.”
CHS has granted all Clayton students lockers, but students still struggle with carrying their textbooks for every class. Most teachers may believe the solution to heavy backpacks is to use lockers frequently, but little do they realize how difficult it is to simply put books away.
“I use my locker occasionally,” junior Simon Warchol said. “But it simply isn’t practical to use it between every class, so regardless, I end up with at least two text books and at least that many binders in my back pack at all times.”
One example that teachers overlook is the location of the lockers, which has been a problem to several students.
“Unfortunately my locker is all the way near the art and history classrooms so it’s really far away and not always conveniently accessible,” Woods said. “The only time I have to switch out books is during my lunch, but that still means three or four binders and textbooks to carry around at all times.”
To show the heavy weight of backpacks, students have testified to physical pain from carrying backpacks and the ridiculous weight of them.
“Prolonged periods of wearing my backpack are incredibly uncomfortable,” Warchol said. “When i put my backpack in the passenger’s seat, it weighs so much that the car things it’s a person and beeps about how it doesn’t have its seatbelt fastened.”
According to orthopedic neurosurgeon Sam Cho, back sores are not common from carrying heavy backpacks for a long period of time.
“If you are carrying a heavy backpack for too long it can cause sores,” Cho said. “They can be sore for a couple of days from your back muscles being overworked.”
Though the effects on the body are not too serious from carrying heavy backpacks, nevertheless, they are still a hassle to students.
“I think it’s clear that a student is carrying too much when their backpack is bigger than them,” Woods said. “I believe tiny people like myself have the hardest time.”
Students suffer greatly from the overloaded textbooks and agree that carrying around a laptop with accessible textbooks online would be much more efficient than carrying textbooks for each class.
“It would be a lot more efficient to have a laptop for school,” Warchol said. “I think that having a physical text book is nice to keep at home, but in class, it would be much nicer if we could just pull the text up on our computers.”
Textbooks being on laptops have already been an open idea. Some Clayton classes such as Spanish and History use Quia, where students can study for their classes online. However, several math courses such as honors precalculus and honors geometry literally have their texts online and thus, students with internet access do not have to carry their math textbooks home to study. Keypress, the company that creates the math textbooks for CHS, creates a textbook online as well as physical textbooks. Though they only sell math books, it is a start to most textbooks being online.
Math teacher Mr. Kohmetscher supports Keypress and future textbooks being online.
“If every student had a laptop or a CD with the textbook program on it, it would be much more efficient,” Kohmetscher said. “But the downside would be that if the internet is down, none of the students would be able to access any of their textbooks.”
Kohmetscher also agrees that laptops would be taken better care of than textbooks.
“For something so expensive, kids are bound to take better care of their laptops,” Kohmetscher said. “Textbooks get torn up over time and are taken less care of than expensive technology by students.”
Even though there may be financial problems for all students to own laptops and have internet access at home, some teachers are still able to get around the problem of students carrying too many textbooks. Chemistry teacher Mr. Howe solves this problem by letting students leave their textbooks at home and photocopying pages from the textbook needed for that day’s lesson.
“I believe my students already have a lot of textbooks to carry around,” Howe said. “I try to help them by letting them keep their books at home. It’s worth it to spend a couple of minutes of my time photocopying pages to help out my students.”