Schoolchildren in a Bind Over Heavy Book Loads

As I read “Bill Seeks to Lighten Kids’ Load” (Aug. 27), I couldn’t help but remember how some very petite engineering students handled the problem of the heavy backpack in the 1990s. They used to copy their textbooks a chapter at a time, and carry only the material currently being studied with them in a three-ring binder.

Perhaps textbook publishers could sell the books to schools in a ready-for-the-binder format. Children could check out the chapter currently being studied from their teachers and transport it to and from school in a binder. Six chapters have to weigh less than six books--especially if there is no hardback cover. Publishers could make up the difference on purchase price by selling schools the right to copy as many pages as they need to replace lost chapters. Or maybe chapters could be reprinted with permission over the Internet.

Michelle Sugimoto

Lake Forest

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Although I agree with the fact that students’ backpacks are too heavy for them to carry around all day, I had to laugh at the solution of publishers “lightening” their texts. I teach eighth-grade pre-algebra and algebra, and we have adopted new textbooks twice in two years. One reason for this is that the old texts did not match up to the state’s standards. Since more material needs to be covered in each grade, the textbooks have gotten quite weighty.

I have tried to order a class set of texts so that my students can keep one book at home and there is one in my classroom, but I have been told that the budget does not allow us to have class sets. Would it not be more cost-effective to allocate money to the schools’ budgets for the purchasing of these sets instead of purchasing all new texts in a smaller version?

In addition to lessening the load for our students, only one set of books would get damaged, while most of the books would stay in relatively good condition. This would cut down on the cost of replacing the damaged and lost books.

Dolores Alpert

Irvine

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A better idea would be to give each child a notebook computer and put all the books on CD-ROM.

You could fit all the books from all the subjects for all the grades on one CD if it was well done. Each district could compile its own custom CD. The publishers would save all those printing costs and may even pass some of that along.

And while they are at it, the use of open-source software should be mandated as well.

Paul Fretheim

Independence, Calif.

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The solutions that legislators drum up always baffle me. Rather than splitting textbooks in half, why don’t we legislate cutting the ridiculous homework loads in half? It would cost nothing and children would regain some of their childhood now buried in heavy textbooks.

Elissa Tognozzi

Santa Monica