Getting bigger

Why are students carrying around more stuff than they used to?

Our tutor reports an impression formed over the last few years: students are now equipped with large backpacks, ferrying around larger quantities of books and other materials than he remembers from his days.  We must all correct for the fact that we’re dinosaurs, and memories can be faulty, but when we were in High School there were few or no backpacks (which might have been called rucksacks anyway, and were distinctly European).  Instead, we would have a three-ring binder with notes and papers, plus maybe two or three textbooks.  Boys would carry them at their sides in a stack, girls across their chests with both hands.  The boys of course were more vulnerable to getting “dumped,” in which an unkind pull or push would spread their whole stack across the ground, possibly opening the binder and strewing papers to the four winds; but such was the custom.

Our point is that the advance of technology would be expected to work the other way.  There should be fewer books to carry around, and indeed many of our tutor’s students do not have textbooks for some classes, instead viewing PowerPoint presentations online.  The laptop required for this sort of thing is an addition, but it should replace many books and so be a net lightening of the load.  Many assignments are also done on line. Indeed, one could argue that today’s students actually need no paper at all.

But they have plenty of it.  At least part of the cause is something we noticed from the beginning of the post-typewriter era: it became much easier to produce and print documents, so there was actually a net increase.  The “paperless office” didn’t arrive until much later, and still hasn’t completely taken over.  Now one can download a hundred-page book chapter from the internet, route it to the printer and have a stack of paper in one’s hand in a few minutes.  Because it’s easy, it’s done.

For teaching, paper has some virtues.  An in-class assignment done in pencil on paper is much better at testing the individual student, instead of testing his or her net-searching skills.  And our tutor sometimes gets very frustrated during virtual sessions trying to get across by typing or mouse-manipulation mathematical expressions or drawings that would be easy on paper.

We can think of another cause for an increase in paper.  Our tutor’s parent company produces its own SAT prep material, and revamped its format entirely when the SAT itself became an entirely on line test.  It’s clear to us that the rewritten questions are designed to be viewed on a computer, where each page costs only a few electrons.  But as (we hope) an interim, they’ve all been printed out on paper, in enormous books, doubling or tripling the previous volume.  However, our students were toting heavy backpacks well before that.

Well, teenagers are resilient, as well as vulnerable, and no doubt will adapt.  But when the entire contents of a former-age school locker can be stored on a smartphone, why are they carrying around so much stuff?