Posted on 11/13/2007 4:47:43 PM PST by Clintonfatigued
Most students carry a backpack, but for some, that necessary action can have lasting health effects.
“Children come in here on a daily basis complaining about back pain, shoulder pain, and I have all these pain medicines to prove it,” said Andell Q. Brown, an RN and school nurse at Northside Middle School. “I have a little boy who comes in here who is 64 pounds. We weighed his backpack one day, and it was 21 pounds.”
An Aug. 8 article by the American Physical Therapy Association -- based on studies on students in pre-kindergarten through ninth grade and college -- recommends a backpack should weigh less than 10 to 15 percent of the student’s body weight to prevent injuries.
“I like to go by 10 percent, because it’s easy to calculate,” said Dr. Bryan Ellenburg, of the Piedmont Health Group Westside Office in Greenwood. “Any parent can weigh the backpack and weigh the child to see if the bookbag is heavier than the recommended weight.”
Backpacks that are too heavy can cause problems ranging from pain in the neck, arms, back or legs to long-term chronic back and neck pain, herniated disc issues and spinal curvature, Ellenburg said.
“In family practice, we see a lot of back pain. From the medical perspective, we’re seeing more young children, preteens and teens with backpacks that are too heavy, and more and more are having problems,” Ellenburg said. “We would like to prevent future neck and back problems rather than treat them later.
(Excerpt) Read more at indexjournal.com ...
There’s too much homework, and the standardized tests indicate that it doesn’t do any good.
When was the last time you heard of homeschooled children having this problem?
If this is true, then college students (who generally carry more books) should be considered a DISABLED class of people!
My wife has been convinced of this for several years. Our oldest son has some minor curvature of the spine. When he was in middle school it was “cool” to carry the backpack over one shoulder. The thing weighed a ton. No surprise here.
Bring back lockers!
If they did more chores before & after school; and swept chimneys on the weekends, it would build up those poor, little frail bodies.
Milking the cow, splitting fire wood, shoveling coal, stacking hay, mucking stalls, churning butter, cranking ice cream...WAIT! How did that last one get in there?!?
I am taking some classes at college (middle-aged me) & I can't believe how many books are required for just one class! Most of the students carry these HUGE backpacks & many of them use the cases on wheels. It's crazy - most of my teachers never even use all of the books we're required to purchase - or use them very little.
I went to the Dentist today, and when he adjusted the chair to get access to my tooth, it felt like I was bent backwards. My back still has a little ache to it.
We have lockers in our school. TONS of lockers.
No one uses them. Students would rather carry every book they own in the backpack than use a locker.
Not to mention, the halls are so packed to stop at a locker and get books would be a huge waste of time.
My locker in high school was my truck. I went there a few times a day to swap books.:) As a freshman, I went before school, during lunch and after school. It was the only time I had between classes.
I rarely carried all the required books to class. Just took good notes and notated what areas to focus on. Most of the books I didn’t even buy.
Our son is a sturdy kid - competitive swimmer and in all other respects healthy and of normal size. He's neither puny nor unfit. Kids today are simply being asked to carry more than is healthy for them, in part because of the huge homework load. One good thing is that some of his teachers keep a second set of books at school so that the child can leave the text book at home. Alternatively, some use an on-line version of the text to support homework.
At least weird, if not crazy.
Back in "the day", we rarely toted books to classes. Most classes were strictly for lectures & exams; and books were either for preparing for the next lecture, or for reference, unless told otherwise.
Notebooks, and a couple of Bluebooks just in case, and a slide rule (unless you could afford $300 for a 5-function "calculator" with no memory) were about all any of us lugged around.
Yeah, you’d think by now - we could have it all on computer & at most, have to lug a laptop around.
Unless the school has no lockers, there is no reason for a kid to be bringing home seven classes worth of books. And even then, as it was in the school my daughters’ went to where there were no lockers, what they didn’t need that night stayed in their homeroom.
You’re not the only parent who has this story.
Back when we were in school, we didn’t have to carry as many books because teachers used handouts a lot. Now, teachers aren’t allowed to print materials..only tests..due to “budget” constraints. Paper costs money, they say. My daughter asked her teacher if she could make a copy of some pages in a classroom book the teacher had, and the teacher said she would have to charge her 15 cents for each page.
My daughter and her friends don’t use lockers for several reasons:
1. The school is overcrowded and doesn’t have enough lockers for everyone. You get one by lottery.
2. They only have 4 minutes between classes and sometimes they have to cross campus to get to class. There is barely enough time to do that when you carry everything with you for all your classes and don’t stop at a locker.
3. If their locker is in the wrong location, they have to deal with clans of black thugs and thuggettes who will either intimidate them out of their locker all together so they can use it, or torment, bully, and say very vulgar things to them when they do try to use it.
There’s too much homework, and the standardized tests indicate that it doesn’t do any good.
***
Where I live, the kiddies don’t get enough. I remember sometime back reading that one of our local school districts was increasing homework to 1-1/2 hours per day. Good grief. I did homework from 3:00 to 4:00 (when we had dinner), then after dinner I worked on homework from around 6:00 till 9:00. By that time, it was time for bed.
Brother and I did prety well in school. And we didn’t have time to go out and get into trouble either.
I see kids now and it looks like they aren’t bringing home (or back to school) much of anything.
And I also read that those extremely high heel shoes are making a comeback.
With all the money school districts spend on useless and incomprehensible textbooks, we could!
But the NEA has a vested interest in themselves and their adult members.
The reason their members even exist as an identified group, never crosses their tiny little minds.
And since public education is paid for by government confiscatory taxation methods, the entire system is skewed towards spending more next year than they did last year, or they “lose money” in the next budget!
Damn the children and their parents, the taxpayers!
No one uses them. Students would rather carry every book they own in the backpack than use a locker.
If "students" are to friggin dumb to use the lockers, then TS.
People have been carrying books for thousands of years. Why is there an issue all of a sudden. We used to walk to school too...
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