I vaguely remember my teachers in school requiring us to have seperate divisions or binders for each subject…
I just ignored it. Think about it logically folks, what are they going to do for not having your own notebook for their class? Bitch at you and maybe call home, who cares?
And folks: What the hell happened to lockers?
I also remember carrying around at most 5 books around with me and it wasn’t too heavy and my backpack didn’t rip.
I just HATE having to defend schools today. But I’m going to explain what these items are for.
The reason my son carries separate binders for each class is that A) Homework is sometimes left for a teacher to read over. Handling loose leaf 3-hole punch sheets of paper back and forth is unweildy and will create lost papers. If you have a spiral bound notebook for Social Studies, then you can surrender it and the teacher can review the work you’ve done then hand it back in a day or so. B) A physical separation helps some kids be more organized. That may sound like bullshit but it’s true. C) MY three-ring binder was a Leviathan thing of awful proportions. On days when I only had work to do in one subject, I had to lug that motherfucking thing home ANYWAY. Now a child can tailor-make the load they carry home to fit the homework.
The issue of larger and greater textbooks is legitimate. My son is 11 1/2, my daughter turns 10 next weekend. BOTH of them carry bookbags that are painful to them. The pediatricians are reporting kids their age and younger with spinal problems. Both kids now use the “one shoulder diagonal strap” bookbag. They all claim it lessens the pain of an overloaded bag. It still bothers me, I see many years of chiropractic ahead.
Don’t talk to me about how kids are fucking lazy-assed whiners who just want to carry their GameBoys[sym]ä[/sym], Walkmans[sym]ä[/sym] and Pokêmon[sym]ä[/sym] cards to school. Our school district has written policy banning these items. They are confiscated. MY kids carry SCHOOLWORK in their bookbags.
Additionally, each child carries a musical instrument with them to school, one day a week.
A 3x5 spiral notebook might have worked when we were in school but you know what? A Homework Folder is a beautiful thing. It gives the kids a central place to stick all papers that they need to work on, AND that the parents need to see. If I write a note for my child, I place it into the homework folder, not into the pit that is the bookbag. It gets delivered the next day.
Cartooniverse
My experience in this area caused me to prickle a little at this comment:
While I believe this is true to an extent, my seven year old was coming home with 4-6 hours of homework EVERY NIGHT! I think this was excessive. While homework should come first, I think that there should still be time to be a child somewhere during the day. It was nothing but homework from the time he got home until after bedtime, and even then, it was rarely finished. It was enough to make us both cry. One day he brought home 18 pages of assigned Skilpak alone, plus three other subjects (I asked - no, he wasn’t behind, it had been assigned that day for everyone). It seemed to be a trademark of one particular teacher, and yes, I did speak to her about it.
I do think that assigned homework should reflect the grade that they are in. I’m in college, and when my young child comes home with more homework than I do - night after night - there is a break down somewhere.
Not practical for many low income parents, single parents etc. Also other issues such as : sidewalks not always passable (snow in the northern places, unpaved in other places). When my son was on the bus, they were sitting 3 to a seat made for two, with their bags in their laps, plus band instruments etc. Bags on wheels would have made this even more drastic.
I believe in homework, thinks it’s absurd for them to have to take each book home each and every day, tho.
Oddly enough, my son seems to have less homework in high school than he did in grade school.
In high school I was in a magnet school with a locker assigned on the north side of the second floor of my “home” school. Here’s a typical year’s schedule (I had the same locker all four years.)
1st/2nd hour- “home” school is locked when I get on the bus for my "away school. Anything I need that day lives in the hiking backpack on my back. Since I walked the mile to school and lived in Michigan, I would occasionally need a coat/gloves/hat etc. as well. Go to classes at “away” school. No locker.
3rd hour- Come back to “home” school. Get dropped off on the first floor, North side. Head for choir, bacement, south side. Move quickly. No locker.
4th hour- Either bacement North side or Forth floor North side. Again, move quickly, no locker.
I could have visited my locker during lunch, but I had on more academic class and an elective, or for the final two years I was leaving to take classes at the local college, already late for them. The locker was an ignored space, as it was never convienent to leave anything in it.
College is a blessed relief, since I don’t carry textbooks and am trusted to take notes however I want. I still use seperate binders though, keeps me organized and not carrying any more than I have to. (Leaves space for toys!)
As for seperate binders, mostly they are reqired by the teachers and graded on being organized as the teacher sees fit.
When I was a senior in high school, back in the mid-eighties, the school removed the lockers for security reasons. At the time they bought one additional class set of every textbook per class so that students could keep a copy at home and use a copy in class. This really wasn’t all that expensive, as it cut down on lost and damaged books; however, when I returned to the same school ten years later as a student teacher, I found that the promise of maintaining a set in the classroom had been discarded. The result was that students not only have to carry the books back and forth, but they also have to carry them from class to class. Here in California, where classroom space is very limited, there is also the problem of multiple classes being taught in the same room. Four different classes at thirty-five students each mean that in the busier classrooms you might need to have 140 large textbooks availiable.
In addition, it is important to keep in mind that, with a few exceptions, textbooks have gotten bigger over the years. Textbook makers find it easier to sell a giant textbook that includes everything but the kitchen sink rather than a variety of smaller books.
I give homework three or four time a week, but only when there is something specific the students need to practice on their own. Students need to have some time to explore interests of their own, even if those interests are T.V. or video games.
This is going to sound REALLY goofy, but stick with it till I’m done, it’s brilliant. 
I can buy a Handspring Visor with 8 Megs of memory for 149.99. For another.... 30.00, it can go to 16 Megs of Memory.
What would Handspring do as a discount for a large urban school district when they find out that the district wishes to buy 65,000 Visors at once? Why lug books? It’s the INFORMATION that is invaluable. Have the districts pay the fee for X number of copies of the texts as data. Download the books for that semester into the Visors- a much simpler task thank you might think, since the same Backup Module could be used to " Format " all 65,000 Visors.
Hand the units to the kids. For the cost of perhaps two textbooks ( whose information is old the day they arrive, due to editing and prepping printed textbooks ), a student has a Visor containing their texts for the year.
Yes, I know- students with poor eyesight are discriminated against here. You know what? If their eyesight falls below a certain level, they are given books on tape OR Large Print books anyway. The Visor font can be enlarged slightly, and made bold.
In fact, I like this idea so much that I am going to pursue it in my school district, for next year. 
Never know- it could change a lot of the cost issues as we know them.
Cartooniverse
p.s. Theft isn’t as much of a concern as you’d think. If you burn your entire year’s worth of books, you owe your school district HUNDREDS of dollars. At wholesale cost, I bet a Visor loaded with software and books could come in at a hundred dollars.
I remember having about four hours of homework a night in fourth grade. I remember being tired, cranky, nasty and being up late and tired in the mornings because I didn’t get enough sleep. THAT is excessive.
I’m talking math problems that confused BOTH of my parents.
Perhaps a little cheese with that WHINE!! Get over it. They’re only children, they will grow out of it…
Sorry, it took me a while to see this.
Your second graders have different teachers for each class? You said that some teachers generally give 10*grade level minutes of homework. I have seven teachers, meaning each would assign me 110 minutes of homework. Unless your second graders have different teachers for math, science, etc., it seems to me that they would spend 20 minutes on homework, not 2 hours and 20.
Anyway, I forgot to add a when I quoted your post before. I didn’t seriously think that MS/HS teachers would use the same guideline.
Thank you for making all of these points. I teach high school English, and I require my students to have a separate binder for my class. By the time the notebook is finished at the end of the semester, the student’s writings/revisions/final copies, tests, etc., fill a large binder, and there is no way it would all fit inside a “Trapper Keeper” with their work from other classes. When I need to review their notebooks, they can simply leave the binder with me without having to relinquish other classwork. I have had students in the past who attempted to keep one notebook for all classes, but I was never satisfied with the organization of the notebook. Ironically, individual notebooks are less cumbersome, and are therefore better taken care of.
As to the OP, the mother is going to wind up with a helpless and spoiled child on her hands. Students must meet the demands of a well-developed curriculum to gain credit. Parents cannot and should not wish to bitch their way out of the system. As to the heavy backpacks, the ones with wheels are very common now and not unreasonably priced. Many of my students within a lower socioeconomic bracket have them. I suppose they could be difficult to maneuver on a bus, but it would still be better than orthopedic damage.
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*Originally posted by wring *
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::snicker:: Yeah, I had “less” homework in HS than in grade school. Seriously, since I don’t know your son, I can’t say, but I had less homework simply because I managed to cram it in at the right times, sometimes just before it was due.
This would never work, but not because it’s a bad idea. There is a lot of money to be made in textbook publishing, and if a school district downloaded textbook content into PDAs, it would take about two nanoseconds for the textbook publishers to sic their copyright lawyers on the school district.
Ideally, the government would commission the top scholars in each field to write standard, high-quality textbooks, then distribute them to school districts for the cost of printing and binding the books (probably about $5 apiece). But no, that would be socialistic, so we have this phony baloney system that encourages publishers to lard up their books with pictures, pie charts, and every dimbulb trendy educational technique they can think of so that they can sell a lowest-common-denominator “product” to the state textbook committee. That way your kid has to carry a 20-pound book containing about one month’s worth of real knowledge, and the textbook publishers get rich.