That’s how it is described on the Amazon page. Which is otherwise in English. And apparently is for a German edition.
The new 4th edition is even longer, having 1104 pages.
My high school (also South African) did it the other way round, with teachers having their own classrooms and the students moving from room to room. But it was a private school that had a bit of a thing about being unconventional, so perhaps my experience was not the national norm.
We did have lockers as well, although as I recall we didn’t actually use them very much.
Ah, it had slipped my attention that your example was a college textbook, that’s a big difference. Some textbooks from my college time, for example for physics, had similar volumes, but I rarely had to carry them around because we usually didn’t need them in lectures, the profs had their own individual script and didn’t follow textbooks. I mostly used them studying at home as reference books.
It definitely is. And it’s been an ongoing discussion in the US, along with mitigation strategies. Here’s one article from my local news station about it. It’s clearly not a new or unusual phenomenon in this country.
And the amount of weight students carry in school supplies, mainly books, increases as they get older. Lockers partially address that. Hopefully digitizing books helps with that, but technology adoption can also be tricky.
The new Government textbooks we got this year are over 1100 pages. Needless to say, I don’t use the book much at all. The Teacher’s Edition is too heavy for me to lift with one hand. The kids were ordered to keep them at home for homework and use the class set for stuff in class. NO WAY was I making them schlep those monsters to school every day. On top of all that they are very badly written and organized. So glad this is my last year. I’d hate to have to actually use the pigs.
Yeah, and worse, it was at a D&D friend’s place.
My high school was on an island - also on the island was the post office.
behind the post office there was an empty lot (along the power canal that defined one side of the island)
Kids who smoked (not ness. tobacco) did so in this lot across the street from school property.
We called it “post toasties”
Back to lockers – at least some kids had to share a locker (maybe freshmen?) I recall trying to find a locker partner (most of my friends were a year behind me)
Brian
This is my son’s high school algebra textbook. It is over 500 pages and weighs over 1.5 kg.
This was in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. High schools in that area were (generally) constructed as a single large building with interior corridors. Ours had a courtyard and one large breezeway, but almost all hallways were climate-controlled. It wasn’t until I moved to California that I encountered “motel-style” schools where classroom doors open directly outside.
North Texas’ climate is less benign than, say, Los Angeles’. Sub-freezing temperatures and snowfall are not unheard-of in the winter.
North Texas: Nothing between you and the North Pole except barb-wire fences, and all but three of them are broken.
Poor kids.
Thank goodness he doesn’t have to carry it back and forth. He has one copy in the classroom, and one he keeps at home, to be returned at the end of the school year.
I suppose that the at-home copies of the textbook are subject to less wear-and-tear from not being carried back and forth daily. So yes, the school has to buy multiple copies (though the classroom copies can be shared by various classes) but both sets should last longer.
2-5 pounds maybe. 2-5 kg is 5-11 pounds. An unabridged dictionary may weigh11 pounds, but those are 3000 oversize pages.
The biggest book I used was senior year AP American History, the two-volume Morison and Commager textbook. Each was about 500 pages and 3 pounds, but we only used one at a time. (Do not look it up on Amazon, which says it has 2 pages and is for grades 7-9 instead being a college-level text!)
Fair enough, but that’s still not exactly lightweight reading!
In other countries, schoolchildren might not have 10 pounds of books. Having 20 pounds (or more!) of textbooks is not uncommon for American high schoolers. Add a folder and anything else (athletic equipment/clothing, band gear, etc) and they’re schlepping a lot of weight every day.
Even more if they can’t put some of it away for at least a few hours.
The biggest textbook I ever had was was my college freshman art history text. I actually wish I kept it, but it was brand new at the time and fantastically expensive, somewhere around $150 or $200 back in the late 1990s, so I ended up selling it back for whatever paltry sum I could get. It weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kilos) and was 9 x 12 x 2.5 inches (23 x 30 x 6.4 cm) with 1,167 pages. It’s pretty absurd, but some of my high school and middle school textbooks weren’t all that far off. Some did push 1,000 pages, but I think many got well into the 700s, and they were all hardcovers too.
That said, never did we cover the entire book in a year. I think for some classes like social studies/history we may have used the same book two years in a row, but that was not common. Generally though, the textbooks covered many more subjects than the school’s curriculum, the idea being that one book could cover multiple school curricula without change. They also covered different levels of the same curriculum, such as for accelerated or remedial versions of the class. There’s also extra information on topics that may be of use to students doing research papers, or simply to be a more comprehensive collection of reference material.
Absolutely. Only sherpas could have schlepped the totality of our possessions around on any day.
I never saw this in a textbook, but I was a generation back from you and ideas about textbooks changed greatly after my time.
I’ve looked through my son’s algebra textbook, and I think I see why it’s so big. Each new idea is introduced with maybe a half page of explanation, but then there are ten pages of examples of all different kinds, many with diagrams. Then another ten pages of problems.
I can see the rationale: High school algebra is very difficult for many students, so they want to include as many ways of demonstrating the idea as they can think of, hoping that the student will get it.
I happen to have a bunch of language textbooks from my, my wife’s, and my kids’ high school years (just in case we need to go back and relearn everything?) They’re all for a single year, and every one of them weighs two pounds or more. In addition, my wife had to lug around a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid for one of her Latin classes, in addition to the regular Latin textbook, while I was carrying dictionaries along with my spoken language books. Throw in a typical high school math book, science book, social studies book, and whatever novel we were reading for honors English. That’s five classes, I’m not counting the sixth class, which was either an elective or a “practical art” class like typing, but they had books, as well.
Then we needed to stash our gym clothes, band instruments, rain/cold weather gear, and many of us brought lunch from home instead of buying it. And because of baby boom overcrowding, some years we had to share a full-length locker.
Instead of bookbags or backpacks, we should have been carrying rolling suitcases.
Not any time I was in there. It was strictly smoking and hanging out, as far as I could tell.