Did a google search and they are a thing. Saw a AC/DC backpack fairly close to what Shannon picked.
Indeed. Those are wonderful bands for children. Like Kiss’s classic ode to back door lovin’, “Nothin’ to Lose”
Or AC/DC celebrating their headlong plunge toward The Bad Place with “Highway to Hell.”
It’s baffling to me how some things wind up considered appropriate for children. Like RoboCop. I love the original RoboCop and think it’s a great science-fiction story with wonderfully satirical elements. What I don’t understand is how it became a Saturday morning cartoon and a range of toys. For that to work, some psychos would have had to been showing RoboCop to children.
Now, back to the comic: The Beatles? That’s like sending one of us geezers to grade six with a Benny Goodman Orchestra backpack.
Well, really, if you listen with modern ears, “Nothin’ to Lose” is even worse. Not just about the but secks but features the lyric “She didn’t want to do it/ But she did anyway”. Stay classy, Kiss.
back in the sixties they laughed at my Nat Shilkret lunchbox.
Child-sized?
I’ve seen a bookmark at my elementary school that has the ACDC font, but says READ instead.
Earlier this year when delivering my kids to school, I saw a 5 or 6-year-old girl wearing a black T-shirt inscribed with “F***ING AWESOME” in enormous white letters. That a (German) parent would dress a kid in such a shirt might be linguistic ignorance or simple idiocy (presumably the latter), but what bothered me even more is that someone would produce a shirt like that in kindergarten sizes.
P.S.When my son noticed it, I mentioned that a shirt like that in an American school would probably get the kid sent to the principal, or home for a change of attire.
In an American school, Kilby, it might get the parents a visit from Child Services.
@Singapore Bill: Kiss was never classy.
And I can never think about “Highway to Hell” without remembering that the head of the Dominican order (I think, might have been the Benedictines) about 15 years ago loved to play electric guitar and that was his favorite song to play.
Perhaps the 6-yo kid Kilby saw came from and was proud of a certain Austrian village whose road signs regularly got stolen until made theft-resistant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking,_Austria
When hubby was elementary school librarian, during a parent visit, the PARENT was wearing a shirt with a HUGE marijuana leaf . . . he was talked to by the principal about setting a bad example for the kids.
In my time as high school library assistant, I’ve seen MANY instances of ‘inappropriate’ clothing that I couldn’t believe the parents bought and/or let their child come to school in. IF there was even a parent/adult in the house/awake when the child left for school. Which is not to say that the student didn’t buy the shirt him/herself and/or put it on AFTER leaving the house.
I would guess that this particular store doesn’t group their backpacks by audience, so the AC/DC and KISS bags may not be targeted specifically at 6-year-olds.
@ Powers, a six-year-old’s backpack is usually tiny. You can tell by the size that it was meant for kidlings.
@ Kilby, did the shirt use the asterisks, or write out the full word? Either way, it’s f***ing stupid.
@ Chak – It printed with all seven of its (CAPITAL) letters, and in English. It’s worth mentioning that many Germans are familiar with the term (mostly from American movies), but because it is a “foreign” word, it simply does not register the same amount of offensiveness for the natives here. For instance, I have heard it more than once on prime time German TV. On the other hand, there is a “native German” equivalent: simply change the “U” to an “I”. The same (German) comedians who have no problem with dropping multiple (English) “F-bombs” on late night German TV would never dream of igniting the corresponding German weapon. Unlike the English term, the German word is felt to be really offensive, and I have never heard it on broadcast television here.
Thanks, Kilby! It honestly didn’t occur to me that as a foreign word, it wouldn’t carry the same, or even any, impact.
Wasn’t it the Beatles who sang “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees?”
I’m just disappointed that the Pearls Before Swine backpack isn’t actually A Thing, because I would totally buy one.
We’ve talked about this before, but Germans have a false understanding of the severity of the F-word in English. It gets dropped so often in American movies, that they think it’s far more common than it is.
Heh…my only real memory of KISS is hearing “Beth” on the radio from time to time.
Robocop Saturday morning cartoon? There was a RAMBO Saturday morning cartoon. A Toxic Avenger Saturday morning cartoon. An Attack of the Killer Tomatoes Saturday morning cartoon which was based on the SEQUEL, the even more obscure Revenge of the Killer Tomatoes.
I mean, there was a stretch there with an amazing number of inappropriate Saturday morning cartoons. And I was the perfect age for them and loved them all. I suspect, if I ever find them again, I will discover that the majority of them will have been regrettable garbage.
I never saw a Nat Shilkret lunchbox, but I wouldn’t have minded a Leonard Bernstein lunchbox if I could have found one. Or at least a Peter Carl Goldmark lunchbox.
Re: foreign language use of English swears… It’s pretty common in Asia. Aside from the common use of bad language on kids clothes, I’ve seen one Japanese kids’ show (the Go-Busters season of Super Sentai) where one of the characters had ‘oh, shit!’ as his catch phrase.
In kindergarten it was half day, so lunch was eaten at home.
We then moved to “Long Guyland”. The school I went to had not really been prepared for the onslaught of new students from the sub developments and did not have a big enough lunch room for everyone to use for lunch. If one had “cold lunch” (lunch from home) one had to eat in their classroom. (And if one was a “walker” they had to go home for lunch and could not eat lunch at school.) So I got a lunch box for lunch in first grade – rectangular, metal, blue with travel pictures on it. Second grade I had one that was shaped like a workman’s lunch box (thermos went in top)and was made to look like a fire station. (Not sure if I picked a “boys” lunchbox, or we waited so long that it was all that was available.) The thermos would break loose and squash the peanut butter (no jelly) half sandwich (crusts cut off) I had daily for lunch. After that the new “cold lunchroom” was open for use and I brought lunch in a paper bag.
I had “hot lunch” (school prepared/sold lunch) a few times the first couple of years, but it was not a good idea for me. I am a picky eater and one was required to eat all foods on the tray. I actually had an argument with a lunch lady at least once that she could not insist that I eat the dessert as cake is not something that is good for one, and dessert should only be rarely eaten and only at dinner. (Mom’s brain washing to keep me from constantly asking for same.) If the salad had not had dressing, I would have eaten it – but I understood why they thought I should eat that.
Then there was the glass of soda in the middle of the table when they had Chinese food for lunch and I could not figure out who was suppose to drink it. It was not for some years that I was told or figured out that it was soy sauce. :-)
I hate to disappoint everyone who is saying that little kids wear smaller backpacks, but that’s one of those things that’s true in theory, not in practice. Lots of kids wear oversized backpacks to my daughter’s school. (Presumably some of this is connected to the “don’t have a tiny bag” guideline, which isn’t spelled out very well, but some parents just don’t bother.)
And I see no reason why AC/DC wouldn’t sell in kids bags. Lots of kids would put their favourite band on their knapsack rather than the characters from the latest half-hour toy commercial. (Not to mention that the small bags are including kids who have never been to school yet, so a lot of them wouldn’t know who the currently hot characters are, and would be much more familiar with a band they listen to.)
DemetriosX, given the Germans’ obsession with “Scheiße,” it’s hard to believe they’re even AWARE OF any other obscenities: I recently saw a German movie that used the word so many times in the first few minutes, Robert DiNiro called the producer to complain about the language.
I remember being introduced to Kiss via lunchboxes and posters in 3rd grade by my classmates, so give or take a few years of age, I wouldn’t be surprised. Of course at that time the bands were more current, so…
@Bill: For Germans under the age of around 50, Scheiße isn’t really all that strong. I’ve even heard it in films aimed at middle grade and up kids. It’s maybe a little stronger than “damn”, not as strong as the English equivalent. While German is great for personal invective, it’s crap for generalized swearing if you’re not from the Catholic south.
To go off on another tangent – WHY are backpacks used anyway? Are there no studies that show damage to the kids’ bones, during the formative years? WE used to carry our books, etc., on our hips, or leave what we didn’t need in lockers . . . when did the backpack trend begin?
AND, as adjunct to that, do students still get their own books? In the school where I worked for 30+ years, there was a class set of textbooks, and books did not usually go home with the students. If this is now the norm, what’s IN all those heavily-loaded backpacks I see kids trudging along with (please pardon the dangling participle, nitpickers)?
Bill @ 30
From that YouTube page: “I’m kidding, this is an animation which I made, thanks to everyone for the attention and praise it has received.”
Oh, I knew that.
Give it another few years, and all textbooks, homework and assignments will be on the kids’ tablets.
. . . and there goes the backpack industry! However, that will be difficult, as not all parents can afford tablets, or computers. A great educational divide, which I saw already when I retired in 2005. There was for a while the idea of loaning out computers/tablets, but I don’t think that caught on . . . too many went missing, I’m sure.
They’re getting cheaper and cheaper to the point where they’ll be cheaper than textbooks. An entry-level Kindle retails for $40. I can imagine Amazon offering them to schools for $30 or less.
And textbooks keep rising in price.
It’ll be interesting to see how that all shakes out. Textbooks are not usually stolen; kindles, tables, etc., are very prone to being stolen. (Am I a pessimist? No, I consider myself to be a realist, having worked with middle/high school students for 30 years, and hubby having worked with elementary/middle school students for those 30 years also. We both worked in what would be considered, euphemistically, low-income neighborhood schools.)
I think the intrinsic value of a stolen Kindle will eventually reach nil. And the savings over textbooks (which also get lost, and low-income families won’t be able to pay for THEIR replacement) would more than compensate for any loss.
I would choose Kindke over iPad because they’re much cheaper AND they gave fewer recreational features.
Even now, people are advised to carry Kindles rather than iPads in area where they might be robbed of your iPad.
Most of the studies I’ve seen in the media talk about dangers from heavy backpacks, not backpacks in general. And I’m fairly convinced that it’s better for them to wear a backpack than to carry everything in a bag in their hands. (I’ve never seen anything contrasting backpacks with other bags, just backpacks vs rolling bags). I suppose that’s part of the problem of a backpack – you can easily carry too much weight. But I’m not trusting my kid to bring minimum three things every day (even less so if you’ve got a kid who’s bussed).
There are some serious questions about the usefulness of homework at all. It seems that it may just be busywork to make parents think their children are doing something.
While I could see the value of putting textbooks on a tablet-style device, they’d need to be fairly powerful and large. They need to be fast enough you can flip back and forth between pages quickly and large enough to display charts, tables, and graphs fully and legibly. It probably won’t do much to reduce the cost of textbooks either. The paper and ink is by far the lowest cost involved in producing a textbook. I could also imagine that, if it doesn’t require to committing to a warehouse full of books, publishers could be issuing new editions every year just by making small changes to the files and requiring payment for the updates.
CIDU Bill, Is there a Saturday Morning cartoon about lunchboxes?
Think of the merchandising…
A good aspect of going to non-print media (other than saving trees, or whatever textbooks are made of these days) would be loosening Texas’ grip on deciding just WHAT textbooks get used and just WHAT is in them.
@ Andréa – The (public) elementary school that my kids attend here in Germany has an excellent rule prohibiting any use of mobile phones whatsoever. Violation are grounds for immediate confiscation, with subsequent repatriation to the parent, not the student.
At the end of the year, the Main Office had BOXES of cell phones that were never claimed . . . and we had only 300 students.
@Kilby: Have you read Achtung Baby by Sara Zaske, and if so, how does it compare to your experience?
My daughter is a high school freshman this year, and she seems to have most of her books (definitely her math book) on the school issued laptop. My understanding is that this will be her personal laptop throughout high school, and I think she’ll get to keep it when she graduates – not that a 4 year old laptop will be worth too much by then. It’s kind of nice for her to only have to bring the laptop home, and not a huge stack of books.
If they asked me — and they never did, nobody ever does — kids would be allowed to “test out” of homework: if you got an A on your last test or quiz, you don’t need homework.
Of course, once everything’s on a laptop, maybe the program would do just that. Simple enough to do, and nobody needs to know what any other student has been exempted from.
The problem with “testing out of homework” is that the tests are usually based on prior homework, so the test results are not necessarily indicative of the students knowledge of the next set of material. Leaving such a decision to a computer program would be insane: that requires a programmer who understands the material as well as (or better) than the teacher, and who can implement a decision tree without error (and without any contact with the class in question). I would prefer to trust the teacher’s evaluation.
@ larK – I’ve never even heard of “Achtung Baby“, but I just added it to my shopping cart. I’m not sure that I agree with the hypothesis that “German” methods are “better”. They are certainly different, but it all depends on what works best for each family in their respective environment. In any case, the reader comments make it sound like it will be an enjoyable book.
And giving the phones to the parents never worked ’cause the parents WANTED the kids to be accessible AT ALL TIMES, for all sorts of reasons (“I may have to tell him to go to his auntie’s house after school” or “She may have to pick up bread on the way home”), so that was an exercise in futility.
@Kilby – Specifically thinking of math (because that is the homework I remember the most as being pointless and annoying), you could easily have a test that determines if a student knows their times tables well enough, or any other thing where the homework is 40 questions where all they do is change which numbers are in. If you can pass a basic test quickly enough, you get to skip the “do lots of these questions so you memorise it” assignments. (I don’t think that would work for something like spelling, where the homework practices more than just what is getting tested though.)
@ Andréa – I never thought of it that way before, but it is entirely possible that part of the purpose of the prohibition was to discourage helicopter parenting. However, as far as I have been able to determine, the de-facto rule prohibits use, and not necessarily “possession”. I am sure that some of the older kids keep a telephone in their backpacks, but as long as they have it muted and do not pull it out during shool hours, nobody is about to search for it.
@ Christine – I’m sure that someone could build such a system, as long as the questions were simple quantitative items. I just don’t think it would be worth the effort. Any teacher who grades a math assignment sheet could come to the same conclusion. On the other hand, many math assignments train the brain in more ways than just rote memorization. With that in mind, the best result of such a test would not be “You did so well that I’m going to let you skip your next homework assignment“, but rather “If this is getting boring, how about taking a shot at some more interesting (but tougher) material?“
Wendy, does the school handle the tech support and maintenance? I mean things like software updates. Also damage repairs.
(Woops, I was trying to make a new paragraph but the Enter posted it.)
I was involved with what a school called one-to-one Mac project, and they had an ambitious policy of doing the updates etc, plus having a few day-loaners to let a student use when their computer was in the Tech Center for repairs.
One of the least-favorite aspects of working at Megacorp (back when I was a productive member of society) was the constant training. Most of it was the same year-to-year. Some modules did allow testing out of the course. You’d take the test first and only need to go through the course if you failed. However, you could often get the course material as an Excel file (searchable). That made the test easier.
Seems to me any “do this after school” message can wait until the kid gets his phone back after school. I guarantee, every kid will boot up as soon as they get their phone back (the same way airline passengers check their messages the moment the plane lands)
@ Bill – At our school, the kid does not get the phone back, the kid’s parent has to pick it up from the office.
AND IT’S ANOTHER BACK-TO-SCHOOL SHOPPING COMIC!! (From who-knows how long ago.)
Andréa, you may have missed the recaps of how to make an image show up embedded in a comment.
1. Paste or type just the URL, don’t try to use an HTML “A” tag or “IMG” tag, etc.
2. It should be a direct URL, not involving search or lookup in a database overtly — basically, don’t use one with a question mark. (This is not to say it can’t have a long string encoding a location.)
3. It should have a full URL path to the image filename, not just to a page containing the image you want. And the filename part must be recognizable by name as an image type, based on the filename extension — usually “.gif” or “.png” or “.jpg”.
4. In some special cases, the URL you come up with may end with a filename, as desired, but it lacks the explicit image extension. In some cases, you can just ADD that on! But then paste the edited url in a new browser window location bar, and make sure it works.
For the Cathy you reference, when I go to the page and right-click to get the image URL, (in this case I went further and did “view page source” then just visually scanned for a url), it comes up as “”https://assets.amuniversal.com/524739e040b901300e49001dd8b71c47” . But we want an image type filename extension, so we modify it to “https://assets.amuniversal.com/524739e040b901300e49001dd8b71c47.gif ”
5. Possibly, but not confirmed, the URL you paste might need to be on a line by itself, and be the last thing in your comment.
On that basis, I will paste that last altered URL below, without the quotations of course, and let’s see if it embeds the image!
(Of course, it’s fine to do as you ended up, paste the URL to the page, and WP will make it a live link. The more elaborate system is just if you think it will work better in the conversation to have the image itself and not expect people to click.)
I had done it the ‘right’ way, and it showed up on my screen, then disappeared next time I looked. Thanks for the recap, tho . . .
I think the Sunday ones are too small to read.
Wendy – to me a 4 year old laptop is new. The one I am using I bought in 2005 and my newer laptop for work I bought in 2009 – both are Win XP, though husband is in the middle of making me a get a new laptop.
I don’t carry a purse. As a general rule, my opinion is that if it does not fit in my (front 2) jeans pockets, I don’t need it. The exceptions to this rule is when I go to a client I carry a briefcase and some travel.
Long ago in the days when one had to carry several large, heavy batteries, a huge camera, and a VHS recorder to record one’s trip (or anything else) on VHS. I carried a large pocketbook so Robert could put all the extraneous items for this project in the pocketbook. (I have been stopped, long before the current searches of what one has, and my pocketbook gone through and asked what it is in it and I have no idea other than it is heavy and Robert put it there.) When going on a trip to Montreal some decades ago I came up with the idea of using a day pack, back pack instead of the pocketbook (long before anyone was using a backpack as a pocketbook substitute) – what a wonderful thing to have. It is much more comfortable to carry whatever he needs me to carry with the weight spread across my back. In more recent years I use clear ziploc type bags to organize what is in it, as it is easily examined if we go through security. Mostly these days I will bring the backpack if we will not have easy and quick access back to the car/RV while we are touring somewhere. Husband sometimes has low blood sugar so I keep OJ and similar for him in the backpack when we cannot quickly get back to the car for them – and things like books which are purchased along the way. The RV has a spare one as one trip I forgot to pack mine.
My 2013 laptop is, I fear, reaching the end of the line. I’m hanging onto it for as long as I can, though, because it remembers all my passwords.
Bill – I am copying my passwords that I use on my laptop to my newer (2009) laptop, just in case. I also have them in code in my cell phone – current and former.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Sychronous, and much funnier . . . https://www.gocomics.com/culdesac/2018/09/02
I had a KISS lunchbox when I was in kindergarten.
Is that Puddles on the backpack Brad is holding?
Did a google search and they are a thing. Saw a AC/DC backpack fairly close to what Shannon picked.
Indeed. Those are wonderful bands for children. Like Kiss’s classic ode to back door lovin’, “Nothin’ to Lose”
Or AC/DC celebrating their headlong plunge toward The Bad Place with “Highway to Hell.”
It’s baffling to me how some things wind up considered appropriate for children. Like RoboCop. I love the original RoboCop and think it’s a great science-fiction story with wonderfully satirical elements. What I don’t understand is how it became a Saturday morning cartoon and a range of toys. For that to work, some psychos would have had to been showing RoboCop to children.
Now, back to the comic: The Beatles? That’s like sending one of us geezers to grade six with a Benny Goodman Orchestra backpack.
Well, really, if you listen with modern ears, “Nothin’ to Lose” is even worse. Not just about the but secks but features the lyric “She didn’t want to do it/ But she did anyway”. Stay classy, Kiss.
back in the sixties they laughed at my Nat Shilkret lunchbox.
Child-sized?
I’ve seen a bookmark at my elementary school that has the ACDC font, but says READ instead.
Earlier this year when delivering my kids to school, I saw a 5 or 6-year-old girl wearing a black T-shirt inscribed with “F***ING AWESOME” in enormous white letters. That a (German) parent would dress a kid in such a shirt might be linguistic ignorance or simple idiocy (presumably the latter), but what bothered me even more is that someone would produce a shirt like that in kindergarten sizes.
P.S.When my son noticed it, I mentioned that a shirt like that in an American school would probably get the kid sent to the principal, or home for a change of attire.
In an American school, Kilby, it might get the parents a visit from Child Services.
@Singapore Bill: Kiss was never classy.
And I can never think about “Highway to Hell” without remembering that the head of the Dominican order (I think, might have been the Benedictines) about 15 years ago loved to play electric guitar and that was his favorite song to play.
Perhaps the 6-yo kid Kilby saw came from and was proud of a certain Austrian village whose road signs regularly got stolen until made theft-resistant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking,_Austria
When hubby was elementary school librarian, during a parent visit, the PARENT was wearing a shirt with a HUGE marijuana leaf . . . he was talked to by the principal about setting a bad example for the kids.
In my time as high school library assistant, I’ve seen MANY instances of ‘inappropriate’ clothing that I couldn’t believe the parents bought and/or let their child come to school in. IF there was even a parent/adult in the house/awake when the child left for school. Which is not to say that the student didn’t buy the shirt him/herself and/or put it on AFTER leaving the house.
I would guess that this particular store doesn’t group their backpacks by audience, so the AC/DC and KISS bags may not be targeted specifically at 6-year-olds.
@ Powers, a six-year-old’s backpack is usually tiny. You can tell by the size that it was meant for kidlings.
@ Kilby, did the shirt use the asterisks, or write out the full word? Either way, it’s f***ing stupid.
@ Chak – It printed with all seven of its (CAPITAL) letters, and in English. It’s worth mentioning that many Germans are familiar with the term (mostly from American movies), but because it is a “foreign” word, it simply does not register the same amount of offensiveness for the natives here. For instance, I have heard it more than once on prime time German TV. On the other hand, there is a “native German” equivalent: simply change the “U” to an “I”. The same (German) comedians who have no problem with dropping multiple (English) “F-bombs” on late night German TV would never dream of igniting the corresponding German weapon. Unlike the English term, the German word is felt to be really offensive, and I have never heard it on broadcast television here.
Thanks, Kilby! It honestly didn’t occur to me that as a foreign word, it wouldn’t carry the same, or even any, impact.
Wasn’t it the Beatles who sang “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees?”
I’m just disappointed that the Pearls Before Swine backpack isn’t actually A Thing, because I would totally buy one.
We’ve talked about this before, but Germans have a false understanding of the severity of the F-word in English. It gets dropped so often in American movies, that they think it’s far more common than it is.
Heh…my only real memory of KISS is hearing “Beth” on the radio from time to time.
Robocop Saturday morning cartoon? There was a RAMBO Saturday morning cartoon. A Toxic Avenger Saturday morning cartoon. An Attack of the Killer Tomatoes Saturday morning cartoon which was based on the SEQUEL, the even more obscure Revenge of the Killer Tomatoes.
I mean, there was a stretch there with an amazing number of inappropriate Saturday morning cartoons. And I was the perfect age for them and loved them all. I suspect, if I ever find them again, I will discover that the majority of them will have been regrettable garbage.
I never saw a Nat Shilkret lunchbox, but I wouldn’t have minded a Leonard Bernstein lunchbox if I could have found one. Or at least a Peter Carl Goldmark lunchbox.
Re: foreign language use of English swears… It’s pretty common in Asia. Aside from the common use of bad language on kids clothes, I’ve seen one Japanese kids’ show (the Go-Busters season of Super Sentai) where one of the characters had ‘oh, shit!’ as his catch phrase.
In kindergarten it was half day, so lunch was eaten at home.
We then moved to “Long Guyland”. The school I went to had not really been prepared for the onslaught of new students from the sub developments and did not have a big enough lunch room for everyone to use for lunch. If one had “cold lunch” (lunch from home) one had to eat in their classroom. (And if one was a “walker” they had to go home for lunch and could not eat lunch at school.) So I got a lunch box for lunch in first grade – rectangular, metal, blue with travel pictures on it. Second grade I had one that was shaped like a workman’s lunch box (thermos went in top)and was made to look like a fire station. (Not sure if I picked a “boys” lunchbox, or we waited so long that it was all that was available.) The thermos would break loose and squash the peanut butter (no jelly) half sandwich (crusts cut off) I had daily for lunch. After that the new “cold lunchroom” was open for use and I brought lunch in a paper bag.
I had “hot lunch” (school prepared/sold lunch) a few times the first couple of years, but it was not a good idea for me. I am a picky eater and one was required to eat all foods on the tray. I actually had an argument with a lunch lady at least once that she could not insist that I eat the dessert as cake is not something that is good for one, and dessert should only be rarely eaten and only at dinner. (Mom’s brain washing to keep me from constantly asking for same.) If the salad had not had dressing, I would have eaten it – but I understood why they thought I should eat that.
Then there was the glass of soda in the middle of the table when they had Chinese food for lunch and I could not figure out who was suppose to drink it. It was not for some years that I was told or figured out that it was soy sauce. :-)
I hate to disappoint everyone who is saying that little kids wear smaller backpacks, but that’s one of those things that’s true in theory, not in practice. Lots of kids wear oversized backpacks to my daughter’s school. (Presumably some of this is connected to the “don’t have a tiny bag” guideline, which isn’t spelled out very well, but some parents just don’t bother.)
And I see no reason why AC/DC wouldn’t sell in kids bags. Lots of kids would put their favourite band on their knapsack rather than the characters from the latest half-hour toy commercial. (Not to mention that the small bags are including kids who have never been to school yet, so a lot of them wouldn’t know who the currently hot characters are, and would be much more familiar with a band they listen to.)
DemetriosX, given the Germans’ obsession with “Scheiße,” it’s hard to believe they’re even AWARE OF any other obscenities: I recently saw a German movie that used the word so many times in the first few minutes, Robert DiNiro called the producer to complain about the language.
Singapore Bill, anything can become a Saturday morning cartoon: https://youtu.be/YDDHHrt6l4w?t=12s
I remember being introduced to Kiss via lunchboxes and posters in 3rd grade by my classmates, so give or take a few years of age, I wouldn’t be surprised. Of course at that time the bands were more current, so…
@Bill: For Germans under the age of around 50, Scheiße isn’t really all that strong. I’ve even heard it in films aimed at middle grade and up kids. It’s maybe a little stronger than “damn”, not as strong as the English equivalent. While German is great for personal invective, it’s crap for generalized swearing if you’re not from the Catholic south.
To go off on another tangent – WHY are backpacks used anyway? Are there no studies that show damage to the kids’ bones, during the formative years? WE used to carry our books, etc., on our hips, or leave what we didn’t need in lockers . . . when did the backpack trend begin?
AND, as adjunct to that, do students still get their own books? In the school where I worked for 30+ years, there was a class set of textbooks, and books did not usually go home with the students. If this is now the norm, what’s IN all those heavily-loaded backpacks I see kids trudging along with (please pardon the dangling participle, nitpickers)?
Bill @ 30
From that YouTube page: “I’m kidding, this is an animation which I made, thanks to everyone for the attention and praise it has received.”
Oh, I knew that.
Give it another few years, and all textbooks, homework and assignments will be on the kids’ tablets.
. . . and there goes the backpack industry! However, that will be difficult, as not all parents can afford tablets, or computers. A great educational divide, which I saw already when I retired in 2005. There was for a while the idea of loaning out computers/tablets, but I don’t think that caught on . . . too many went missing, I’m sure.
They’re getting cheaper and cheaper to the point where they’ll be cheaper than textbooks. An entry-level Kindle retails for $40. I can imagine Amazon offering them to schools for $30 or less.
And textbooks keep rising in price.
It’ll be interesting to see how that all shakes out. Textbooks are not usually stolen; kindles, tables, etc., are very prone to being stolen. (Am I a pessimist? No, I consider myself to be a realist, having worked with middle/high school students for 30 years, and hubby having worked with elementary/middle school students for those 30 years also. We both worked in what would be considered, euphemistically, low-income neighborhood schools.)
I think the intrinsic value of a stolen Kindle will eventually reach nil. And the savings over textbooks (which also get lost, and low-income families won’t be able to pay for THEIR replacement) would more than compensate for any loss.
I would choose Kindke over iPad because they’re much cheaper AND they gave fewer recreational features.
Even now, people are advised to carry Kindles rather than iPads in area where they might be robbed of your iPad.
Most of the studies I’ve seen in the media talk about dangers from heavy backpacks, not backpacks in general. And I’m fairly convinced that it’s better for them to wear a backpack than to carry everything in a bag in their hands. (I’ve never seen anything contrasting backpacks with other bags, just backpacks vs rolling bags). I suppose that’s part of the problem of a backpack – you can easily carry too much weight. But I’m not trusting my kid to bring minimum three things every day (even less so if you’ve got a kid who’s bussed).
There are some serious questions about the usefulness of homework at all. It seems that it may just be busywork to make parents think their children are doing something.
http://time.com/4466390/homework-debate-research/
While I could see the value of putting textbooks on a tablet-style device, they’d need to be fairly powerful and large. They need to be fast enough you can flip back and forth between pages quickly and large enough to display charts, tables, and graphs fully and legibly. It probably won’t do much to reduce the cost of textbooks either. The paper and ink is by far the lowest cost involved in producing a textbook. I could also imagine that, if it doesn’t require to committing to a warehouse full of books, publishers could be issuing new editions every year just by making small changes to the files and requiring payment for the updates.
CIDU Bill, Is there a Saturday Morning cartoon about lunchboxes?
Think of the merchandising…
A good aspect of going to non-print media (other than saving trees, or whatever textbooks are made of these days) would be loosening Texas’ grip on deciding just WHAT textbooks get used and just WHAT is in them.
. . . and French students won’t be able to use their phones – IF THIS LAW SUCCEEDS, and I doubt that it will . . . https://www.yahoo.com/gma/french-kids-head-back-school-without-phones-160307415–abc-news-topstories.html
@ Andréa – The (public) elementary school that my kids attend here in Germany has an excellent rule prohibiting any use of mobile phones whatsoever. Violation are grounds for immediate confiscation, with subsequent repatriation to the parent, not the student.
At the end of the year, the Main Office had BOXES of cell phones that were never claimed . . . and we had only 300 students.
https://www.gocomics.com/overboard/2018/09/06
@Kilby: Have you read Achtung Baby by Sara Zaske, and if so, how does it compare to your experience?
My daughter is a high school freshman this year, and she seems to have most of her books (definitely her math book) on the school issued laptop. My understanding is that this will be her personal laptop throughout high school, and I think she’ll get to keep it when she graduates – not that a 4 year old laptop will be worth too much by then. It’s kind of nice for her to only have to bring the laptop home, and not a huge stack of books.
If they asked me — and they never did, nobody ever does — kids would be allowed to “test out” of homework: if you got an A on your last test or quiz, you don’t need homework.
Of course, once everything’s on a laptop, maybe the program would do just that. Simple enough to do, and nobody needs to know what any other student has been exempted from.
The problem with “testing out of homework” is that the tests are usually based on prior homework, so the test results are not necessarily indicative of the students knowledge of the next set of material. Leaving such a decision to a computer program would be insane: that requires a programmer who understands the material as well as (or better) than the teacher, and who can implement a decision tree without error (and without any contact with the class in question). I would prefer to trust the teacher’s evaluation.
@ larK – I’ve never even heard of “Achtung Baby“, but I just added it to my shopping cart. I’m not sure that I agree with the hypothesis that “German” methods are “better”. They are certainly different, but it all depends on what works best for each family in their respective environment. In any case, the reader comments make it sound like it will be an enjoyable book.
And giving the phones to the parents never worked ’cause the parents WANTED the kids to be accessible AT ALL TIMES, for all sorts of reasons (“I may have to tell him to go to his auntie’s house after school” or “She may have to pick up bread on the way home”), so that was an exercise in futility.
@Kilby – Specifically thinking of math (because that is the homework I remember the most as being pointless and annoying), you could easily have a test that determines if a student knows their times tables well enough, or any other thing where the homework is 40 questions where all they do is change which numbers are in. If you can pass a basic test quickly enough, you get to skip the “do lots of these questions so you memorise it” assignments. (I don’t think that would work for something like spelling, where the homework practices more than just what is getting tested though.)
@ Andréa – I never thought of it that way before, but it is entirely possible that part of the purpose of the prohibition was to discourage helicopter parenting. However, as far as I have been able to determine, the de-facto rule prohibits use, and not necessarily “possession”. I am sure that some of the older kids keep a telephone in their backpacks, but as long as they have it muted and do not pull it out during shool hours, nobody is about to search for it.
@ Christine – I’m sure that someone could build such a system, as long as the questions were simple quantitative items. I just don’t think it would be worth the effort. Any teacher who grades a math assignment sheet could come to the same conclusion. On the other hand, many math assignments train the brain in more ways than just rote memorization. With that in mind, the best result of such a test would not be “You did so well that I’m going to let you skip your next homework assignment“, but rather “If this is getting boring, how about taking a shot at some more interesting (but tougher) material?“
Wendy, does the school handle the tech support and maintenance? I mean things like software updates. Also damage repairs.
(Woops, I was trying to make a new paragraph but the Enter posted it.)
I was involved with what a school called one-to-one Mac project, and they had an ambitious policy of doing the updates etc, plus having a few day-loaners to let a student use when their computer was in the Tech Center for repairs.
One of the least-favorite aspects of working at Megacorp (back when I was a productive member of society) was the constant training. Most of it was the same year-to-year. Some modules did allow testing out of the course. You’d take the test first and only need to go through the course if you failed. However, you could often get the course material as an Excel file (searchable). That made the test easier.
Seems to me any “do this after school” message can wait until the kid gets his phone back after school. I guarantee, every kid will boot up as soon as they get their phone back (the same way airline passengers check their messages the moment the plane lands)
@ Bill – At our school, the kid does not get the phone back, the kid’s parent has to pick it up from the office.
AND IT’S ANOTHER BACK-TO-SCHOOL SHOPPING COMIC!! (From who-knows how long ago.)
Well, that didn’t work as I thought it would . . .
https://www.gocomics.com/cathy/2018/09/09
Andréa, you may have missed the recaps of how to make an image show up embedded in a comment.
1. Paste or type just the URL, don’t try to use an HTML “A” tag or “IMG” tag, etc.
2. It should be a direct URL, not involving search or lookup in a database overtly — basically, don’t use one with a question mark. (This is not to say it can’t have a long string encoding a location.)
3. It should have a full URL path to the image filename, not just to a page containing the image you want. And the filename part must be recognizable by name as an image type, based on the filename extension — usually “.gif” or “.png” or “.jpg”.
4. In some special cases, the URL you come up with may end with a filename, as desired, but it lacks the explicit image extension. In some cases, you can just ADD that on! But then paste the edited url in a new browser window location bar, and make sure it works.
For the Cathy you reference, when I go to the page and right-click to get the image URL, (in this case I went further and did “view page source” then just visually scanned for a url), it comes up as “”https://assets.amuniversal.com/524739e040b901300e49001dd8b71c47” . But we want an image type filename extension, so we modify it to “https://assets.amuniversal.com/524739e040b901300e49001dd8b71c47.gif ”
5. Possibly, but not confirmed, the URL you paste might need to be on a line by itself, and be the last thing in your comment.
On that basis, I will paste that last altered URL below, without the quotations of course, and let’s see if it embeds the image!
(Of course, it’s fine to do as you ended up, paste the URL to the page, and WP will make it a live link. The more elaborate system is just if you think it will work better in the conversation to have the image itself and not expect people to click.)
I had done it the ‘right’ way, and it showed up on my screen, then disappeared next time I looked. Thanks for the recap, tho . . .
I think the Sunday ones are too small to read.
Wendy – to me a 4 year old laptop is new. The one I am using I bought in 2005 and my newer laptop for work I bought in 2009 – both are Win XP, though husband is in the middle of making me a get a new laptop.
I don’t carry a purse. As a general rule, my opinion is that if it does not fit in my (front 2) jeans pockets, I don’t need it. The exceptions to this rule is when I go to a client I carry a briefcase and some travel.
Long ago in the days when one had to carry several large, heavy batteries, a huge camera, and a VHS recorder to record one’s trip (or anything else) on VHS. I carried a large pocketbook so Robert could put all the extraneous items for this project in the pocketbook. (I have been stopped, long before the current searches of what one has, and my pocketbook gone through and asked what it is in it and I have no idea other than it is heavy and Robert put it there.) When going on a trip to Montreal some decades ago I came up with the idea of using a day pack, back pack instead of the pocketbook (long before anyone was using a backpack as a pocketbook substitute) – what a wonderful thing to have. It is much more comfortable to carry whatever he needs me to carry with the weight spread across my back. In more recent years I use clear ziploc type bags to organize what is in it, as it is easily examined if we go through security. Mostly these days I will bring the backpack if we will not have easy and quick access back to the car/RV while we are touring somewhere. Husband sometimes has low blood sugar so I keep OJ and similar for him in the backpack when we cannot quickly get back to the car for them – and things like books which are purchased along the way. The RV has a spare one as one trip I forgot to pack mine.
My 2013 laptop is, I fear, reaching the end of the line. I’m hanging onto it for as long as I can, though, because it remembers all my passwords.
Bill – I am copying my passwords that I use on my laptop to my newer (2009) laptop, just in case. I also have them in code in my cell phone – current and former.