My school bag weighs three pounds more than my cat does, and my cat weighs 15 pounds. It seems like we have far too much pressure on our backs because there is so much pressure on our brains.

The heaviest books in my bag right now are the algebra and chemistry textbooks and the chem workbook. I also have notebooks for three subjects, a Japanese workbook, a folder which holds many of my papers, a small English book, a calculator, and a few pencils.

Backpacks (especially those that weigh more than 18 pounds) put undue weight on our backs, and our posture doesn’t get any better. In fact, backpacks make you shorter, which explains why the subbies who wear them are so short.

All kidding aside, the traditional backpack isn’t the most comfortable way to transport books. As a subbie, I used an airport-style pullbag whose handles broke halfway through the year. The wear and tear of my first year at Uni bore large holes in the bag, and now it rests in the garage, untouched for more than a year. Pullbags were not any fun to drag through the snow, nor were they fun to carry up two flights of stairs.

There's an easy way to reduce the load, however. During the day, instead of carrying a full backpack with all my books, I only take the materials required for a specific class. There’s no need to take your math book to history, so why bother? Just store your books in your locker — that’s why we have them. At the end of the day, you can pack up the books you need and head home.

A more potent solution to the problem would be to make all academic work computer-based. Textbooks could be copied online in the same way the Encyclopedia Britannica is put online. Of course, all students would have to have a laptop, and there would be no margin for computer error. Still, with some math classes being moved to Siebel to allow for the access of tablet PCs, such a future may not be entirely out of the question.

For now, though, we’ll have to drag home our backpacks. But we don’t need to take them to every class.