Forget The Textbooks

It was an inevitable revolution to hit schools. The age of technology may officially have hit American education this year as students at Empire High School in Vail, Arizona arrived at school and told they would not be receiving any textbooks this school year. No books..none. Instead, the school issued each student his or her own i Book, those Apple laptop computers. Thus, Empire High School became our first public school to eliminate textbooks in favor of computers. It sounds like a natural progression to me.
Kids today are far more interested and friendly towards computers than books, so why not make computers the text rather than just supplemental media? In the U.S last year approximately 600 school districts tried pilot programs to give their kids laptops as an adjunct to their texts. So far, all are still using those computers as supplemental resources, but it is likely that the text books will be phased out completely and replaced by the laptop as they age and are retired. Most publishers of the textbooks school use also already offer digital formats to use in computers. Schools also use subscription services and free web resources. My own school district has a pilot program of E School for kids too ill to attend classes. they are given a complete course schedule to complete on-line.
At Empire High students get material via the school wireless network, which is filtered to limit what can be downloaded on campus. It also controls chat room visits and instant messaging that might distract the kids. When doing homework the Empire students can turn it in online and a web program checks to verify the assignment was not plagiarized.
So far the students say they like the change- no books to carry around, papers to file and hold on to. Also, any student who objected to the textbook less school model was allowed to transfer to a traditional textbook model system. Oh, books are not completely gone at Empire. There is a library filled with them and instructors often assign outside readings from the selection.
'I think I never did see Something so wonderful as a tree' I believe that's what poet Joyce Kilmer wrote in her classic poem 'Trees". It praised the beauty of trees and how they make our lives better by injecting beauty into it. But I think Diane Kaiser, 57, of Freemont, California may have gone over the edge the other day, far past what Joyce Kilmer meant in her poem.
Diane was so upset that tree trimmers from Pacific Gas & Exploration were going to trim away branches of Diane's trees, that she was arrested with assault with a deadly weapon, theft and resisting arrest- all in the name of saving those branches from the chain saws that wanted to remove them. The four tree trimmers knocked on Diane's door and called into the house but got no answer to their notification that they were here as scheduled (Diane had been notified several weeks earlier by letter that the trimmers would be there).
But Wait! Diana suddenly bolted from the back of the house, cursing and screaming. She picked up several rocks and began throwing them at the workers, picked up a tree trimmer's chain saw and pointed it at them. This caused three of them to flee and the fourth to scurry up one of Diane's trees in an attempt to escape. Police were summoned and Diane was arrested and charged.
My advice to Diane is to either plead guilty and ask the court for mercy or find another tree, climb it and hide.