1 That's ludicrous. First of all, if I were to move to France, China, Spain, Germany - anywhere - I would feel obligated to learn the damn language. Especially if I intended to be educated there. It amazes me that the US (a nation stereotyped and characatured as bullish and/or egocentric) wouldn't expect the same. Not only that, we're willing to severely compromise the teaching capacity of our educational institutions in an effort to lift the boon of LEARNING THE LANGUAGE OF THE NATION YOU LIVE IN to immigrants. Well, don't say we never gave ya nuthin'.

2 They shouldn't waste time limiting the number of pages, they need to limit the weight and the number of books. at the rate they're going, by the time todays generation grows up there wont be a single person with out a hunched back or scoliosis. My book bag, with out any text books- only folders, weighs 4.5 lbs. With text books? a hell of a lot more, seeing as theres a physics book, an english book, math book, and 4 history books (one on latin america, two on american history, and a third random one on a mixture of the two.

Its insane. I don't care how many pages there are, I care about the number and the weight!

3 That's bloody crazy, it's obviously a lame attempt at both lowering the weight of backpacks, and the cost of books. What's more likely to happen though is kids will be getting the Condensed version of history etc, OR be forced to have 2 or 3 books instead of 1, actually increasing the cost to the school/parent/student.

Definitely micromanagement gone bad.

4 If only there were some way we could electronically store the information on something much smaller and lighter than a book. This 'disk', if you will, would hold the entire text, be the size of one's hand, and only weigh a few ounces. Hmmmmm...or maybe we could locate it in a 'virtual' location, a 'network' or 'web' if you will. Reachable from a computer in the labs on campus or from a home...

However, who knows when we'll have that kind of technology. Especially in someplace like California where the state budgets are tiny and the location so remote from the rest of the world.

5 That gives me an idea. If California would levy an additional 1% tax on the "entertainment" industry*, they could use the money to fund the creation of ebooks. They'd probably be able to sell the rights to the ebooks to other states to use. If any official representatives of California are reading this, contact me for my consulting rates.

* I'll even go so far as to limit the tax to those who make $1m a year or more. They'd be happy to do it, because it's for the children.

6 Ebonics

We prefer the term "Ebonese."

7 Exactly Ted. I find it somewhat humorous that in this post information age era, some institutions seem to be backstepping towards the medieval age. I've been in grad school for the past year, and most of the text/resources/handouts for my classes have been available online or on CD-ROM. Hell, one of the professors had an entriely web-based class. All homework and projects could be downloaded from his site and uploaded back to the site when completed. His gradbook was also web-based, and we could check our grades there, figure out what we needed on future assignments to get an A or a B or whatever. Amazingy easy to use too. Sheesh Cali! Get on the ball!

8 Rob@L&R, so one who speaks "Ebonics" is an Eboneser? BAH!