By Pham Tran
It’s a whole workout to wear your backpack to school. Look around — everyone looks like the hunchback of Notre Dame with the arch on their backs. Your homework, Chromebook and papers piling up as the day goes on make carrying your backpack no different than lifting the heaviest weight at the gym. And, even worse, you have to carry this weight for an average of eight hours each day.
From inside the classroom, you can hear the sounds of the wheels from afar as those so-called “rolling backpack kids” run through the hallway with the backpack handle in their hands. Anti-rolling backpack kids hate these backpacks for being the obstacle that prevents their feet from moving forward, especially with the hassling hallway traffic during passing periods.
They guiltily became embarrassing tools and enemies of many high schoolers, as they deducted thousands of aura points if you were to trip over. Whenever you trip over a rolling backpack, it’s hard to erase that shameful moment forever.
But do rolling backpacks deserve that much hate for the trouble they cause? Let’s look at how the view of these backpacks shifted as you grew older!
Remember when you were a little kid in elementary school? Or a preteen who just experienced puberty? You didn’t care much about what people think about your style or how you should behave in school. Your choice of using a rolling backpack, probably from listening to your mom’s advice or just because it was way easier to carry materials during school, wasn’t affected by whether people thought it would become trouble for them in the hallways or not.
According to Matein, rolling backpacks do not give you back pain as traditional backpacks do. You just need to use a little force to pull the handle, and the backpack will roll along as you go. Back problems can be a serious problem in the development of children and eventually lead to bad posture, according to Samitivej.
But as you go through that puberty period and say hi to the world as a real teenager, you start to care more about your appearance and what you should wear in front of people to maintain that reputation. You start to ignore the benefits that rolling backpacks offer and use their drawbacks as an excuse to shift to traditional backpacks. Let’s look at some pros and cons of this backpack with wheels to see why kids dislike them and whether or not we should give them another chance.
CONS:
Tripping hazard
If not careful, these rolling backpacks can cause people around you to trip if they’re not paying attention. Especially during passing periods, when everyone is rushing to their next class, people won’t be able to watch what’s in front of them every time and might trip over without looking. Again, you don’t want to be responsible for anyone’s injuries, right?
Carrying upstairs
You can’t roll your rolling backpack anymore when it comes to stairs. You will have to use your hand strength and lift the backpack step by step. In the end, those wheels still add up some extra pounds to the backpack itself. Your hands are begging you to put that backpack down, wishing you were those with the traditional backpacks who move so easily and quickly up the stairs. If an elevator isn’t near, you’ll be in great pain.
PROS:
No more back pain
With the rolling backpack, you can feel like a whole weight just got lifted off your back. Imagine if you were on a vacation with a bunch of things to carry, from souvenirs and clothes to many personal items that you don’t want to leave behind—you would give up if you had to carry those weights on your poor back. But rolling backpacks will be your life savior, as you can just put all of the stuff in and roll along. You can let your back relax twenty-four-seven now!
Bigger capacity
Every good thing goes with its bad thing. That scary test that you need to study for makes you shove everything in your backpack the night before so you can utilize every second before class starts to prepare for it. This includes your ten-page study guide, piles of notes and not to mention the big heavy textbook that every student hates to carry around.
Sometimes, if that traditional backpack gets too packed and you can’t breathe anymore, you start to struggle to zip it through and become those kids who confidently walk through the hallway without knowing their backpack is open. But with a pair of magic wheels, you can put as much material as you want in the backpack and roll through the hardship easily with an easy A on that test.
At the end of the day, we should be more open to these rolling backpacks. They are not only a great helper for your health later on but also easier for carrying materials around school, especially when you have to bring many things to school and back home every day.
Your health should be placed on top of all the factors, and if it’s a big hassle to carry the backpack upstairs, you’re in luck because Fountain Valley High School doesn’t have any stairs!
