After one of Mark Frey's students complained that her wallet had been stolen, school security guards quickly sealed off the classroom and began searching backpacks.
"As they started the search, there was a wave of movement of people going to the back and hiding things in a pile," said the computer science teacher, who works at Skyline High School in Oakland, California.
And what might this pile of contraband booty contain? Frey peeked. "It was mainly standard stuff: CD players, cell phones, Motorola two-way pagers -- those are really big,"
While cell phones and CD players are gadgets non grata at many schools, teenagers say they're pretty much required backpack stuffing. And maybe a pager, some glitter makeup -- and don’t forget black paper.
"A lot of people have black paper to write on with their gel pens," said Allison Fossati, an eighth grader from Vista, California.
"Everybody has a cell phone now, every little white mid-suburbia kid," said Antony Demekhin, a 16-year-old high school senior in Cincinnati, Ohio.
In the predominantly black, urban Oakland school district, it's the same story. "Two-way pagers, the CD player and the cell phone are the standard-issue devices," Frey said.
As for preferred brands, Nokia wins hands down according to the five teens we spoke to and to messages posted on the teen site Bolt.com.
If you're really cool, you can screw on a colorful antenna that lights up when your phone rings.
Why CD players and not MP3s? "MP3s are kind of pointless," Demekhin said. "If you want somebody to listen to a song, you have to put headphones on them and pass it around." Though record labels need not heave a sigh of relief just yet. "More people I see are burning their CDs," he said.
Palm Pilots are also rare, according to the high schoolers, though Western Washington State College sophomore Jacob Rosenblum, 19, has a different perspective. "A lot of my friends who went to college have Palm Pilots," he said. He describes Discmans as "a pain in the butt," and said he prefers MP3 players because you can jog with them.
Digital cameras rank high on Bolt posters' lists of portable goodies. Brendan Bellomo, a Palo Alto, California, high school junior, carries one with him to take pictures of friends and to use in his filmmaking projects.
While basically everybody wears Jansport backpacks, according to Amanda Bove, Fossati's 13-year-old cousin and a high school freshman, they're likely to take one of those gel pens to it.
"They don't want to do something totally out of what other people have, but sort of unique," she said. "'In,' but they make it their own."
Too much individual flair on the backpack, warns Demekhin, is grounds for getting made fun of. "Personalization isn't cool. It's for kids with nothing better to do with their time," he said.
The computer manufacturers' dream of a laptop in every rucksack also is a long way from reality. Most of the teens we spoke with bristled at the notion of taking a laptop to school. "If you're a complete dork," Rosenblum said. "Most people don’t have laptops or they keep them in their room."
Perhaps to Texas Instruments' great chagrin, rather than their newly released T-1-83 handheld computer, designed with today’s tech-savvy teen in mind, Roxy planners, a girly, surf-themed descendant of yesteryear's Day Planners, are in with the ladies, according to Fossati.
Light and portable, e-books might seem like a student's best friend, but bulky, pulpy textbooks are still very much around, teens complain.
All this gear has some people worried. Research shows that heavy backpacks are a leading cause of back injury to teens and younger kids.
While a market research study by Cahners In-Stat Group is predicting that 50 percent of all teens will own cell phones by 2004, the cell-phones-cause-cancer caucus is arguing that all this chatter will lead to dire health consequences. Meanwhile, Tennessee legislators have authored legislation specifically forbidding teen cell phone use while driving.
But as Frey's students' backpacks so readily revealed, rules are made to be broken.
