Good intent, bad effect: fewer school assemblies necessary

Last year at the “Every 15 Minutes” assembly, presenters tried to convey the importance of not drinking while driving.  During the “Speak Up for Change” week in January, guest speaker Scott Backovich used jokes and catch-phrases to emphasize how critical it is to help others.

At the end of the week, the leadership class tried to connect with the audience through personal video anecdotes. Yet despite the weight of the issues discussed in each of these efforts, the hallways echoed with disrespectful remarks and ridiculing comments in the days following. 

These assemblies aren’t supposed to be fun; they deal with serious issues. But just because they aren’t necessarily entertaining doesn’t negate their value. There is no doubt that school-wide presentations have good intentions. They certainly do resonate with some students, but many others refuse to acknowledge the messages no matter the method used to reach out to the student body.

Whether they don’t understand the magnitude of the issue at hand or are not mature enough to take the messages seriously is unclear, but the sarcastic comments they share afterwards suggest that school assemblies are not as effective as they could or should be. It may not be possible to get through to these students unless they experience hardships themselves; maybe just hearing others’ experiences isn’t enough to change their perspective.

Organizers could try new techniques to engage a student audience, but chances are that these students still won’t learn.  It is unrealistic to think that one or two assemblies in the span of one week out of a school year will affect how all students act in the long term. And increasing the frequency — having assembly after assembly after assembly — risks becoming tedious and borderline intolerable.

Issues like bullying can’t be hacked away with a blunt weapon like school-wide assemblies; they must be treated with care, patience and a precision the school has yet to discover. Possibilities range all the way from teacher-skits to student-led discussions — as of now, assemblies simply aren’t doing the trick.

Some may say that if even a single student is affected, the effort was worth it. This could be true, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t search for a more effective, long-term solution. The actions of just one student somewhere on campus are probably not enough to make a significant difference given the negativity spread by 10 others due to the same assembly. At this point, the assemblies almost do more harm than good given how much they are mocked.

When students share their life experiences as they did recently through a set of videos, their peers are more engaged; when assemblies turn into two-hour-long-advice-giving sessions, however, they test students’ patience. Forty-five minutes would have been more than enough for the final Speak up for Change assembly.

Perhaps one way to address the problem is to make school assemblies optional, like rallies are. Keep them short, to the point, and engaging: a smaller audience would cut down how long it takes to file into the auditorium and get settled, hopefully causing students to be more willing to listen.

An obvious objection to this suggestion would be that students who need to hear the thoughts expressed in assemblies wouldn’t attend, but forcing students to sit through an hour of material they deem “useless” won’t help change their minds, either.

Instead, it would be best to hold talks during lunch or a class period, so students aren’t bitter about missing tutorial. Non-mandatory presentations geared toward underclassmen won’t bore juniors and seniors, and vice versa with assemblies meant for upperclassmen. This way, only students who are invested in the topic being discussed will attend, and the students who are only going to be negative don’t need to come.

With shorter, optional presentations, the good will resonate and the bad will be contained at the very least. If the talks are engaging, word will spread and the talks will become more and more popular — maybe then assemblies would be fully effective. The hope is that the students who attend optional presentations and take the topic seriously will begin to shift their outlook and can lead the other students by example, a little bit at a time.