Assemblies: they are supposed
to give us helpful information
as a larger group, inform us of
important events or schemes,
such as the International Award
and Young Enterprise, and
benefit our attitude towards
school life.
Contrarily; the actual assemblies are
filled with horribly cliché topics
which are intended to be a work
ethic booster, but merely make us
want to oppose the message of the
assembly due to the terrible way in
which it is presented. For example,
one assembly for year IO revolved
solely around the word "if", in an
attempt to sound "deep and
meaningful", but merely came off as
idiotic, and made us think that the
teachers were running out of ideas
for assemblies, and completely
demotivated us. But it appears they
had not, as this was followed by
more of the same type of assembly.
Not all of these assemblies were as
such, as some had no effect on us at
all, other than causing some students
to ridicule the teachers responsible
for assemblies, an improvement upon
the others. These assemblies merely
give us announcements about subjects
which are sometimes untrue, such as
the student council having to explain
about how they were "inspired" by
their day working with a paralympian,
a statement which was revealed to me
as being false by one of these
members immediately succeeding the
assembly
Other announcements are of no
interest or use to the majority of the
audience, such as the Environmental
Committee explaining about their
projects, and how much money was
being spent on them. While I do not
object to the projects in themselves,
nor the committee who effects them,
using an assembly to tell us about it,
as well as the large sum of money
being used for a cause which I
personally believe is not worth the
effect that it will have, is not using the
precious time of the students
effectively when we could be Working
or studying. While some announcements such as
the previously mentioned
International Award and Young
Enterprise are more important, they
are not given the time they deserve
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(Mr. Le Heux, when talking about
said award was forced to speak far
faster than an effective talking speed
for transmitting information between
people, and still had not finished by
the time the bell went), and in light of
the other examples, of which there
are many more, it is clear that the
assemblies are not functioning as they
should. While as a year IO student, I
cannot say the state of assemblies in
other year groups, I have noticed that
with each year the assemblies have
appeared to become less and less
productive. Whether this is standard
for each year group or is happening to
all year groups with time is something
I have yet to discover.
There are still more examples, such as
the use of whole school assemblies
(which as they take place in the
atrium provide terrible conditions for
the students to sit or stand, as it is
cold and has a very small number of
benches to provide more comfortable
seatinglfor primarily informing us of
sports results in ISST, GISGA and
other events, this topic of the school
focusing too much on sports and not
enough on academic events will be
discussed in a future article.
While the problems with assemblies
are admittedly minor as they take
place only once every 2 weeks, tutor
times mean that we waste an hour
every two Weeks which could have
been spent for lessons or studying.
The majority of year IO tutor times
are spent With the student playing
games on iPads and even when this
does not happen, they tell us about
subjects such as the dangers of
bullying, a repeated subject every year,
on which we have spent an assembly
and multiple tutor times Wasting our
time on, roughly an hour, this year
alone discussing a problem which is
clearly not prevalent in our school.
I hope I have made it clear to our
readers about my, as Well as my
colleagues‘, opinions, on assemblies
and tutor times and how they are
being misused. While I could expand
on a number of points present in this
article, due to constraints of article
size I cannot explain them in this
article, but I hope that the content
present in the article is suflicient.
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