Assemblies

Almost without rival, the worst word you could ever use in an assembly is Jesus.

Now, if your Christian beliefs and sensibilities are such that you already detect the odour of offence, please cease reading. I suspect, though, that if you have come this far, you might just cope. I have no intention here of launching an invective against Christianity as a way of life or a set of beliefs, nor do I draw my bow tautly and aim for the door of any of the established Christian Churches. Much as I am tempted. (And you cannot blame me for that; it’s all Satan’s fault - much like the rife paedophilia within the Church of Ireland over recent decades.)

It’s just that, love him or hate him, Jesus does not engage with the vast majority of students when his name emerges in the opening phrases of an assembly. Why then do we jam him in? Church schools can’t really avoid it. Jesus is as much an essential component of a Church school assembly as a flat, tasteless slice of beef is in a McDonald’s hamburger. For non-Church schools, he is a gherkin. Someone’s told them they have to squeeze him in, and despite the incongruity of doing so, there he is.

The second most unappealing word for students to hear in assembly, one that gives them an almost equal cause to recoil in distaste, is poem.

Teacher: I want to read you a poem this morning…
Students: (sigh / tut.)

We’re told to include a spiritual element in our assemblies, and yet most of us are clueless as to what this means. We immediately think of religion, which arguably for most people under 18 in the country is the antithesis of spiritual. But by throwing in a few of Jesus’s well-known parables, a little Christian morality, we can feel safe in the knowledge that we are at least not neglecting our students’ spiritual development.

There isn’t really a great leap from Jesus to poetry, as we aim to do the spiritual thing from a more secular angle, thus making it more palatable to non-Christian tastes (i.e. that of most students.) But poetry is like Indie / Alternative music – when it’s good, its amazing, and when it’s not, it’s fucking awful. Add that to the fact that it’s rare to hear a teacher blessed with the capacity to actually read a poem with any depth of feeling, and you’ll see why poems, like Jesus, should be non-negotiable no-no’s in assembly.

The third and final apathy-inducing word to open your assembly with is story. Fine for the primary lot, lovely, a story, yes, how exciting. Say it to your secondary audience and you’ll see every pair of shoulders collectively lower by two inches as their owners push their bums forward and sink deflated in their plastic seats, minds switched to standby.

Any teacher walking to the front of an assembly holding a book about assemblies needs to be stoned to death, pre-Roman Judean-style. These stones can help to save us all from becoming Lost in teaching; unquestionably, death is far preferable.

Advances in technology, which have led to many schools equipping their main halls with a decent sound system, large screen and projector linked up to a computer, have created opportunities to put on more engaging assemblies.

Music has a spiritual impact on people. Many of us grew up miming the words to Christian hymns in assembly, drowned out by the school piano and the one member of staff with operatic pretensions. Nowadays, you can only get away with asking your primary school congregation to indulge in collective singing; try it in a secondary school, and the silence will be louder than bombs.

When the profession began to surrender in the face of the futility of this exercise, there was a void, which we filled with Jesus, poetry and stories. Then the technology arrived and some of us were brave enough (or cowardly enough, depending on your point of view) to ditch the dusty old Book of 1000 Assembly Ideas, and instruct our IT staff to play pop music over the sound system as the students filed into the hall.

But even this great leap forward in trying to engage with the youth of today is often derailed by those of us who become Lost in Teaching when it’s our turn to perform and preach through the medium of assembly. In an effort to get down with the kids, a concept to be explored further another time in this blog, some of us will play our choice of music, rather than anything the students enjoy listening to, simply because we don’t know what they listen to.

It’s fair to say that after the age of about 15 or 16, it is not uncommon for some teenagers to develop a sophisticated appreciation of the more classic pop musical genres from the second half of the 20th century. This was the age when I abandoned listening to the Top 40 on a Sunday evening, ceased taping my favourite songs onto an audio cassette, and instead began to discover and buy records that had been released before or shortly after I was born. Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Doors and David Bowie all became my music, once I had matured enough to appreciate the rich pop-cultural history of my country (and the USA in its capacity as Britain’s cultural feeder country.)

However, to your average student aged 11 to 14, any music more than five years old sounds rubbish. They will frown and giggle when you play them Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2) rather than find themselves spiritually moved by David Gilmore’s exquisite guitar solo or challenged to reflect on Roger Water’s radical, anti-establishment lyrics. They will contort their mouths in bewildered distaste when you mistakenly attempt to introduce them to The Smiths. And you will assume that anything from your own youth that had a fundamental spiritual impact on you as an older teenager, naturally lends itself to doing the same job on younger teenagers a generation later. It might do one day, when they discover it themselves, but it won’t do when their teacher plays it in assembly, and then uses the lyrics to try and impart some kind of message about morals, working hard or respecting the rights of others.

Perhaps it is time to take advice from advertising gurus. There are only a few messages we ever want students to soak up and adhere to and they could be condensed into a series of advertising slogans. Put these phrases to music, ideally some form of annoyingly addictive jingle, and play them at the start and end of every assembly and the result will be subliminal brainwashing of all of our young people and teacher mind control of youth culture. The slogans that could comprehensively encapsulate the entire gospel of the British education system are as follows:

1. Show everyone respect.
2. Be responsible.
3. Work hard.

Everything else is a mere sub-slogan of these.

So my suggestion is as follows. Make the students sing these lyrics to the tune of You’ve Got the Love by Florence and the Machine (with Dizzee Rascal):

Sometimes I feel like showing everyone respect (yearrh yearrh),
I know I got to work real hard,
Sometimes I feel like being so responsible,
This is the school that’s gonna see me through.
(yearrh)

Jesus, that was pathetic. Where’s my book of poems?