The Harsh Reality of School Assemblies

This morn­ing I read an arti­cle that, among other things, made me reflect on school assem­blies and their rela­tion­ship not just to the cur­ricu­lum but also to the cul­ture and the envi­ron­ment around them.

In my school, assem­blies typ­i­cally revolve around cul­tural enrich­ment, expos­ing stu­dents to expe­ri­ences they wouldn’t oth­er­wise be able to have, cel­e­brat­ing stu­dent achieve­ments, char­ac­ter build­ing, how to pre­vent bul­ly­ing, and such.

The stu­dents at a mid­dle school in the Gaza strip yes­ter­day had &th&emc=th" target="_blank">an assem­bly about how to han­dle mor­tar shells and other dan­ger­ous mate­ri­als if they find them lying about. One of  the Eng­lish teach­ers at the school com­mented about the assem­bly: “They are not ready to learn yet. And I am not ready to teach.”

I think some­times, in our drive to com­plete the book and cover all the con­tent before the state test begins so that our school once again can be deemed ade­quate, we can lose sight of the fact that we may have stu­dents sit­ting in front of us who are not ready to learn. And some­times we are not ready to teach. I real­ize that my real­i­ties and those of my stu­dents are not nearly as harsh as many oth­ers’ around the world. But they are still real, and they can still affect learn­ing. The only way instruc­tion can pos­si­bly be effec­tive is if we deal with those imped­i­ments to learn­ing before we get to the pre­scribed content.