Assembly: Quality Over Quantity
By: Arya Palla
Sometimes assemblies are worth the 30 minutes they take up, and sometimes, they’re not. Obviously, the likeability of an assembly is subjective to its audience. However, you can never truly know whether you’ll enjoy an assembly if you don’t attend it.
Of course, there are times when you can’t sit still and listen to a speech that drones on and makes those 30 minutes feel like an hour. This doesn’t necessarily have to do with the content of the assembly. The timing and length of assemblies, combined with lack of sleep, hunger and sheer boredom, can make these events intolerable. Rather than withstand these tribulations, students skip assembly.
Exeter has tried to combat the epidemic of missing students by working with different systems of attendance, the most recent being the infamous Sched system. Faculty are also on the watch for students running back to their dorms, but some still slip through. These students’ absences are apparent when you see the large patches of unfilled seats in the Assembly Hall—a testament to the failing attendance systems. Like I said before: this doesn’t necessarily have to do with the actual assemblies, but with the boredom and fatigue that accompany some of them.
Nonetheless, assemblies can be enlightening. They can engage the audience and put forth novel ideas that students might be willing to discuss further. They can bring joy through performative displays of music and dance, offering recognition to some of our peers in the Exeter community. They can demonstrate the hidden (as well as well-known) talents of our students and bring us to a closer appreciation for each other. They can even foster discussion in our community and some intellectual development, particularly when we invite an eloquent speaker with a controversial opinion. Ultimately, these are the assemblies that we ought to strive for.
Assembly can work sometimes, but it’s hard to ensure that it’s always the case. Since the Academy has to find a speaker or event for assembly two times every single week for every month of school, the quality of assemblies and assembly speakers can vary. This need to constantly pump out talking points every Tuesday and Friday diminishes their quality and influence over the student body, which in turn causes more to skip.
It isn’t surprising that the Assembly Hall can’t comfortably hold the entire student body. Packing together a thousand students early in the morning for thirty minutes can irritate anyone. Especially when listening to an assembly you aren’t interested in.
This can be a terrible start to the day. The lack of comfort and the unrest can distract the audiences from the message of the assembly and further encourage students to skip it. This skipping, of course, destroys the whole point of assembly in the first place—to bring our community together.
In order to improve the quality of assemblies, we should target frequency and quality. Attempts to take the attendance of every student at every assembly are not sustainable or effective—they tremendously slow down the days.
Instead, we should look to reduce the frequency of assemblies and focus on quality, not quantity. Like Andover, we should only hold assembly once a week and use the opportunity to strengthen our Assembly program by bringing in quality speakers likely to impact our community.
Exeter should also advertise our assemblies more publicly—perhaps, marketing will draw up student enthusiasm for our most exciting speakers and convince students to attend.
We could also consider changes to the structure of Assembly Hall itself an open environment with room to sit makes the overall assembly experience easier and more pleasurable.
While assemblies can be useful and interesting, due to inefficient implementation, they fail to enlighten and entertain as much as they could. I think it is important to attend assemblies because you never know how you will react to certain speakers and events. However, I still understand why people skip them. If we reduce the frequency of assemblies, and couple this with careful planning, clarity amongst the students, and a more comfortable listening environment, the Exeter community will be better off for it.