Snippets from school assemblies

Every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, my entire high school (of 400 something people) gathers in the auditorium for announcements/worship/speaker/whatever crazy scheme the adults come up with. Usually, it’s a recipe for comfortable mundaneness, but on occasion, it creates some pretty funny moments.

A lot of the time it results from the principal’s wry sense of humor. For instance:

Last week, he gave us a refresher on the school’s rules. One of those is that you’re not allowed to carry blankets around with you from class to class. He said it was because it looked bad for when visitors came to tour the school and that we looked like “privileged homeless kids.”

When the temperature dropped, he told us about his conversation with his brother who lives in Colorado and is also a headmaster (I guess it runs in the family?). At his school, the kids go outside if the temperature is in the double digits. If it’s nine degrees, they stay inside. If it’s ten degrees, the kids have recess. He said they were like mini polar bears. On the other hand, we stay inside if the windshield and temperature is below forty.

Another rule is that on Fridays, the one day of the week we don’t have to wear our uniforms, we’re only allowed to wear jeans but only blue ones. Of course, as I’m sure happens ever year, some students went to talk to him and the other administrators about enlarging the acceptable color spectrum. The other day, he told us he and the two teachers were praying about wheat (apparently there’s some senior who has a super awesome pair of “wheat” colored jeans?), gray, and black jeans. When a student shouted from the crowd that God’s answer was yes, he shot back that God had told him He hadn’t heard from us in a while.

Sometimes it doesn’t involve the headmaster. For example:

This one speaker talked about his high school experience in a not very good city in California. At the school, fights broke out so often that the principal, the six vice principals, and the six counselors all had helmets and bikes that they would ride on to go from breaking up one scuffle to another. They also had sirens and megaphones.

Another time, the president of Biola University came to speak. He was very energetic and basically burst (Wait, the past tense of burst is burst? Oops, “bursted” is definitely not a word.) with energy. At the beginning of his talk, he mentioned that the founder of Vine was an alumni from that school, which grabbed a good percentage of the audience’s attention. I thought that was a very clever move on his part. The man went on to talk about overusing technology and how boredom can sometimes be a virtue. I particularly liked two things he said.
1) The world doesn’t need more boring people. It needs more bored people.
2) When people tell me they’re bored, I want to tell them to put on a cape and be SuperBored.

P.S.

At what temperature does outside stuff get canceled at your school? When my principal told us about his brother’s school, he said that they probably think we’re a bunch of weaklings, to which I say: do their summers soar into the triple digits? Anyways, what are your school assemblies like? Wait, do you even have school assemblies? My school’s small so it’s okay, but I can imagine it would be too much of a hassle for larger schools.