How Not to Hold a Leavers’ Assembly Meeting
Tom Starkey again takes the minutes from your school's most recent meeting…
- by Tom Starkey
Present
- GL – (Deputy Vice Principal)
- BN
- RR
- CL
Apologies from
Just about everyone as it’s currently exam season – I’ve no idea how this lot have got the time.
Meeting held in
The assembly hall – soon to be full of teary-eyed students as they realise that the time has come for them to… have another assembly.
Item 1 | Doing it for the kids
GL expressed a desire to do something ‘wacky’ and ‘zany’ so the kids could go away with something to remember.
RR asked if that was him offering to do a break-time duty for once. There were stifled chuckles and a whispered, ‘Ohhhhh buuurn’ from an unidentified source.
GL carried on as if he hadn’t heard, and suggested a ‘totally hilarious’ video of the staff lip-synching to a pop song, as he had seen that one off the YouTube and he thought it might be fun (and up our social media game if it went viral).
‘You mean like the one off The Ring?’ asked CL. ‘Yes, I can see something like that happening. I’m currently dying of fright just thinking about it.’
There followed some concern expressed by staff regarding the form the video was to take, how much extra workload it would result in, and which filters were going to used.
‘Is there a filter that makes you not look like an embarrassingly awkward muppet?’ enquired RR, ‘Because we’ll need to be knocking that up one up to 100%.’
‘What…’ asked BN (with the uncanny knack of someone who truly wants to get to the heart of the matter) ‘…would we be singing, exactly?’ Leading us neatly onto the next item on the agenda…
Item 2 | What we would be singing, exactly
‘Well,’ proclaimed GL clapping his hands, ‘It’s got to be Robbie, hasn’t it?’
‘No,’ replied RR.
‘No,’ replied BN.
‘Who’s Robbie?’ asked CL.
The following discussion then went on to cover which popular artists were good (Robbie, apparently); which were bad (Robbie again); and which might have a song the kids would have actually have heard of (so that’s Robbie off the list, then).
CL displayed a surprising penchant for Grime. BN was big on prog-rock, but no-one could really see the staff making a video that was seventeen minutes long, didn’t have any words and was mostly played on a keytar.
RR stated that if she had to do it, if it was stipulated in her contract that she had to be filmed doing something this heinous, then it better not be anything from The Greatest bloody Showman.
“If I have to hear someone reaching for the stars one more time, I’ll make them see stars.’
It was agreed by everyone that maybe they should stick to speeches in the assembly and then a swift shutting of the gates once all of the buggers were out.
AOB
The staff present decided that, to be at optimum performance level, it was time to lubricate their vocal cords down the local.
Meeting adjourned
Aaaaand now I can’t get some genuinely awful tunes out of my head. Thanks for that.
Tom Starkey is a teacher and writer who blogs at stackofmarking.wordpress.com. Follow him on Twitter at @tstarkey1212.
