Hidden Messages Your School Sends to Students
Once, at a staff meeting, my principal shared a short video he’d seen at an administrators’ conference. It was an effort, I think, to talk about important things at mandated staff meetings, rather than simple announcements. Although there was a lot of eye-rolling when he cued it up, I thought it was worthwhile, with some apt observations about schooling.
One of those was a suggestion that if we wanted to assess what was most important to us, we should look at the times when the normal academic schedule was disrupted, and the student body gathered for an all-school assembly.
At that point in the school year, we’d had five assemblies:
- An assembly on the first day, where students were welcomed, then informed which teacher would be leading them to their first hour class and giving them schedules.
- An annual ‘rules’ assembly for each grade, where the assistant principal went through all the rules in the student handbook.
- An all-school assembly to introduce the annual fund-raiser, and a follow-up assembly, two weeks later, to reward all the students who sold enough sausage and cheese with an hour out of class to play in bouncy castles and batting cages.
- A fall sports assembly to recognize athletic teams.
I mentioned this to my principal, who asked tartly if I thought that our school was all about schedules, rules, fund-raising and sports? Why else would we be having CONTINUE READING: Hidden Messages Your School Sends to Students | Teacher in a strange land
