Emma Lee

Eventually, we start to drown out the cookie-cutter suggestions that we always hear — sleep more, stop participating in so many extracurriculars, be productive and stay off social media.

During the average week, we spend around an hour and a half sitting in mandatory school and class assemblies, often at the expense of office hours and the short chunks of free time we have during the week. The limited time in each school day is a precious commodity, and assemblies and meetings too often disregard it. Although these gatherings serve important purposes and address our community needs, we need to work to restructure these events to be more meaningful to students without sacrificing content. 

Two weeks ago, juniors attended a LIFE meeting while sophomores and seniors spent time with their Eagle Buddies. That meeting discussed the impacts of unhealthy coping mechanisms, a crucial topic for many high schoolers, like many of the subjects LIFE assemblies tackle: mental health, sleep, time management. But it excised a portion of our lunches, normally a time to breathe and relax, for a mandatory meeting, making it difficult to be present. Eventually, we start to drown out the cookie-cutter suggestions that we always hear — sleep more, stop participating in so many extracurriculars, be productive and stay off social media. 

LIFE meetings should move beyond reminders toward actionable advice. For instance, LIFE speaker Dino Ambrosi from last year shared his personal experience with screentime addiction and offered as a solution concrete tools like apps ClearSpace and ScreenZen, which many students downloaded and began using that day. His information wasn’t tuned out. Instead he showed that, as listeners, we want to hear information through the lens of easily implementable actions: solution-oriented rhetoric is more appealing and helpful to students. 

School meetings also offer an important space for our community to learn about new initiatives. But few schools mandate repeated meetings that have all students and faculty in attendance. And even fewer hold them every week. At the same time, school meetings tend to run long and impinge upon office hours, once again siphoning away valuable free time from the school day. 

New, stricter ASB guidelines for in-person announcements are a step in the right direction, but the vast majority of club announcements still don’t need to be said aloud: many of those reminders are reposted after school meetings on Schoology anyway, which students need to plan their schedules regardless. It’s this repetition that makes school meetings run long. 

ReCreate Reading, too, struggles to live up to its intent to foster genuine interest in reading. Every year many students openly admit to not finishing their books, and discussions often feel like halfhearted affairs, leaving students questioning why they must participate in such an activity. The structure and focal points of ReCreate reading can be simplified to refocus on its core goal. Fewer choices of books, for instance, would promote deeper conversations with larger groups of students. 

The solution to these issues isn’t to eliminate schoolwide gatherings entirely. Rather, we should approach them with a critical eye. What can be shortened? What activities and suggestions truly and practically serve students? 

In pruning mandatory gatherings, however, we must not fill empty time with more scheduled activities. Leave it free. There is profound value in unstructured time. In moments where students are not racing to the next obligation, we find time to chat with friends, catch up on work and simply recharge. The LIFE acronym itself reminds us to live with intent, focus and enthusiasm, tenets that every assembly should work to promote. But those ideals are impossible to uphold when students have no time to breathe. 

While students have a say in the agendas of many assemblies, intentional scheduling only works when the students in attendance listen and engage actively. Consider the higher purpose of gatherings. Participate meaningfully. Not doing so wastes the time of organizers, speakers and students. 

Be intentional about how we structure these gatherings, and how we receive them. Remember that less is more. That principle can help us ensure that every assembly enriches our school community.