One Tuesday a month, students file into Spangenberg to attend an assembly. The attitude on campus during these assemblies is usually not one of happiness for attending the assembly, but rather resentment for having to get out of school one hour later than students usually would. However, these assemblies provide new insight to many important topics not commonly covered in the present Gunn curriculum, and the information they provide is important for each Gunn student to know.

Assemblies cover a wide variety of topics, including global warming, African-American history, health and well-being issues and world cultures. Though some of these topics are lightly covered in the Living Skills and history classes, assemblies provide a more direct way to address the issues and share information. Through assemblies, students can gain knowledge about topics they may or may not know anything about, and some students may find that after the assembly, they are interested in a topic they may not have previously been interested in.

Assemblies also provide students with important information about events happening at Gunn, such as Homecoming themes, club activities and Prom locations. Through assemblies, students are able to get important announcements and information that they may have missed on the morning announcements or through the Daily Bulletin. Assemblies provide a way of sharing this important information to a large group of people in a very short period of time, and give students a quick and direct way to find out about events that they may not have found out about otherwise.

Without these assemblies, the school would have to come up with different ways of sharing this information with students. There has been some dicussion of having an advisory period, which could potentially meet multiple times a month rather than just once. This could cause changes in the Gunn schedule and possibly result in more longer, extended days, rather than the current hour-long extension on just Tuesday a month. Though plans for an advisory period are tentative and not necessarily going to become a reality, it is probably safe to say that a good portion of Gunn students would rather keep the current scheduling of one extra hour of school for an assembly once a month, rather than having an advisory period that could potentially change the school schedule and extend school hours for multiple days each month.

Either way, assemblies are an important and valuable way for students to learn about a wide variety of topics that are usually not covered in the classroom. Instead of looking at assemblies as just a bothersome extra hour tacked on to their school day, students should pay attention to the assemblies, because they have a lot of important information to offer about things going on in and out of the Gunn campus.