It’s Tuesday morning, you’re late to class and barely catch the last minutes of “The G” reporting on today’s assembly schedule. Could the day get any worse? You’ve just lost the tutorial that you desperately needed to study for a calculus test, and on top of that, you are going to miss out on the delicious sandwich that you could have gotten during your expertly chosen G prep. Assemblies are inefficient, unneeded, overused and a large source of stress for students.

The main problem with assemblies is that they are inefficient because they speak to the entire student body when the information only impacts a small percentage of it. Take the Prom assembly, for example. Although it’s interesting for the freshmen and sophomores to see what they’re missing out on, it would be more efficient to make the assembly mandatory only for juniors and seniors who choose to go to prom. It is unfair to make everyone sit through a presentation that is only valuable to a small minority of the students.

Assemblies are also overused. So far this year we’ve had six assemblies. Added together, that’s more than an entire school day. It is true that Gunn must have assemblies to meet a state minimum of school hours, but as an alternative to assemblies, students should have the option of going to tutorial instead. This would alleviate the stress formed from students losing their valuable tutorial time.

Some of the assembly information is important and should be available to students, but there are much more effective ways to convey it. An assembly video, for example, would be more time efficient because it could be edited to show only the necessities. It could also be viewed in the classroom as opposed to dragging everyone into a crowded auditorium.

Another option would be to use an electronic version that could be viewed at home. Most likely, if watching the movie was optional and supposed to be done at home, very few students would follow through. However, if students don’t care enough to watch a 20-minute video, who says they’re going to pay attention during a 50-minute assembly?

Another problem with our current assembly system is the quality. It takes a great amount of courage to perform in front of the entire student body, but the courage must be matched by preparation. Everyone is human and mistakes happen, but when you’re presenting to a large audience, it is your responsibility to be as well rehearsed as possible. There have been quite a few slightly shaky assembly performances this year which were not only embarrassing for the performers, but also wasted the audience’s time. One way to increase the assemblies’ quality would be to simply have fewer of them. That way, the performers would have more time to practice and the acts could be chosen more selectively.

Assemblies have the potential to be a valuable education tool and a way to easily communicate to the entire student body, but they need to be improved. By having more concise and efficient assemblies, students would have time to go to tutorial, or simply relax on Tuesday afternoons. Gunn is located in one of the most innovative places in the world, and its time our school system reflects that. Creating a new assembly system would lower student stress and simply make Gunn a better campus.