underrated school assemblies i was forced to attend and summarily hated

inspired by late off-topic discussion itt: why did rock critics hate Queen so much in the 1970s/80s?

What were some of the most horrible, offensive, or illegal, or downright dumb school assemblies you were required to attend in school?

so many anti-drug screeds

a screening of the film 'enemy mine'

a screening of the film 'ferris bueller's day off'

¯\(°_o)/¯

one of the school board member's kids got drunk at a party one night, took off on a motorcycle, crashed, and died. a few days later we all had to attend a mandatory assembly about the dangers of drinking and driving and they wheeled out the motorcycle he had crashed on. somehow I suspected that if that kid had not been a son of a school board member, that assembly would not have happened.

xp

a screening of the film "Top Gun". IN BIOLOGY CLASS.

the teacher said the scientific principles involved in landing jets made it "educational"

I went to international schools with diplomatic and military brats, so every year a bunch of kids would move away as their parents were reassigned. We had one assembly where we all had to sing "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" to all the departing kids, changing the lyric "oh babe I hate to see you go" to "oh friend I hate to see you go."

Sophomore year, we had to attend an auditorium sex ed assembly where they projected close-up photographs of STD-afflicted genitalia on a large screen.

'pretend to be homeless day'

It's a pretty fucked up thing to do to a virgin or inexperienced young person's psychology, xp. It's like showing Midnight Express to a person who wants to know what foreign travel is all about.

btw we watched Midnight Express in our burnout-taught "AP US History" class.

this is sort of unrelated but I was just googling around for stuff and found this ridiculous Linkedin profile for the dude who ran the anti-drug/undercover cop operations at my high school

http://www.linkedin.com/in/thegadfly4u

Attended evangelical religious school circa US 1st & 2nd grade, frequent assemblies showed films about coming Armageddon. This was not cool.

Multiple assemblies led by this fucking jackass: http://davidtoma.com/

I don't remember a single high school assembly. I must have been to one.

There was this one from elementary school:

beachville wrote this on thread What effects pedals should I get? on board I Make Music on Feb 7, 2012

When I was in third or fourth grade, we all gathered in the cafeteria for a puppet show about the dangers of drugs. The lead female puppet was a singer with a beautiful voice who wanted to sing in some talent show or something, but I think she was worried that she'd blow it. So this other puppet knows just the way to help her win - by cheating using an effects pedal - The Phaaaaaaase Shifter. She can't get enough of The Phase Shifter and she keeps dialing the knobs until it makes her sound really weird. I think in the end, she develops the courage to be herself and sing with her own natural, unmodulated voice and she wins the talent show.

A few years later in high school, I started smoking pot and eating acid, but I've always steered clear of phasers.

school assembly I missed cos I walked to school and got there late featured Bark Psychosis when 2 of the initial 3 were students there. Think they were doing Joy Division covers or something, not actually sure if they had become Bark Psychosis by that point but it was Graham Sutton and John Ling anyway.

!!!!

We had a school assembly every year for presenting "awards" and "gifts" to students and the teachers from the senior class. I use scare quotes because they were almost uniformly deragatory and insulting to the receiver. The ones to the teachers were generally tame, but the ones to students were like "biggest nerd", "hottest chick". Seriously. This was 1990-1994. The assembly was mandatory and you "had" to go up to accept your "award" in front of the entire school.

Mind you, this was the same school for which all of the teachers and administration turned a blined eye to Freshmen "initiation" each year which always involved chraming activities like making freshmen push a penny around a toilet bowl rim with their tongue, seniors applying deer piss hunting scent under freshman student's noses, duct-taping students hands to car door handles and driving around the parking lot, and driving the freshmen out into the country during lunch and leaving them with no way back to school (in turn resulting in a detention for the freshmen).

Fuck I hated my high school.

Oh, we also had a real "Drive Your Tractor To School" day every spring.

Jesus.

A bunch of convicts were bussed in from the State Prison. It was a "Scared Straight" assembly for the entire HS. I remember one
guy growling "If you're in the same cell with me and I wake you up in the middle of the night you best belieeeeeve I don't wanna play chess!" Everyone just burst out laughing.

Freshman year of high school there were several pep rallies for the football team. At some point, someone complained that it wasn't fair to the kids who played other sports, so in sophomore year there was an "other sports" pep rally. And I just remember an auditorium full of kids not caring at all as the golf team ran across the stage one-by-one. Eventually they just stopped having pep rallies altogether.

I had actually kind of forgotten about this, but I had to attend a strange overnight "retreat" before the beginning of high school. I went to a mostly African-American (like 90-95%) public magnet school, with a pretty sizeable percentage coming from I guess "rough" backgrounds or whatever (though certainly plenty that didn't), and the retreat was this deprogramming-style thing that was supposed to help kids overcome the ghetto or something, although it wasn't clear to me that there was any particular methodology behind it. At one point we were all asked to meditate on the loved one we were closest to and then to just imagine them dying, and suddenly the room was full of sobbing, wailing fourteen and fifteen year olds. At another point they broke us into separate male and female groups and we had this drill-sargent type dude yelling insults at us and making us do push ups.

fucking christ.

Only mandatory assemblies we had were the pep rallies, around which the entire school day was arranged: all classes were shorter to accommodate the 90-minute pep rally in the middle of the day. Since I was in the "pep band", there was no way to skip out on it. It was actually kind of fun, because drums in the basketball gym were loud as fuck. Also, it was where I heard "It Takes Two" for the first time, still burned in my memory.

The only non-pep-rally mandatory assemblies I remember were a performance by pianist Dorothy Donegan, which rocked, and a presentation on AIDS. There were four or five speakers, some of whom were HIV-positive, and at least one who had full-blown AIDS. As one man spoke, some students were snickering near the front. One just stood up and said, "Are you gay?!" The speaker said, "Yes. Do you have a problem with that?" The kid said, "Yeah, I do." Speaker said, "Well, I DON'T" to hearteningly tumultuous applause.

The ones to the teachers were generally tame, but the ones to students were like "biggest nerd", "hottest chick". Seriously. This was 1990-1994. The assembly was mandatory and you "had" to go up to accept your "award" in front of the entire school.

What the fucking fuck. How was this allowed to happen?

these guys were once featured at an assembly at my high school and they played an acoustic version of this song, I think it was supposed to be a cultural experience. It was bizarre but kind of amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrSKG3TS0uE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrSKG3TS0uE

god why are schools so shitty

One teacher (my form tutor, Dutch, very authoritarian) lecturing the school hall about bullying and telling us the story about how when he was younger he came home with bruises on his arm, so his Dad marched him to the other kid's house and made him ask for a fight.

to this day i don't know what the moral of the story was.

mentioned in the other thread: we were all whisked to an assembly one afternoon that seemed innocuous at first. It began with two young adults doing some philosophical beat poetry about brotherhood and equality and it was actually quite good!

Suddenly, the curtains parted, and a gospel choir came out singing about Jesus, and the lead vocalist urging people to accept Jesus. it was proselytizing in overdrive. A few folks left in disgust, and teachers did not stop them.

The worst thing was...I got whisked to it a second time later that afternoon. I didn't bother to leave, simply because I wasn't paying attention anyway and I was getting out of class.

Kim Peek came to our school for an assembly once. In the days leading up to it, all of the students were asked to submit questions, which would be reviewed by like the student council or whoever, and the best ones would be asked at the assembly. Overall I guess it was really cool but I hated it at the time because it was kind of obvious that the kids who picked the questions only picked whatever they/their friends had submitted, because asking Kim Peek to solve basic fucking arithmetic problems felt like a missed opportunity.

best assembly was in 3rd grade, when Curly Neal came to our school for a presentation and gave me an Orlando Magic headband.

worst was this after school special type play that was done about domestic violence. obviously its heart was in the right place but had they actually had competent actors, it might have gone over well. because of how bad the actors and the script was, nobody was receiving the message and kids were instead howling in laughter. it was really uncomfortable cos it was a serious topic, but what did they expect when they hired a bunch of hammy overactors.

ie:

(abusive boyfriend and girlfriend are at restaurant)

girl: I'll have--
boyfriend: (melodramatically) SHE'LL HAVE THE SALAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!

(friend of abused girlfriend hears her tales of woe)

guy: I should go KICK HIS BUTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!

then there was a gunshot at the end and that shut everybody up. also made my friend start weeping because a friend of hers had just committed suicide a week earlier and it was believed it was via gunshot.

we went to the auditorium to watch a short film about teenage depression & suicide; mostly kids just laughed at the suicidal character

i remember a performance by these guys:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dnVUuQcr0eM/TziUWdvsiwI/AAAAAAAAEaw/36dU3jTllrs/s400/cover.jpeg

and i remember the deputy head playing us 'lifted' by the lighthouse family and telling us to uuuuh take some kind of message from it, and i remember some army guy trying to recruit us, and i remember lots and lots of 'drugs are uncool and only losers take them' presentations.

oh, and i remember being 14 or so and really impressed by tommy sheridan who'd come along to talk politics alongside some chump local candidates from the major parties.

watching this in the early 80's in our cushy high school auditorium in our cushy seats in our confortable town full of good drugs, well, there was a slight disconnect from the gritty and grainy 70's movie we were watching. it's a rough movie. junkies puking. that's mostly what i remember. the whole thing doesn't seem to be online though. i never forgot the dead is dead tagline for as long as i have lived so hats off to godfrey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjnikDoUWic

it's a rough movie. junkies puking. that's mostly what i remember. the whole thing doesn't seem to be online though. i never forgot the dead is dead tagline for as long as i have lived so hats off to godfrey.

omg movies like that gave me nightmares.

my 11th grade History teacher brought in a Vietnam vet to talk to us once. She also told us she used to be married to a Vietnam vet as well.

He basically spouted shit that would have infuriated me today, but I was impressionable then. He talked about how he did what he did and believed in what he did because of *that flag*, which he kept pointing at, and talked about how he hated all the kids asking 'why' about the war.

Then he promptly told us his greatest regret of the war was that he shot and killed a 14-year old kid 'by accident'.

Oops

Did he blame the flag

i posted this in the awesomeness charlatans thread:

ohhh goddd the whole world of high school motivational speakers is probably worth a look

there was a dude who came in to our gym, beat all the teachers at once in a volleyball game, then talked about how it was a crying shame there wasn't prayer in schools.

― Critique of Pure Moods (goole), Saturday, February 4, 2012 5:06 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

um i think i found the vball guy

http://beatbob.com/

― Critique of Pure Moods (goole), Saturday, February 4, 2012 8:36 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

full disclosure i'm not positive that website is the dude who came to my school; i think there are/were a few people working that grift

I swear this isn't a humblebrag.

When I was a senior I was captain of the quiz bowl team (aka academic challenge, knowledge bowl, there were all kinds of different names). We won the state title for our school size and it was a sort of big deal as it was the first time anyone from our region had won anything like that. So we came back and people were happy and there was going to be an all-class assembly in celebration. Well, about the same time, the school ice hockey team had fizzled out in their state championships and came home with nothing. The jocks were super pissed off that us nerds got all the glory and attention, even though there really wasn't nearly as much excitement as there would have been if they had won their tournament.

So anyway we get called out in front of the whole school and the principal and our teacher/coach said a bunch of stuff and all I could think of was the hockey jocks in the back giving us the finger and fucking with us in the hallways before and after, made the whole experience just negative and shitty in the moment and afterwards. Now, of course, I look back fondly on those times but when it was actually happening I didn't enjoy it at all.

Sorry, got distracted with actual work and hadn't been able to keep up with the thread, but to answer this question:

What the fucking fuck. How was this allowed to happen?

The only answer I can give is "small fucking town". The level of shit that was able to go on in that school system was astounding. The only time there were any consequences for anything, were if the football team was somehow negatively affected.

I think thats true for most american school districts tbh esp out in the burbs

The only time there were any consequences for anything, were if the football team was somehow negatively affected.

Presumably, nerds were blamed when this happened?

Haha. Kinda?

I mean, here's a perfect story that sums up my high school experience. In gym class during a unit on basketball, the captain of the football team threw a basketball at my face, from about 8 feet away. Blood immediately starts spurting out of my nose, I turn and say, "what the fuck?". The gym teacher (also the assistant football coach) goes immediately red-faced, walks up to me and screams "YOU! NO CURSING! DETENTION! OUT OF MY CLASS NOW!". While I'm walking out the gym, using my t-shirt to stop the bleeding, he walks over and high-fives the captain of the football team.

Jesus fucking Christ.

To be slightly fair, he never followed through on the threatened detention, but he did maintain the high school's caste system.

wow

i remember in sophomore year of HS we had one of those antidrug assemblies which started out very serious. a couple of students started heckling the speaker from the audience, and everyone kind of tittered nervously. then those students ran up to the stage and it turned out they were part of the presentation, and they spent the next hour telling us about how drugs had ruined their lives. it was actually pretty effective.

then they did the exact same thing the following year and it wasn't so effective. i remember my cool burroughs-reading friend reviling it afterwards as 'state propaganda.'

Our pep rallies seem pretty good-natured compared to all of these others! Everyone was allowed to boo the freshmen at a particular time, followed by escalating cheers for the other classes. If we beat the next-door suburb full of rich WASPS at any event, cupcakes were served ("let them eat cake"). Our girls basketball team won the state championship in my senior year, and if sports girls had to represent themselves at an assembly they got just as many cheers as boys' teams did - possibly because they were winning state titles in things and the boys were not. People were even respectful to the state champion synchronized swim team (the woman who taught it was the head gym teacher of 30+ years' standing and knew all these exquisite ways of making life not worth living if someone was rude about her girls). Drugs and sex awareness happened in a classroom setting (the sex/period ones meant the girls had to go to the female teacher for A Talk, and the boys went to the male teacher for same). We had a preview of this mortification from the girls in the year above who shared the pamphlet HOW SHALL I TELL MY DAUGHTER? with us a year before while trying not to piss themselves laughing.

In elementary school, the most memorable assembly was the Snake Guy who brought all sorts of creepy-crawlies to show kids: 'do you want to touch the lizard?' One of my classmates later became the Bug Guy, doing remarkably similar presentations 25 years down the line.

'do you want to touch the lizard?'

yeah this question would have gotten quite the interesting reaction at my school.

We had Chris Eubank come and speak to the John Locke Society (John Locke being a school alumnus should help you pinpoint the the school and his nature) a slot normally reserved for politicians from across the way or other worthies. I think he had been booked as a 'treat' and came and did what I guess was his stock motivational speech about triumphing over adversity, unfortunately the only adversity most of the audience had seen was not going on a second skiing holiday that year. I've never seen a speaker bomb so hard, he was done in 20 minutes and taunted by public school yahoos in another 20 minutes of questions.

Its not an assembly per se but this thread has reminded me of the bizarre time my French teacher went on a tear telling stories about The Troubles (she was Irish), including a vivid retelling of how IRA soldiers liked to gleefully stab pregnant women in the stomach and crow "I killed two of em!"

... I have doubts this was true, and what in the fuck it had to do with anything let alone a French lesson :|

oh man did anyone ever have to watch the video about how buckling your seatbelt is important because if you get into a crash your flailing failure of a body can fly around and KILL EVERYONE ELSE IN THE CAR?

literally the video showed one person (middle back seat) becoming a projectile and individually killing the other four people in the car

this was in the same assembly where a church came and tried to goad kids into joining, and i never understood how that was allowed in a public school. actually it was pretty euphemistic, they did a vague sketch with a cliffhanger ending and then a guy came out and said "if you wanna know how it ends (it ends with jesus) come to [church event] tonight! there'll be free pizza and you'll have a chance to win a *F*R*E*E*I*P*O*D*"

in another one there was a motivational speaker whose motto was "you're beautiful" and this assembly had the terrible luck of occurring when james blunt's song was huge

he also told the "true" story of a man whose suicide note simply read "i'm going to walk over to the bridge and if no one smiles at me, i'll jump" ("he jumped") and this implanted enormous feelings of guilt about being way too anxious to smile at strangers for my entire life

it just occurred to me that i don't think i can recall any specific school assembly when i was coming up. i went to bad schools for at least a few years, which probably contributes. also probably lots of repression of high school etc.

*memories. high school memories

https://i.imgur.com/g73Yq44.jpg

he also told the "true" story of a man whose suicide note simply read "i'm going to walk over to the bridge and if no one smiles at me, i'll jump" I recall this story as well. Could be in a Glurgepost context on Facebook, mind.

Did anyone else get forced to watch Threads and the Day After in the 80s? I think we might have another thread on that tho.

Who's old enough to remember Florrie Fisher? (Not me).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQRVnKdme0k

I just conferred on Facebook with a number of fellow alumni, including the person who ran the auditorium lighting booth, and none of us can remember anything about the content of any assemblies during our time there.

We had assembly every day at my school, and rarely a week went by without the principal saying that students had "been seen" in town in uniform out of school hours and how unacceptable that was. Yet they wouldn't let us change on the premises and would insist on us wearing uniform while on school property (people were stopped leaving school grounds). To this day I don't know what was an acceptable solution to that "dilemma".

Only other parts of assembly I can remember were the prayers and the announcements of which teachers were absent that day.

It unacceptable to wear school uniform out of school? What was the reasoning behind that?

When I was about twelve there was an epidemic of wedgies at our school. During one assembly all the girls had to leave and the guys had to stay behind for a lecture

A lecture on wedgies

they said that local shops had reported loitering and such from girls wearing our school uniform, but everyone knew the real reason was girls meeting their boyfriends IN PUBLIC in uniform.

great thread!

* Movies - we never watched these in assembly but they were of course popular filler when large portions of the class were away on a field trip or something. "Ferngully" and "Jurassic Park" in 9th grade science; "Sound of Music" in 7th grade music; "West Side Story," "Sister Act 2," "The Little Mermaid," and inexplicably "Dennis the Menace" in MIDI keyboard class. We watched all of "Gandhi" in 6th or 7th grade social studies - took the better part of a week! "Roxanne" in AP English maybe the most unfortunate of these.

* Sometime in 6th or 7th grade, to demonstrate our mastery of German, we did a big group performance of Wiedervereinigung-themed power ballad "Herz an Herz." Wir sind su stark zusammen; gemeinsam sind wir flammen! Something something something, Herz and Heeeeeerz.

* In 6th or 7th grade we had a visiting Shakespeare company whose schtick was to do lighthearted comic interpretations. We were required to write them letters and I complained at length that they were sullying the greatness of the Bard, etc. etc.. They wrote back with a polite and reasoned defense of their approach which I probably still have somewhere.

* Also around the same time, there was some kind of gigging folk group possibly wrapped up with 50 Simple Things YOU Can Do To Save The Earth!. I still remember one of their tunes, something like: "Black waters, black waters, run o'errrr the land." This wasn't so bad, but really, sitting in rows of plastic chairs in a glaringly-bright elementary school cafeteria isn't the best way to get into a musical performance IMO.

* A visiting storyteller, engaged in small groups in the library (this would be around 5th grade). This was pretty okay. He may have done the "Soap, Soap, Soap" story or I may be crossing this up with a time our librarian read this one.

* From the other thread: I remember one time we had to see THE POWER TEAM, who are bodybuilder/stunt magic types - pumped-up WWF clowns shattering cinderblocks and ripping phone books for Jesus. But the school-assembly version didn't have any Jesus stuff - presumably it was meant to act as a promo for their normal show. This is not exactly what I think of when I listen to Queen but I would be sympathetic if somebody else felt that way.

The best assembly was when Barry Louis Polisar played at my elementary school. That guy is awesome.

so, unsurprisingly, "Black Waters" is a much older song. It's good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFVdp1KJiqM

Watching Films in school?

When did this become a thing?

It's not that I never knew this happened, the girls have mentioned this already but I never know before that!

Oh yeah, we watched movies in school back in the 1990s. After exams but before they could officially dismiss us for the year or whatever. Usually Disney so they wouldn't risk offending anybody.

It really sucked being 15 but having to sit in a room watching the Lion King.

Couldn't say when exactly. Our school was a magnet school and probably better funded than most public schools in the district, so there were a handful of individual TVs on big rolling carts, with VCRs and laserdisc players (!) to be checked out to different classrooms. When I was a library volunteer I remember a lot of emphasis being placed on correct pushing of these carts, since if you push on the long side they can apparently tip forward and drop a television on your head. Anyway, I imagine the showing of movies in classrooms directly tracks the availability of such gear...

Good call re: Disney. I think at the end of the year (in the same science class that showed Jurassic Park and Ferngully) there was some kind of easy-going work day where people could bring in music. The chosen CDs were those volume one, volume two things of Disney with the big Mickey Mouse logo on back. We also had an informally-organized student event in the senior courtyard one day, where the two biggest Disney fans of the year faced off in a sort of battle of who could remember/perform the words of whatever obscure song was requested.

In 6th & 7th grade we had to sit through "Dead Is Dead," mentioned by Scott upthread. Also one or two other similar antidrug films. The visiting crusader who showed the films liked to stop them right after vomiting-junkie scenes and roll them backwards so the puke would jump into the kid's mouth. Backward and forward a couple of times while we all hollered and gagged (and laughed) about the grossness, then he'd carry on with the rest of the film.

Best antidrug film was the one where the voiceover ominously intoned, "Even some current pop and rock songs contain messages that glorify illegal drug use."

Cue Boston's "Smokin'."

The one I remember most was a couple of old people (they were probably in their 30s or 40s lol) who came to our middle school to tell us not to drink. The guy's name was Prue and he kept starting sentences with "When I was about your age..." and finishing them with anecdotes about how wasted he would get in middle school. And the reason I remember it so well is that my friends and I spent the next two years starting random sentences with "My name is Prue and I was just about your age..." and laughing and laughing. Note: it did not stop me from getting shit hammered at a young age.

Oh man, just remembered a sort of covering-all-bases puberty and anti-drug video we had to watch. One very uncomfortable scene dealt with nocturnal emissions - the kid trying to slip the sheets into the washing machine, the older brother confronting him: What're you trying to hide?. The anti-drug segment, IIRC, starred Dina from Salute Your Shorts.

I remember some anti-drugged/drunk driving video where I think the Bill Gates looking kid recounting his accident confesses to doing a few "rompers" along with his beers. Still not entirely sure what those were. this was in middle-school health class though, not an assembly.

Usually Disney so they wouldn't risk offending anybody.

Ha, even that was no guarantee w/ some students at my school. We had this annoying born-again in my choir class (he was a former metal musician who ODed on acid and his brain was fried but he found Jesus, y'know), and we were singing for the opening of Disney's Animal Kingdom, and we were singing Lion King songs and learning the Zulu lyrics that went along with it. And he demanded to know WHAT DOES THIS MEANNNNNNNN! I DEMAND TO KNOW WHAT I'M SINGING ABOUT in class. Which ok, fair enough, so I said "c'mon, it's DISNEY, man", and he shot back "Ohhhh Disney doesn't have a good track record w/ me!" and started ranting about the urban legends about the clouds that said "sex" in Lion King, the whole same sex partnership benefits 'scandal' of the 90s, etc.

This kid also got "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" turned off on the bus on the way home from a recording session as the language offended him.

the worst film they showed us was in Driver's Ed, it was an HBO special or something that documented all highway deaths in a certain state on a specific date, including footage from the scene, interviews with survivors/family, etc.

This also included up-close footage of burning wreckage and smoldering corpses. I had nightmares for days and was basically terrified to drive.

the driver's ed teacher made it worse by referring to the deceased as "crispy critters". multiple times. daily.

we got to watch ET not long after it came out, on what was obviously a pirate video.

the only assembly i remember remotely like anything else here was when a policeman came in to talk to us about the brixton riots.

oh god I remember David Toma -- a major disappointment from the satanic panic speaker the year before

Oh, we watched the first third of E.T. in math one day, again near the end of the year, maybe it was like PSAT week and they were trying to keep things mellow. First third of Batman one time too.

We also watched the German versions of The Neverending Story and Das Boot, but at least that was related to it being German class. IIRC, The Neverending Story was interrupted by crowds of students screaming through the halls in celebration of the O.J. verdict.

My high school Spanish teacher had us watch Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown multiple times.

No school-wide movie showings for us. My first elementary school (like all the schools built in our town during the interwar years) had a seated movie theatre in the basement and showed films like 'Godzilla vs. Mothra' on 'days off' eg. parent-teacher conference days.

Thanks to a student population that was 40 per cent Jewish - and the parents who would have raised Hell were it ever to happen - we NEVER had to sit through Jesus-freaky motivational speakers or use the version of the Pledge of Allegiance with God mentions.

In elementary school, if it was raining you couldn't play on the playground after lunch, you had to watch Harry & the Hendersons in the gym.

Our rainy-day after-lunch movie selections were Popeye and Felix the Cat cartoons from the 40s, or possibly the 30s.

We had to go back to classrooms and read or play games on rainy days. Televisions only came out if there was a big/tragic news story or an inauguration.

We had some anti-drunk driving assembly before prom time that I believe was put on by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. It was, as they tend to be, stories of horror and films covering the worst. I just remember some of my classmates talking to each other about where parties were going to be in the hallway after the assembly.

In the late 80's Sal Solo from Classix Nouveaux turned up at my school. He had renounced devil music and was promoting some miserable Jesus song and giving us all that jive about how the trappings of fame didn't make him as happy as praying and generally being a hypocritical pious twat etc. No-one had heard of him apart someone who said they recalled one of his hits from one of mum's old NTWICM albums. The school seemed to think it wouldn't need "policing" by the tougher teachers because we would be mesmerised by this "pop star" and be respectful towards him. It certainly didn't work out like that! Probably the last "sink school" he ever visited, if his ego ever recovered sufficiently for him to leave the house again!

In about '89 or so they brought in this retired military man of some stripe and he basically spent 30 minutes yelling at us to be properly patriotic, not a bunch of pussies, etc. "You either lead, follow, or GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY!" was the big takeaway quote, which we, naturally, spent the rest of that year yelling at each other.