An Ambitious Assembly

It's Monday morning period three. This morning was the morning of my
first ever school assembly, something I've been preparing for for a
number of weeks now.

Having completely forgotten to prepare a prayer meeting I was supposed
to lead earlier in the term I was determined not to have the same
embarrassment with my slot on the assembly rota. So much so that I
timetabled a whole week of year 7 classes to prepare it. Year 7 were
very pleased to be involved as they'd not done an assembly yet this year
and used to get lots of chances to do them as juniors.

We tried to do a TV game show style science quiz where the audience had
to answer questions to gain points for their team. The stage was set up
like a TV studio with fancy lighting and we'd made a slide show
presentation on the computer with all the questions on. We had a host, a
glamorous assistant, a camera man, an interrupting furry animal, a sound
effects and computer operator and a correspondent to interview the
audience. I was the voice-over man hiding at the back and controlling
the sound desk (well used with a music bed, four microphones, the sound
effects and, my favourite invention, the buzzer.

The buzzer was a 2D cutout in the shape of the interrupting furry animal
which, when hit, would play music. It was a simple push-to-make switch
in the signal path of my mp3 player which was playing snippits of such
music as YMCA, Song 2 (Blur), Dance of The Sugar Plumb Fairy, The
Beegees, and guitar solos from Pink Floyd and Dave Skipper.
Unfortunately I couldn't get the swiss yodelling or the Top Gun theme
from Adam in time.

Well it was all going swimmingly until my computer crashed.
Unfortunately it struggles to run slide show presentations and decided
that along with playing the music bed too this was a bit too much effort
so early in the morning. I was very disappointed and we had to improvise
a little and cut things short but it seems everyone enjoyed themselves
and several teachers commented on the concept and the work which had
gone into it. All the kids want to take the buzzer home!

I need to go and teach year 8 now, less fun.