Towards the end of every school year, Uni students and staff begin to prepare themselves for the Uni High awards ceremony. Awards related to STEM, writing, athletics, and other legacy awards at Uni are celebrated, along with occasional student acknowledgements. While it can be exciting to cheer on your friend or fellow classmate, after spending over an hour in Uni Gym listening to the constant clapping, teachers cracking jokes, students, staff, and parents start to lose interest.
Some awards and acknowledgements are appreciated by nearly all, such as the Athlete of the Year or the annual staff milestone video. However, parts of the ceremony can become repetitive and dull. Like listening to English teachers recite a paragraph of review information for each winner’s submission, or having each National Language Exam placement stand up one by one, or acknowledging every person that participated in some form of Math team.
As a required assembly, Uni Gym is packed each year with Uni’s entire student population, faculty, and parents of award winners. The goal of any awards ceremony is to celebrate students and all that they’ve done and accomplished; it gets tiresome when you ask every genre of student interest to be acknowledged and recognized.
One recommendation is a short assembly for major awards given, such as Athlete of The Year, Student of The Year, or the Directors Award. A recommendation expressed among Uni students is that the awards ceremony should be held after school, for parents and students that actually want to come support or cheer on peers. With this, students, staff, and parents would be able to enjoy the assembly as they wish, without force or required attendance.
Joel Beesley, computer science teacher, disagrees with this student opinion. He stated that around this time of year things start to get busy, and less people would show up at night. He believes it’s not much to ask of students to sit together for an hour, free of study time.
Ultimately, while the awards ceremony is meant to celebrate student achievement, forcing the entire student body to attend has instead created widespread boredom and disengagement, rather than feelings of pride and enjoyment for classmates. Many students start to feel disconnected when an event goes on for so long, especially if the same few students are highlighted, involved or awarded multiple times.