A Lack of STARs Part I: A Reflection on the Senior Assemblies

By Peter Tran, Staff Writer

While our juniors and sophomores were hard at work STAR Testing, FVHS seniors were treated to two assemblies courtesy of our fellow brethren ASB and BBN.  The assemblies were split up to two days which were in turn split up to four sessions; the first day consisting of one long three hour assembly while the second day consisted of three motivational speakers.  Yeah, getting out of school early without truancies was great but STAR Testing –for seniors– was not all it was cut out to be.

DAY 1: The Longest

Day 1, Assembly 1, Session 1 can best be summarized in the words of a wise capitalist, “I\’ve never felt such a mixture of pity and indigestion.” Day 1 was long. Upon entering the gym, it appeared that this was going to be just another education-injected soma holiday with all of the senior social orders and cliques packed up in one gym like a can of sardines.  It\’s quite pleasant to be there huddled up with all the people you love and the people you couldn\’t imagine being within a forty-mile radius of.  Of course the screaming adolescent rabblerousing and the occasional passing of drugs was kept to a dull roar.  After all, this was a respectable high school assembly, not some wild college lecture.

With much added pleasure, it was nice to see new adult faces standing at the center of the gym, demanding the attentions of my fellow seniors.  It would have been slightly more rewarding had they demanded our ears instead.  As their mouths truffle-shuffled into fruitless inaudibility, it was difficult to discern whether our elders were talking about graduation or Bernoulli\’s principles of fluid dynamics.  The gym became a wonderful animal house of excitement complete with shrieking bipedal beasts and oblivious obstinate zookeepers.  The idea of keeping a bunch of high on summer graduating seniors in one place for three hours appears to be another scientific conundrum.

The senior majority ruled the entire assembly; They talked over the presenters and did their own things.  It\’s as if the presenters were merely court jesters placed by a king to appease the hormonal teenagers.  The audio gain from the speakers was so low and so poor that the whispers from my dear peers overwhelmed the gym.  Supposedly we went through both the Disneyland Grad Night and FVHS\’ very own Grad Knight, but it was really hard to tell what was going on with all that Id swirling around the bleachers.  To lighten up the mood, the class of 2010 was treated with a fashion show and a dance-off.  While no names will be mentioned in praise of these futile exercises, it was clear who the winners and losers were.  When real skill displayed itself at the dance off, the vast majority pulled for the underdog who had little, if any skills at the art of dance, while the clear winner was slighted by a noticeably lesser scale of applause.  It just goes to show how prudent my fellow brethren are.

The climax to the first day was the icing on the mud pie cake that was our senior assembly.  We were treated to a complimentary special forty-minute episode of the BBN.  It was just like another episode of BBN, but forty minutes worth as opposed to the usual fifteen minutes.  One can imagine the great joy my fellow classmates had at watching nearly an hour of The View\’s worthy successor, being that hosts of this special BBN were gracious and modest enough to tug us along with them without being too overly smug.  This episode featured never-before-seen clips unaired by the BBN with a quirky spin off of our beloved Baron\’s Got Talent, but with Edison Chargers! M. Night Shyamalan couldn\’t have predicted such a twist! The talent that the Chargers displayed was playing video games which this columnist thought was pretty clever being that most of our Barons don\’t even know what video games are! But never mind my philosophical discourses, this is all about our seniors and the assembly we were invited to participate in for those wondrous three hours.  In fact, my fellow brethren were so happy to sit through the forty minute BBN that they loudly applauded it even before it was over!  Now that\’s quality.  The grandest applause came at the end when the credits rolled and the seniors were let out for lunch at 11:23 AM; A fitting end to a wonderfully long day.