School assembly gone right, actually.
I went to a fairly scummy South London comprehensive, full of various diaspora from around those parts and as multicultural as only an inner city school can be. It was a well-meaning school overall, let down by the sheer amount of parents who simply refused to engage with their spawn and saw the secondary as a kind of nursery for teenagers. (Actually, they weren't always wrong, it did feel like that sometimes.)

Me being a socially inept teacher's pet, I queued quietly among a baying crowd of 13/14 year olds outside the converted lunch hall on a Wednesday morning, trying to calculate how to get into the hall last so I could be out of there sharpish at the end. We all filed in and I proceeded to stare at the clock for a while as the Head Of Year rabbited on about something or other. But a tension was filling the room; the normal bored mumbling had ceased and people were actually listening to the teacher. Confused, I tuned back in:

'... She was eight months pregnant, and they pushed her to the floor, forced a cattle prod into her vagina and shocked her with it until she passed out. The baby was later born prematurely and died. They did this because she wasn't married.'

Jesus. The teacher said vagina! There was a ripple of uncomfortable nudges in the hall about the phrasing, but it was clear that a sports hall full of teenagers from every year of the school had just been given the starkest depiction imaginable of human rights abuses available from a middle aged man with grey hair and ankle-swinger trousers. The silence was palpable, and all I could think about was some poor woman in Africa (I think, though I can't remember the rest of his story) being put through torture. Many of my classmates were from extremely religious countries themselves originally (Somalia, Palestine etc), was it really right to be raising something like that when opinions might differ at home? I maintain it was a bold move, but a good one.

I left the assembly intensely grateful for my own rights and freedoms and with a sense that the world was nowhere near as innocent as it was 45 minutes previously. Good job, Mr Whatever-Your-Name-Was. Good job.

(Additional: I am paraphrasing the story a little, but the details are there.)
( Bats, Wed 19 Jun 2013, 9:06, 3 replies)

boring

( The Doveston haunted by the memory of his own amnesia, Wed 19 Jun 2013, 9:08, closed)

So's yer face.

( Bats, Wed 19 Jun 2013, 9:15, closed)

She's right doves,
your face is a bit boring
( Major Turd for tonight only, Wed 19 Jun 2013, 17:36, closed)