5 Emerson Students Place in Speech & Debate Competition
EmersonMS
On November 8, 2012, Emerson Middle School’s Speech & Debate team came home with five trophies from the Southern California Middle School Speech and Debate League’s first competition of the year. Thirty Emerson students competed alongside 300 other middle school students from 15 California Distinguished Schools. In the fourth round, five Emerson students advanced to compete in the top 30. Those students placed second in the “Dramatic Interpretation” category (in which students perform a monologue), and fourth and fifth in the “TV Duo” category, in which pairs of students present a mock TV news program including four true news segments plus 30-second original commercials.
Lily Parker, the Emerson team coach, has been teaching English at Emerson since 2000 and brings over three decades of performing arts experience to her work with the team. Before turning her attention to public education, Ms. Parker worked in professional theater in New York as a writer, director and coach, and as a professor in the Performing Arts Department at the College of Santa Fe. She has also taught MFA directorial candidates at AFI (American Film Institute).
Following its success at the November 8th competition, Emerson’s Speech team was invited to participate with ten other schools in an online Shakespeare collaborative culminating in May 2013. Ms. Parker and Kelly Graham, the 6th Grade SAS English teacher at Emerson, also are developing a mentoring program in which 8th grade debate team members work with 6th grade mentees to develop the skills needed to compete in Speech & Debate.