Faculty Focus: Charlotte Lawrence
Today we're featuring a faculty focus on Charlotte Lawrence, one of the great first year out instructors VBI has hired for 2014. She attended VBI last summer for 3 weeks, and is graduating from the College Prep School this year.
Charlotte explained some reasons for why she chose to work at VBI over other summer opportunities by saying that, "I loved VBI because the instructors seemed to really care about helping us learn and seemed to really enjoy teaching. They were truly accessible, encouraging, hard-working, and so so so helpful. I also really appreciated the focused but still light-hearted environment that VBI encouraged - while camp was definitely challenging and could be stressful, I never felt overwhelmed or overly anxious. Truthfully, it was really fun. Those are the main the reasons that I chose to work at VBI over other camps, as well: I wanted to give back to the camp that had given me so much, and be part of a group of people who genuinely love teaching and learning about debate."
She is excited to teach students about philosophy and strategy, as she has read a significant amount of ethical, critical, and epistemological philosophy during her debate career. She has also gotten very good at employing smart and effective in-round strategy.
Charlotte has debated for College Prep in California for four years. Her junior year, she cleared at several national tournaments, most notably getting to quarters of St. Mark's and semis at the Beltway Invitational and the NDCA Championship. She's competed in the Voices Round Robin (twice), the Valley Round Robin, the Lexington Round Robin, the Kandi King Round Robin, and the California Round Robin, where she placed third. This year, she's earned five bids so far. She was in semis of St. Mark's, finals of the Meadows Invitational, and quarters of the Glenbrooks. Among her speaker awards are sixth place at Voices, fifth place at the Glenbrooks, and Top Speaker at Meadows.
