The Cupertino Courier
Cover Story
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Messenger: Carmendale Fernandes taught speech, debate and drama at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale for 41 years before leaving the school in 1988. Now, at 82, she travels the country as a speech communications specialist.
Speak Up
Debate teacher made Fremont High a power
By Cody Kraatz
'My students have said to me that they live by the outline," says Carmendale Fernandes, 82. "They eat by the outline and they speak by the outline."
The longtime speech and debate coach hammered organization, preparation and planning into their young minds, and it stuck.
For Fernandes, in the outline she lives by, there is no room for a listless retirement and no time to slow down.
Those who know Fernandes say her assertive, brisk conversation commands as much attention as it did when she coached speech and debate at Fremont High School for 40 years. She retired in 1988.
"She's alive and kicking and just as feisty as she was when we were back in school," says Mark Utley, a local lawyer who graduated from Fremont in 1967 after four years on the debate, or forensics, team. He compares her style to the Socratic method he encountered at law school.
"She was very much a person who tried to teach with a little bit of respect and a little bit of fear. If you weren't on top of your game, she was going to rip you apart."
Speech and debate was crucial for him and other students, he says. It was a time when they developed a lot of the self-confidence and abilities they use personally and professionally today, many as lawyers, judges, teachers, writers and politicians.
"[Speech and debate] didn't drive me to want to be an elected official. But definitely being able to speak extemporaneously and gather your thoughts on the spur of the moment was one of biggest assets where I ended up," says Sandy James, a former Cupertino city councilwoman and two-time mayor.
Fernandes, the only woman ever to be president of the National Forensic League and one of the first people inducted into its hall of fame, pushed James to get into speech and debate during her senior year at Fremont, and she competed in debate and extemporaneous speaking. James says she became comfortable speaking in front of any size group or in a CEO's or governor's office.
"She has this thing she does," says James fondly, but with a hint of the trepidation held over from high school. Fernandes used to take notes on her students' performance during competitions, and started doing it again when James ran for city council.
"The most dramatic thing she ever said was at the last state of the city speech I did in 2004," says James. Fernandes, whom she honored in her speech, sat at her table that night, and she still remembers her teacher's praise after the speech.
"I sat down and she reached over and handed me this little piece of white paper, and I opened it up and it was blank. She said she wouldn't have changed a thing. It was like the biggest compliment I ever got from her."
James kept that piece of paper to remember the moment.
Reunited
"A lot of my friends came out of the program, some of my best friends," says Utley. A friend from the Fremont team was the best man at his wedding.
Several years ago, Utley decided an all-class Fremont speech and debate reunion was in order and spent three years tracking down and calling former students to assemble a database of contacts. But he knew one person would be essential.
"No reunion was going to be complete without her. She was the glue," he says of Fernandes. So in 2003 he brought her on board. She helped a lot with the planning of the reunion at the San Jose Hyatt, something she does regularly as a volunteer for the California High School Speech Association.
The reunion in April 2005 naturally turned into a celebration of how much her teaching had affected the minds and lives of the 65 or so people who came. Many showed up because they knew she would be there, says Utley.
Fernandes has a legacy that is not forgotten among current speech and debate coaches, some of whom worked with her and know her personally.
"Everybody feared Fremont--everybody," said Shirley Keller-Firestone, speech and debate coach at Homestead High School. She started her teaching career at Fremont in 1963 as Fernandes' assistant speech coach.
After Fernandes left, the school went through several coaches. The size and success of Fremont speech and debate teams fluctuate along with the changes in coaching and team make-up.
"She was probably the most successful coach at Fremont High School. She had an extremely big program that was extremely successful for a number of years," says Sheila McKay, the current speech and debate club coach at Fremont. When a popular coach leaves, it takes students awhile to get used to a newer, perhaps less experienced coach, she says.
"They kind of cycle. Sometimes they do extremely well, then they sort of level off, then they get smaller."
The club is smaller now than it was when Fernandes was running it, but it can boast some nationally ranked debate teams in recent years.
"We have people competing, and competing successfully," says McKay.
Speak and learn
Fernandes sees speech and debate as a robust foundation for many other academic and professional pursuits and is not surprised her former students became highly successful.
"They're pretty secure about what they're going to say. They can get up and express themselves, while other people just sit there and they go home frustrated," she says.
Fernandes' favorite type of public speaking is extemporaneous speech and debate, in which a speaker is given a topic and a short amount of time to prepare before they debate. It requires a lot of reading and keeping up on current events.
"That's what kept me aware. I often tell students that's what keeps you alert."
She travels a lot, but keeps up on local, national and international news by reading Google News, the San Jose Mercury News website and U.S. News & World Report regularly.
She has checked off Japan, China, Africa, Europe, Puerto Rico, Australia and New Zealand from her list. A trip to Russia may be in her plans, and she can't get enough of the northern Italian lake country or the French countryside.
Besides teaching at Fremont and various university summer school programs around the country, Fernandes has worked as a consultant to business groups and real estate agents. She has helped Lockheed Martin engineers present the results of their research, a notorious public speaking challenge, she says.
She continues consulting, and for four years has augmented her social life at the Cupertino De Oro Club, where local women in the community meet regularly in an old school building on Homestead Road near De Anza Boulevard. They gather for tea, lectures and cultural programs.
Classical music plays softly in Fernandes' Cupertino apartment, revealing its continuing presence among her passions. She studied at the Carmel Summer School of Music in 1942 just before she enrolled at San Jose State University.
"I originally wanted to be a director. I like the classics, but I love musicals," she says. She directed theatrical productions and musicals at Fremont before she started coaching full time.
She came from her hometown of Turlock to study music, but soon changed her mind and decided she wanted to be a lawyer. The major law schools were not receptive to women at the time, she says. She harbors no bitterness, because she found speech and debate and started teaching locally after she graduated in 1946.
Scene change
Students may be different now, but what makes the real difference in high school forensics today is what Fernandes sees as a decrease in parent involvement from when she was teaching.
McKay explains that these days not all parents can afford to give up weekends to volunteer as debate competition judges, either because of work or having other children at home.
The fact that some parents are not native English speakers and the students speak another language at home can also pose a challenge. But this only serves to help speech and debate students, who are usually high achievers already and that much more driven to succeed. And, they can speak and debate in multiple languages.
"Speech classes help them learn English because they have pressure, because they have to," says Fernandes. So when it comes time to express themselves in writing, they have learned how to organize information and can transfer what they've learned into writing, she says.
McKay agrees that many students find the ability to organize their thoughts is helpful when they have to organize short essays for the written part of the SAT.
The Fremont team has two English-language learners right now. McKay says students who are learning English should have a chance to speak out and be heard.
"The club is open to anyone. People can use it for whatever they want. They never have to compete if they don't want to."
