The Experience of One TOC Champion at LemonShark, by Tico Liu

“As a student of Lemonshark in fifth grade, it had helped me a lot throughout the one year of my debate career. When I started learning Lemonshark in fifth grade, Tony’s course really made me wanted to learn more and compete more in debate. Tony is my first debate teacher but laid down some of the most important knowledge for me about debate which is how to be a really good debater not a debater which sounds or seems impressive. I feel Tony’s courses aren’t long but extremely beneficial to students who do public forum debate and can also hook students interest to public forum. Tony can use teach the required knowledge of the topic to us in an effective and easy-to-understand way, not throwing a huge amount of evidence and letting us read. Which further proves that why Lemonshark would be an ideal place to start off an topic or start off learning debate. At the end of a course, there would definitely be some competition and mock debate which can let us have experiences debating a toipic before actually debating in NSDA which makes us even more prepared. In addition to this, every round of mock debates supported by Lemonshark would have Tony closely looking at it so he can give us some very good and very effective feedback on how to improve and what needs to be improved. He also can help us give very experienced suggestions to specific things like how to improve the wording of some blocks or our case, or as big as giving suggestion to speak orders or giving suggestions about which person should use which format of summary, rebuttal etc. All in all, Tony’s courses and suggestion is bery helpful for me in my debate career.

When I first competed in NSDA actually, it was a while after I took Tony’s course, I was a second speaker but did not know what to do in final focus, but Tony taught me in detail how and what is a final focus. I feel like Tony is a really nice teacher and would always be there when you need help. With his advice I improved from not breaking to semi-finalist then to regionals and TOC’s champion. I really appreciated and feel really lucky to have him as my teacher.”

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