All the classroom is a stage

Teaching is not only a noble profession but also a specialised art. Not every learned person becomes a successful teacher, and the lesser qualified a poor teacher. Even great scholars fail miserably in their teaching rooms. I arrived in Chennai, then Madras, in 1965 to join Loyola College as a teacher of English. The task of introducing me to the staff was entrusted to Prof P N Diaz and from then on, he became my friend, philosopher and guide. 

As our superiors were very strict and expected the students to maintain absolute discipline not only inside the campus but also outside, teachers did not have much problem in handling the students. However, to become popular among the students, we had to use some special manoeuvres. Within a short time, I realised that Professor Diaz was a sought-after teacher in the college, and as a novice in teaching, I wanted to explore the secret of his success. I found that Diaz was endowed with several competitive skills, particularly histrionics and innovation, which made all the students attend his class without fail. I used to sneak into his classrooms, sit in the last row and listen to his deliveries with equal enthusiasm and expectations, as a learner.

Very soon, I found out the main reason for his popularity among the students. He transformed himself into the characters of the play, essay or poem he had to teach. When teaching Shakespeare’s Othello, we found in him Othello himself standing in the classroom with his roving and rolling eyes, full of suspicion. When he taught Julius Caesar, he painted a vivid picture of the indomitable and power-hungry Caesar and also the most honourable Brutus, the noblest of all Romans. 

While teaching poetry, he made the students “fly on the wings of poesy”. For example, when teaching John Keats' Ode to the Nightingale, it was as if his students could literally smell the fragrant flowers like the white hawthorn, the pastoral eglantine, fast-fading violets and musk rose mentioned in the poem. After his class on P B Shelly's Ode to the West Wind, his students were sure to leave the classroom die-hard optimists. He had a knack of making his students instantly fall in love with the beauteous forms of Mother Nature.

His dramatising was confined not only to plays and poems but to all branches of literature. He could transform even the otherwise monotonous prose classes into very lively ones. Humour was his forte; the walls of his classrooms always reverberated with peals of laughter.

“What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state, than that of the man who instructs the rising generation?” said Cicero, the Father of Political Science, twenty-two centuries ago. Professor Diaz was such a teacher, worthy of emulation by all the instructors of the day.