And he dreamt big—he wanted the biggest engineering school in the country. He believed that the best way to uplift and empower the Filipino youth was through technological educa- tion. Every graduate, every board-examination passer and topnotcher that the school produced were affirmations of his vision to empower the Filipino youth through education. TIP became my classroom through the years, with Papa teaching me through example and admonitions how to run and manage the school. He was not my classroom teacher, rather he was my teacher for life, and the whole of TIP was our classroom. But Papa Deming was actually a classroom teacher for many years, a college professor before he even thought of establishing TIP. At the National University and at the Manuel L. Quezon University and later at TIP, he was well liked for making his students understand the subjects they feared most—algebra, trigonometry, analytic geometry and calculus. He brought his prowess as a teacher to many more students and teachers in many more classrooms across the Philippines with his author- ship of textbooks in these same topics. His books explained, in the simplest manner possible, the concepts that were otherwise hard to grasp for Filipino students, when encountered in books by foreign authors. With Papa’s books, it was as if the reader, a freshman or a sophomore college student, had a private tuto- rial with the master himself. Godwin (in Sullivan, 1996) said: “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.” Papa’s countless engineering students, some eventually becoming his employees, would remember him for his booming voice and colorful delivery of lessons inside and outside the classroom, for stand- ing throughout his lecture and never sitting down to be better
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