Christopher Schager

Let me set the stage, literally. Chris Schager, "Schager" as he told us to call him, is a professor I had for 3 classes my sophomore year of college. The classes he taught were Speech, Voice & Diction, and Movements for the Actor (yoga). I enjoyed all three but Voice & Diction is the main one that stands out in my memory. We met for this class in an auditorium. Students sat in the rows of audience seats and Schager stood on the stage. He is a teacher like no other I have ever had. He is adept at keeping students engaged because of his unique and entertaining approach to teaching.  I remember his warm-up drills of saying "red leather yellow leather" over and over.

Background on Schager: 
He is an actor who has received his Bachelor of Arts in Theatre from San Francisco State University in 1991. He moved to Mississippi in 1993 and completed his Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Mississippi in 1996. In 2001, Mr. Schager completed 18 graduate hours in Communications at Mississppi State University. He’s appeared in stage productions of 'The Segull', 'A View from the Bridge', 'Gillian on Her 37th Birthday', 'The Lover', 'Macbeth', 'Betrayal, 'King Lear', 'Hamlet' and 'A Midsummer's Night Dream.' Mr. Schager has several film credits, and has taught numerous theatre disciplines in both California and the Southeast.  Literary inspirations for him have been Dostoyevsky, Charles Dickens, Thomas Merton and Nikki Giovanni.


Tests in Schager’s classes were not multiple choice. They consisted almost totally of vocabulary words for which you had to really learn the definition. The reason being, he would literally give you a sheet of paper with only the words (around 30 or so) and you had to fill in the definition yourself. My major in college was Communicative Disorders. I then enrolled in graduate school to get my Master’s Degree in Speech-Language Pathology. A particular requirement for this field is knowing the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) like the back of your hand. I felt so prepared and ahead of the game because my favorite teacher, Chris Schager had already taught it in Voice & Diction. He says that his motto is "Every teacher has both an ethical and moral obligation to make the next generation better than his own."  It is my opinion that he truly works toward accomplishing that daily.