Behind a door with postcards of art noveau, of small trinkets from the old Germany outside of popular ideas and into the heart of an almost fluffy yesteryear, sits German Professor Dr. Brett Martz. His office is not unusual in so much as it consists of a computer and the numerous textbooks of his studied language. However, Martz himself is a spectacle of the best kind. Of average height and brunette with a perky, barely contained energy, Brett Martz is neither a nearly baby-faced twenty something or a chiseled piece of sixty year old granite. He is rather someone far from cooling down but obviously tempered by work and life experience in the last few decades. His attitude comes from his father's example as a long time coach, his time as a football player, and "thievery" from what great teachers he has had in his life.
However, Martz story begins far away from Farmville, Virginia in South Jersey. Joking that the distinction is important due to most negative stereotypes coming from North Jersey, Martz traces his history from the choice of German as a language in middle school. In High School, while he enjoys four years of football and a state championship win his junior year, Martz also encounters one of the best teachers he will ever have in four years of German instruction and an AP course put together personally for the students. Matriculating to University of Pennsylvania where he double majors in Communication and German, Martz relates the experience as enjoyable, but mostly because of a transformative moment when he is around nineteen or twenty years old. At this time, Martz gets the chance to visit Berlin and his interest in German in confirmed. However, for a while, Martz is not so concerned about scholarship in German as he is in any student's primary concern: making good money. For a while, he worked for a German dot com company operating under U.S. tax laws and selling downloading services. Like so many other dot coms in the early days of millennium it failed and Martz found work servicing computers at a consulting firm; a time he describes as "two years of unsatisfying work."
At this point in his life, Martz is beginning to reconsider his values. While a student, he enjoyed the social life and took for granted the plentiful intellectual food and German literature of his old program. It was time to get back in. Satisfying his new ambitions to teach, Martz headed to the mixed urban and rural setting of University of Virginia and gets to teach for two years. In 2010, Martz became a PhD and started as a visiting professor at Gettysburg College. Unable to progress at Gettysburg, he gained a teaching position at Longwood University where he built a career and perceived that the faculty "values teaching." At Longwood, Martz also notes that the lesson plan is more extensive than elsewhere, an aspect of "value for the students" that he enjoys. However, the average Longwood student strikes him as comparably different and considerably more "street smart" than someone he would have met at UVA, Penn or Gettysburg. It's a comment he makes with a laugh, considering the Longwood student's usefulness in a street fight.
When asked about his teaching methods, Martz held up a bottle of hot sauce to demonstrate the energy he has to use on the daily basis. The bottle was half empty, a metaphor for both commitment and the need to put zest in his student's lives. While liking to read "trends" and " methods" in teaching, Martz commented that the charm ultimately lies in what suits the teacher's personality. For instance, while Martz is wholeheartedly encouraging of the modern "communicative" method, he is willing to use any tools, even the slightest application of drills, to make sure the student is able to get it all. Instinct was also revealed as a major contributor with a reliance on how he felt when he was a student and how he would have liked to be taught.
Finally, when asked about what students should know about him before ever taking one of his courses, he said " I want them to know I'll be hard," but at the same time that he would be willing to give every opportunity to improve. He also really cares about how engaged his students become and the idea of someone "zoning out" on him, even unintentionally causes a reevaluation of his own teaching methods. However, Martz also doesn't want anyone to feel excluded and reaching out says "I want you to be part of the class" with a concerned and at once undemanding air.
