The professor stands at the front of the class, her quick, yet fluid, hand motions making a silent statement. Though fascinating, to someone who doesn’t know American Sign Language, the various finger shapes and body shifts might look confusing. To the students in the class, however, they’re just the directions for the day’s activity.
Brittany Metz has been teaching American Sign Language at Colorado Mesa University for four years. Signing became her passion when she discovered that her younger brother, Kobe, was deaf.
“I wasn’t really interested in it until we found out about my brother,” Metz said. “Then once we figured out that that was going to be his way of life, his method, then my thinking switched.”
Metz’s experiences with her brother were her main inspirations for becoming a teacher of ASL. She began as a deaf education teacher for public schools, and then worked her way up to becoming a college professor.
Teaching at the university is different because Metz gets to teach the language itself as a separate subject. That’s when her passion really started to grow.
“I love looking out, and [my students] are learning something new,” Metz said. “And then there’s like the ‘aha’ moment.”
In her class, she also teaches her students about deaf culture and what it’s like in the deaf community. Because of Kobe, she has had a lot of exposure to that world. She is always in a place where people are going to be signing. Kobe has asked her if she will stop signing when he goes off to college, but Metz will never forget how to sign.
“I told him ‘I am forever in your world.’ Forever connected to it because he will always be deaf,” Metz said.
