Jennifer Rock
After working 14 years at Pierce College, Carlos Martinez, dean of academic affairs, will see retirement June 30 to pursue his musical interests and travel.
“There are just so many things I want to do in my life. I want to travel and do a lot of reading.”
Martinez has led an extensive career in speech and as a dean of academic affairs for several years.
He graduated from California State University of Los Angeles with a bachelor’s in 1964 in speech and drama. In 1965 and 1966 his first job as a speech and drama teacher was at San Gabriel High School, which Martinez says he hated.
“I had mainly the athletes and cheerleaders in my classes and I found that they didn’t want to learn speech, they just wanted to fool around,” said Martinez.
Since Martinez had a degree in speech, a lot of people would ask him for help with their children who had speech problems.
“I got to be a real expert on something I hadn’t taken a lot of courses in. But once I decided that public speaking wasn’t the course I wanted to teach at the high school level, I decided to look more and more into speech therapy.”
After leaving San Gabriel High, Martinez worked as a head start speech therapist for Brightwood Elementary School in Monterey Park.
With this decision, Martinez went back to Cal State LA where he finished up his master’s degree in Speech Pathology and Audiology in 1975.
He also received his restricted credential in speech pathology which enabled him to work as a speech therapist for the Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools.
In 1973, Martinez worked at one of his favorite colleges, East Los Angeles College as an assistant to one of his favorite bosses, Former President Armando Rodriguez.
“He was a bright guy that changed my temperament around completely,” said Martinez.
At the same college, Martinez was became the Director of Special Education.
In 1979, he moved on to become an Acting Assistant Dean of Student services at Mission College working closely with admission.
Martinez has also served as dean of administrative services at Valley College, the evening dean of academic affairs at L.A City College and finally to Pierce in 1992 serving as the dean of academic affairs and a speech 101 and 113 teacher.
“I think each of the campuses has a slightly different personality,” said Martinez.
Since he lives all the way in San Gabriel, Martinez said taking the day job at Pierce was a benefit to him.
“Taking this job really took a lot of thinking […] I’ve enjoyed it very much.”
Barbara Anderson, department Chair of Speech said she feels blessed to have known Martinez the five years she has been here as a full-timer.
“He’s excellent teacher […] students have always benefited from being in his class.
He’s knowledgeable and an expert in speech pathology. The speech department will miss him, but we hope he will continue to teach part time for us in the years ahead,” said Anderson. Martinez will continue to teach one speech class for the spring and fall semesters but has some other retirement plans in mind such as traveling and playing the trumpet and Mexican bass guitar, the guitaron.
“I want to learn how to play two musical instruments[…]” I want to learn how to play the trumpet….all my life I wanted to play the trumpet but I never had a chance to, so here my chance to take lessons and see if I can do it.
I want to learn how to play a musical instrument called a guitaron,” said Martinez
He also plans on continuing to exercise his speech therapy.
“I want to open my speech therapy practice back up, just on a part-time basis, just to provide a service to my community,” said Martinez. I don’t need to make money; I just want to do it.