WATERTOWN TRIES TEACHING ARMENIAN SANS TEACHER

The Boston Globe
December 27, 2009 Sunday
MA

In a bid to save one of the last public school Armenian-language
programs in the nation, Watertown officials are experimenting with
a hybrid class for upper-level students.

The program, nicknamed "ArMedia," has replaced traditional
foreign-language instruction for Watertown High School juniors and
seniors with a curriculum that has the students compose online blogs
and create multimedia projects about Armenian politics and culture,
using the language whenever possible.

The school district’s 40-year-old language program was nearly shut
down this summer after its founder, Anahid Yacoubian, retired from
teaching. The system was unable to find a qualified teacher to take on
advanced students in Armenian, the heritage of many Watertown residents
but a language otherwise so obscure that there is no official state
certification for instructors, and enrollment had dwindled to just
a dozen or so students in the upper grades.

Armenian classes were cut from the public schools in nearby Arlington
and Belmont years ago. Most local instruction for young children in
Watertown, which registered the third-highest number of Armenian
immigrants in the country in the 2000 US Census, is now sponsored
privately at St. Stephen’s Armenian Apostolic Church or St. James
Armenian Apostolic Church.

At the behest of many local Armenians, school officials agreed to take
special, if somewhat unorthodox, means to keep the language alive at
the high school level.

Houry Boyamian, principal of the elementary school at St. Stephen’s,
said she is pleased that the Watertown district had found a way to
salvage the program this year. But she also said a more aggressive
search must be launched to recruit a qualified instructor for the
future.

"I would prefer more language classes, rather than just combining
Armenian with technology," Boyamian said. "The school needs to keep
looking. It’s not right just to stop looking."

The hybrid course has Watertown High School’s media teacher,
Vera Ventura, who does not speak Armenian, collaborating with two
Armenian-speaking volunteers: Setta Sullivan, a full-time employee
in the school district’s business office, and Tamar Berejiklian,
a Waltham resident who teaches English as a second language.

The new class is a hit with students, several of whom attended a recent
School Committee meeting at Town Hall to show off video projects they
were working on; school officials are considering adding the program
to the curriculum next fall.

Watertown High senior Ani Moushigian, president of the school’s
Armenian Club, and Ani Israelyan, a junior who emigrated here with
her family in 2003 speaking only Armenian and Russian, said they are
enjoying the new, more contemporary approach to the language classes,
and believe their skills have continued to improve, despite the lack
of traditional instruction.

Their class requires them to read Armenian newspapers and websites
on a daily basis, as well as create in-depth study projects, they said.

Despina Najarian, a junior, said the class blog chronicling the
experiment, at , has received more than
150 hits from all over the world.

Ohanes Arouyan, a sophomore still in the traditional language track
this year but who is creating an independent study project on the
Armenian diaspora, brought his Armenian-speaking father, Khoren,
to the School Committee presentation. "I like the idea," said the
elder Arouyan.

Sullivan said ArMedia is a good solution to the challenges of providing
courses to meet student interests during a time when every penny spent
on education must be justified, and far more Watertown students elect
to learn Spanish than Armenian or French.

"It closes a circle. The students learn not just the language, but
more about where they came from and it teaches them to be better
Americans," said Sullivan, who was raised in Lebanon, where her
ancestors fled amid the mass killings and displacements of Armenians
under a genocide by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1918.

The students, using the Internet video-linking service Skype, are
creating a relationship with a high school in Yerevan, Armenia’s
capital, Sullivan said, with hopes than an exchange program will
blossom in the coming years.

The new effort takes a distinctly modern approach to an Armenian
identity that is deeply rooted in past persecutions, she acknowledged.

"Sometimes, all kids know is about the genocide and they define
themselves through that. That’s not to say it is not important,
but there are many, many aspects to being an Armenian," said Sullivan.

The school district’s superintendent, Ann Koufman-Frederick, said
she understands some academics might argue that a media class is no
substitute for classical language training.

However, in the absence of a qualified, advanced Armenian-language
instructor, the nontraditional class "shows in a clear way how media
tools can be used to help students learn a foreign language," she said.

"The program is still being built, so I don’t really know what it
will look like in the end. But our goals are to build the Armenian
program, and the evidence that it is a success, so far, is that the
kids are engaged and are learning to use their language in productive
oral and written ways."