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The ten classes of Armenian

St. Gregory Armenian School in White Plains is a positive force

by Gregory Lima

Published: Thursday April 09, 2009

Nectar Munro’s second-grade class at St. Gregory Armenian School. Gregory Lima

White Plains, N.Y. - In a large sense every church is a school, some more than others. The beautiful, expansive church of St. Gregory the Enlightener in White Plains, New York, started as a school even before it had its own altar as a church.

It started when a group of Armenians who had moved to the northern suburbs of New York City sought a more local place to worship and to teach their children to speak Armenian. They found Fr. Karekin Kasparian, then the dean of the St. Nersess Seminary, recently arrived in the area, who happily obliged by setting up seminars and classes on the Armenian spiritual and cultural heritage along with Armenian-language classes for adults and for children.

Soon the group became a parish and Fr. Karekin became its pastoral priest. Over time the means were found to raise a church that from the outset would make very ample provision for the school that was already in existence. Today, some 10 years after the consecration of the Church of St. Gregory the Enlightener, the original number of classrooms has doubled.

Armenian as a second language

Over the many years when Armenian was widely spoken at home among the immigrant communities, it was regarded as the mother tongue and taught as a first language. With generational assimilation, however, it became in fact a second language, and in many cases the forgotten language, although it was not easy to recognize it as such. The loss of language threatened the profound loss of cultural identity and with it Turkish genocidal triumph over the dispossessed survivors.

The recourse was to tie language instruction to the institutional longevity and organizing power of the Armenian Apostolic Church in America; to teach Armenian as a second language, and to be serious about it. To be serious about it meant to separate it from Sunday school, giving it its own independent space and validated academic curriculum. It also meant replicating as closely as possible family instruction through direct, personal, one-on-one teacher-student participation in small classes, and further, to locate and employ the best pedagogical, peer-reviewed teaching techniques. It also helped to call on the cultural resources of the community.

The result as seen in the St. Gregory Armenian School is ten classes of Armenian every Saturday morning. Each class is tied to the equivalent location of the children in the public school system, the children placed in nursery, pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, then first through seventh grades. Moreover, the children stay comfortably together through the grades creating enduring, interactive friendships. They take a child at any age, place him or her in the grade appropriate to the age, the teacher making the accommodating adjustments.

According to Margrit Hamparsoumian, the school principal, starting at the earliest age is preferable. That is why they include teaching Armenian at the nursery level. But at each age the children have personal strengths that can be called upon to make learning the language natural, stimulating, and fun. There have been some excellent results at all grades.

A clustered archipelago

Each of the classes has a distinctive character of its own. Going from one class to another is like visiting separate islands in a clustered archipelago, admiring the artwork in one, listening to the recitals in another, watching a group dancing, or nodding approval at the melodious harmonies of the choral voices in others. The children are kept busy. Much of the learning is through action and interactions that are akin to group play.

Each grade level has its own teacher, and where necessary, two. The variation in teacher personalities creates different class atmospherics. In some classes the teacher has an overwhelming presence and one can get the impression here that spring has come and every seed must burst into bloom, and if force of will can make it happen, it will. Another might have an autumnal feeling, a time of plenty where we simply reach out and gather the already ripened fruits. Some of the teachers have their own children in their class. As 6th-grade teacher Mari Yapoujian explained, "If I ask my children to come here, I must do my part also. I may be the teacher, but I find I learn with them, not only by preparing the class but in the class. They have better memories than I have. They become my teachers too."

Not everyone is delighted to be there, and there are some you cannot keep away. As they grow older some can rebel against their parents' insistence they attend class. Asking one such very young lady what she would rather do, she answered "Sleep," which she seemed to manage exactly where she was. Until it was time to dance. Then the sleepy girl turned into a dynamo. There was also the boy who had finished all the grades and still came back. He was drawn by the pleasure of speaking Armenian, the cultural activities, and the friends he had made.

Drawing on the community

Language and culture create each other until there is a fusion that it may be impossible to separate. The children may be learning the language but it is successful only to the extent they are learning and directly participating in Armenian culture. One of the strengths of this Armenian school is its ability to call upon Armenian cultural resources in the New York metropolitan area. A good example of this is Rita Kahvejian of New Jersey's Shushi Dance Group and Khoren Mekanejian, composer and choirmaster.

There is a special pleasure in seeing children in full costumes rehearsing their parts in an Armenian play. Or others in rigorous dance lessons, where only perfect posture in all body parts is acceptable, along with precisely choreographed steps. Or seeing the children rise to and meet the challenge as Armenian music fills the auditorium. Nor is the satisfaction less when visiting Shant Mardirossian's history class and seeing the students in the physical act of handling coins of the realm and imagining how they were used in the different historical periods.