new teacher profiles

Magum opus

by Ellie Spielberg

Apr 26, 2007 12:22 PM

Educator’s lifework is teaching the classics

Not just the headmaster wears a tie. So do the boys and male teachers. The boys’ ties, part of the formal uniform that all students wear, are deep purple, for a specific reason.

“Our school colors are purple and white. Purple is the color of Roman nobility. At the Vatican the most precious stones are deep purple, extremely rare, set into the columns and into the mosaics on the floor,” explains Alex Nazaryan, on his way to teach a Socratic seminar, where students learn to express their opinions according to formal rules of discussion.

Nazaryan is not crossing the leafy quad of a New England prep school as he speaks.

He’s on the top floor of PS 147 in East Williamsburg, home of the new Brooklyn Latin HS.

The name and school colors are not the only cues it takes from Boston Latin, the venerable public high school founded in 1635. It is modeled after it, offering a rigorous classical liberal arts education to a diverse group of gifted kids who have done well on the Specialized High School Admissions Test. Students call their teachers by the Latin title “magister.”

“Too often people look at the classics and think of dead white males, very foreboding and cold, something that will not appeal to the modern reader,” says Nazaryan, who is in his second year as a literature teacher.

“I actually think the opposite. The basic ideas of our civilization are all in the classics. By giving students the ability to study those ideas, you are truly empowering them intellectually in a way that many schools talk about but very few actually do.

“Reading Plato and seeing the justifications for slavery, or reading Virgil and seeing the effects of war, is very powerful because you start to see the origins of all the concepts we struggle with.” 

War, forced labor, the rise and fall of governments, toppled dictators, masses of people trying to escape: None of these concepts are abstract to Nazaryan, who was born in St. Petersburg and had a Soviet education up to the 3rd grade.

His father worked as a physicist and his mother as an engineer. He describes them as “Russian intellectuals, very cultured, who can reference Plato or Beethoven and it’s not labored, it’s part of who they are, a European sense of having a big bank of knowledge that makes you a more well-rounded person.”

They longed to get out of the Soviet Union.

In 1989 Nazaryan spent half of his 4th-grade year in Austria, where his family waited to immigrate to America. He learned German and started to learn English by the time they left, “in around 1990, during the last big wave of Soviet immigration before the Soviet Union came down,” he says.

“Soviet education is incredibly strict. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing, but that’s what you grow up with. The negative part of it is there’s no room for intellectual creativity. The positive thing is that you would never have what happens in some of our low-performing schools here because the society is so different, not in a better way, just founded on a radical concept that made its way into education.”

His family eventually moved to Connecticut, where he went to public school. “There was hostility toward Russians, there were fights in school, but that was all over by the time I was in high school.”

At Dartmouth College, Nazaryan discovered a certain luxury enjoyed by many young Americans. “I majored in procrastination while studying English lit.”

Although Nazaryan plans to teach modern literature in the near future, he is staying with the basic texts for now. “I love to teach the Greco-Romans, Homer, Virgil, Sophocles — and Shakespeare. And the kids enjoy reading them, too. They’re very proud of themselves. They know they’re reading difficult stuff and meeting the challenge. That it’s meaningful and they’re not just doing it for the sake of doing it.”

He loves the diversity of students: “Gifted kids from all over the city, from way up in the Bronx near Westchester to so far out on Staten Island they might as well be in Jersey. They come from public, private and parochial schools.”

He loves his job. “I’m teaching exactly what I studied. I teach one class very similar to an English literature survey course in freshman year in college. What I love about this school is that we teach stuff that most public school educators never get to do.”

And it’s not all Socratic seminars at Brooklyn Latin. There’s fun and a lot of extracurricular enrichment in the offing: yoga, drama club, community service and field trips, to name a few.

Nazaryan loves the sense of unity at the school. “It doesn’t matter where you come from or what ethnicity you are. We are part of a unique community here at Brooklyn Latin, an intellectual culture that stresses thinking.”

A far cry from his Soviet education.

But then again, the apple never falls far from the tree.

“I play classical music for my students. We take them to museums and we took them to Harvard. We want them to be cultured people. To me that’s very important, because I was lucky to grow up in a very cultured family.”