A teacher takes center stage Bergen County music teacher is the 2016- 17 New Jersey State Teacher of the Year By Kathryn Coulibaly, NJEA staff 22 NJEA REVIEW
<strong>Argine</strong> <strong>Safari</strong>’s classroom at Pascack Valley High School is a hive of activity. Students enter during their lunch period to practice “My Shot” from “Hamilton” with a group or to play Adele songs on the piano independently. The walls are decorated with photos of previous classes and choral groups, family photos, and fluorescent collages commemorating performances. The stadium seating permits maximum visibility for the woman at the center of the action, even as a stuffed gorilla hunched over the drum set in the back of the room does its best to distract. For the past 11 years, this has been the epicenter of <strong>Safari</strong>’s professional life, but her story begins far away, in Yerevan, Armenia. <strong>Safari</strong> and her twin sister grew up listening to their father play the piano and sing in their living room. Some of her earliest memories are of his voice filling their house with sound. As the girls grew, their parents would hold musical weekends and encourage them to sing and make music. “My parents recognized our talent early on and encouraged it,” <strong>Safari</strong> remembers. At 17, <strong>Safari</strong> left home to study musicology and theory at the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. She thrived at the school, and developed a lifelong relationship with her professor and mentor, world famous scholar Dr. Valentina Nikolayevna Kholopova. “Dr. K is my role model as a teacher,” <strong>Safari</strong> says. “She respects her students deeply, she pushes them as far as they can go, and then she supports them throughout their careers.” At 21, <strong>Safari</strong> married her husband, Tigran. While working on her doctorate at the conservatory, <strong>Argine</strong> had their first child, a daughter named Beata. Shortly after, the <strong>Safari</strong>s were granted refugee status and immigrated to the United States. Their son, Areg, now a freshman at Pascack Valley High School, was born in the United States. Beata is now a student at Seton Hall University School of Law, and <strong>Safari</strong>’s husband is a vice president of a technology company in New Jersey. <strong>Safari</strong>’s path to the classroom Before becoming a teacher, <strong>Safari</strong> had a variety of jobs, including translator, insurance agent and even a stint on Wall Street. As interesting as those careers were, education and the performing arts were her passion. She taught for several years at the Brooklyn Youth Chorus Academy, an allaudition school, while gaining her business and finance degree from Brooklyn College. It was around that time that <strong>Safari</strong> helped a student who had lost her father in the 9/11 attacks prepare and audition for a top performing school in New York.
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