Chatting about Armenia

Darleene Barrientos

Balboa Elementary School students chatted away with other kids on

Friday, but this was a long-distance conversation -- really

long-distance.

The students chatted with their peers in schools thousands of

miles away in cities like Boston; Flint, Mich.; Annandale, Va.; and

Greenbush, Minn.

Through the Internet, the students in the school’s Gifted and

Talented Education program got a chance to chat with other students

in these cities early Friday morning. Teachers participated in a

cultural exchange Internet chat, organized by Project Harmony. The

organization sent Balboa Elementary teacher Maureen Miller and

several others to Armenia for an exchange of ideas on students and

teaching methods in July.

Miller and her counterparts in each city coordinated the chat room

session through Project Harmony, which set up a dedicated chat room

available only to the four classrooms. Miller’s students came in as

early as 7:30 a.m. to be able to chat with the students on East Coast

time.

Students talked about several topics, including the weather. The

pounding rain in Glendale might have been unusual for Miller’s

students, but one student couldn’t believe the weather at the other

end of the chat room -- 42 degrees below zero with the wind chill.

“That’s such a lie!” 11-year-old Michael Mushegian said, peering

at his seatmate’s computer.

His seatmate, 11-year-old Armen Krikorian, who recently visited

Michigan, disagreed.

“Yeah, it could be,” he said.

Other students were discussing Armenia and what the country is

like.

“They’re asking about whether there are kings,” Lucine Oganesian,

10, said. “I told them there is a president. I went to Armenia a

couple of years ago and my parents are Armenian, so they tell me a

lot.”

One of Project Harmony’s goals was to involve each teacher’s

students in correspondence with Armenian children via e-mail, Miller

said. The Glendale students are usually unable to correspond with the

Armenian students through the chat rooms because of the 12-hour time

difference, but some students have stayed up late to chat with them.