Mrs. Amy Mkrtchian is a 9th and 12th grade English teacher at Glendale High School, and she was born in Yerevan, Armenia. She grew up in Hollywood, California, but the majority of her life has been in Glendale. She calls herself “a Glendale girl.” 

Mrs. Mkrtchian’s favorite hobby is reading. She most enjoys reading classic novels and articles. She loves to fill her sights with words, sentences, paragraphs and essays. Also, when she wants to take a break from all of that thoughtfulness, she likes to watch reality TV shows, like American Idol.  

Mrs. Mkrtchian had an interesting journey before coming to GHS. She started working in banking. She was a bank teller, and she worked at the processing center. Mrs. Mkrtchian thought that she was going to go into banking as a career, but that changed when she started working at Edison Elementary School part time. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to work with kids or not, but then she loved it so much that she quit banking and became a teacher. 

Mrs. Mkrtchian worked at many different schools before coming to GHS, including Edison Elementary School, John Marshall Elementary School, Clark Magnet High School, and R. D. White Elementary.

In the end, Mrs. Mkrtchian decided to come back to GHS, because she feels “like GHS is home to me.” She loves the kids, and she feels that she is connecting to the community when she is at Glendale High. Mrs. Mkrtchian feels happy and grounded when she is at our school. 

One difficult aspect of her job is not being able to reach every kid. Mrs. Mkrtchian wants to be able to connect with every student, but sometimes it doesn’t happen, and that breaks her heart. Something that excites her about her work is her students. She says that after five or ten years, when students come back and say, “Thank you, Mrs. Mkrtchian” or when they come back and say, “Look at what I accomplished,”  she feels excited with a sense of pride. 

A piece of  advice that Mrs. Mkrtchian has for GHS students is to “take the time to really enjoy being in high school and being a teenager. The days will go by fast, and the real world is around the corner.” She hopes that young people remember that the choices they make today will impact their lives in the future, and that everyone should remember to act out of kindness, first and foremost. 

Mrs. Mkrtchian hopes that she can continue to teach English and explore literature for many years to come. She thinks that she has the best job in the world, and she thinks that the students are the “cutest!”