GUIDE BOOK: Bronx stars Christina Varghese and Barry Price wrote this how-to book on teaching. (James Messerschmidt)
GUIDE BOOK: Bronx stars Christina Varghese and Barry Price wrote this how-to book on teaching. (James Messerschmidt)
These 99-percenters literally wrote the book on how to be a great teacher.
Two Bronx public-school teachers, Christina Varghese and Barry Price, penned a how-to guide for teaching the toughest inner-city youths long before the city’s own evaluation data confirmed they are among the best in the Big Apple.
“Our whole process was a journey. We were teaching together for eight years,” said Price. “The key to improvement was reflection and collaboration.”
Price and Varghese both received cumulative 99 percentile ratings for improving eighth-grade math test scores while teaching at the James Kieran Middle School in Soundview.
In 2009 they published “Cliff’s Notes To Teaching: Journey of Two Inner City Middle School Teachers’ Search For Excellence” to share their classroom strategies for success.
“We recognize that the [successful] teaching is data-driven,” said Varghese, 35, who like Price now teaches high school at Mott Hall V in the Crotona Park East section of The Bronx. “We also know that what happens in the classroom on a daily basis — the teacher-student interactions and true student understanding — drive student performance.”
Price, a long-time basketball coach, said the evaluations can be used as an impartial benchmark to improve performance.
“For me it’s like playing basketball. Don’t take anything personally, you’re only as good as your next shot,” he said. “Ultimately, whether you are good or bad, what matters is what you’re going to do next.”
Varghese agreed.
“Teachers can be turned off by [evaluations], but that shouldn’t be what it’s for. It’s a snapshot — not a portfolio,” she said.
Their advice includes a strict adherence to discipline and an attempt to figure out what really causes students to act out in class.
They also both said teachers must fine-tune their lesson plans to bolster what is effective and weed out what’s not.
Just as important, they said, was having a supportive principal who will encourage them to take risks and allow them to occasionally misstep if they can learn from the errors.
Varghese, a Brooklyn native, has spent nearly 15 years as an educator, and Price, from Queens, became an NYC Teaching Fellow in 2003 after years of managing restaurants.