Jackie Vargas, East San Jose

A s part of the Chalk it Up to Teachers campaign, Teach for America and Experience Project bring you this teacher's story.

Jackie Vargas, 3rd grade, East San Jose

At the beginning of my first year teaching 3rd grade in a low-income community in East San Jose, I assessed more than half of my students as two years behind in reading. To prove that my students could read at grade level, 80% of them needed to grow at least 2 years in reading in just one year’s time. The measure of my success, I knew, would be students such as Pablo Vera.

Pablo entered my class two years older and two feet taller than his classmates, and reading on a kindergarten level. In the last 3 years, Pablo had been transferred 5 times between different schools for reasons other teachers attributed to poor work ethic and behavior. Each night as I created lesson plans, I did so with Pablo in mind.

I knew I had to invest Pablo in reading. I also knew that Pablo loved art. His creativity was unparalleled by his peers, as Pablo frequently created masterful works of art from found items: journal pages, math manipulatives, broken pencils, and even garbage. While planning, I discovered an autobiography of Pablo Picasso detailing how his life experiences were infused by art. Everyone, especially Pablo, was fascinated by the story and reproductions of Picasso’s art. When asked to share his response to Picasso’s artwork, Pablo picked up his pencil and began to write when he would usually draw.

Pablo struggled to read 85% of the words in the autobiography, but his eyes never left the page. At recess and after school, Pablo approached me with endless questions and thoughts about Picasso’s art and life. He took the book home to show his Mom and Dad. He started to use every minute of silent reading time to re-read the story of Picasso. Pablo became a reader. By the end of our three-week unit, Pablo could read at least 50% of the grade-level text featured in the Picasso story.

This level of success was not limited to Pablo. Slowly, my other students began to make progress with their reading; and with progress came investment. On the end-of-year assessment, all 12 of my struggling readers had advanced at least 1.5 years in reading – and some had grown 2 years, including Pablo Vera, who entered 3rd grade on a kindergarten level and left reading at an early 2nd grade level.

My two years as a corps member have so profoundly impacted my commitment to this issue that I have decided to join Teach for America’s recruitment team for next year. I will spend my days sharing my story with college students, hoping to shape their consciousness about educational inequity here in the Bay and in our country at large. And who knows… I may even meet Pablo’s future teacher along the way.

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