Telpochcalli School instructor Jessica Suarez Nieto is surprised by students and fellow teachers Feb. 28 at the Chicago school after being named Illinois Bilingual Teacher of the Year. (Photos by Kevin Beese/Chronicle Media)

Jessica Suarez Nieto remembers being told in school at a young age in the early 2000s, “You can’t be speaking Spanish. You’re supposed to be doing English only.”

“That really had an impact on me,” said Nieto, a bilingual teacher at Telpochcalli School on Chicago’s South Side. “What does it mean to be a bilingual teacher? To be able to honor people’s full identity.”

Being part of a working-class family, Nieto said, the question from her mother was always “How are you going to serve the people?”

“So for me, teaching was that act of service. This is what I wanted to do,” Nieto said. “Particularly being a bilingual teacher and a math teacher stem from my negative experience in schools, not being able to have people who were culturally able to connect with me, people who didn’t consider me as someone who was teachable, as someone who could actually learn.

“It really grounded me both in being the bilingual teacher I am today and being the math teacher I am.”

That drive to be the teacher she never had helped earn Nieto the honor of Illinois Bilingual Teacher of the Year.

Nieto thanks students and fellow teachers for their support.

“The recognition of being Bilingual Teacher of the Year is a huge honor,” the Chicago Public Schools educator said. “It recognizes the fight and the struggle of people in the past, when we think about Mexicanos not being allowed to be in classrooms, when we had to fight to have a space in public education.

“Even today, we still have to fight for bilingual services or bilingual support that our students need. It’s a constant reminder that the work we do as bilingual teachers matters. It’s so important and it’s obviously something that we need.”

“Miss Jessica,” as she’s affectionately called by Telpochcalli students, teaches bilingual math and English as a Second Language special education classes at the school in the city’s Madison Square neighborhood.

Being a teen mom in high school was another challenge that Nieto faced and directed her to teaching math.

“I had such as negative experience with my high school teacher,” she said. “I was made to feel I wasn’t good enough to be taught math. That really shaped me in saying, ‘I will be the math teacher that my students need so that they don’t ever feel like they’re not teachable.’”

She definitely has become that teacher in the eyes of her students.

“When you’re talking with her, you can tell her anything and she won’t judge you,” Ta’naia Young, a Telpochcalli eighth-grader, said. “She’s just fun to talk to.

Ta’naia Young (left) and Rihanna Rayon Rojas are two of Nieto’s students. “To me, Miss Jessica is like a best friend,” Rojas said.

“Miss Jessica really means a lot to me. I really don’t like the subject that she teaches, but she has really changed that for me. I love her teaching style. I think this (award) really shows she’s won the hearts of a lot of people.”

Rihanna Rayon Rojas, a seventh-grader at Telpochcalli, said, “To me, Miss Jessica is like a best friend.”

“She’s a really nice person. She’s a hard-working person,” Rojas added. “She’s really amazing.”

Nieto, a Northwest Side native, said she feels called to support students not just in academic spaces but in how they understand the world around us.

“A lot of my work in the classroom is really thinking about how do we transform ourselves, but also the world that we live in,” Nieto said. “That’s something that I pose to students all the time. It’s like, ‘Yes, I can teach you math. Yes, I can teach you how to speak in English. Yes, I can teach you all those skills, but it’s what do we do beyond the classroom space to live in a better world?’”

Working at one of the few dual language schools in the city, Nieto believes bilingual education is essential for student success.

“Language and culture are an integral part of learning,” Nieto said.

She is works to bring an indigenous language to her math classroom.

Nieto encourages other bilingual teachers to build strong relationships with their students.

“At one point, I had a student speaking Portuguese in a predominantly Spanish-speaking class,” Nieto said. “Sometimes there’s multiple languages in the classroom space. How do we honor the faces of people? Communication is important. How do we go beyond those barriers to really be able to reach and communicate with our students?

“I think that as teachers, because our job is always about giving – giving, giving, giving – how are we able to collectivize that effort of giving to embed more of the community as well?”

kbeese@chronicleillinois.com