Ten years ago, as a middle school student at KIPP Bridge Charter School in Oakland, California, Victoria Diaz was a student of Teach for America teachers. This fall, she’ll be back in Oakland, but this time as a TFA teacher leading a first grade classroom at Greenleaf Elementary.

“I’m really looking forward to creating my very own classroom culture,” Diaz said.

There were more than 5,000 new TFA corps members nationally last year, including 370 in the Bay Area. Nationally, about 200 current TFA corps members were once students taught by TFA teachers.

“These extraordinary leaders show us what’s possible,” said Elissa Kim, the executive vice president of recruitment for TFA. “As kids, their teachers empowered them to defy expectations and discover their passions. Now, they’ll get the chance to do the same for their own students.”

Diaz’s journey wasn’t as simple as coming full circle from TFA pupil in Oakland to college and back to Oakland as a TFA teacher.

She attended four schools from kindergarten through the 12th grade — including a traditional public school, a Catholic school, and a boarding school in Connecticut — all the while grappling with vision problems (astigmatism and optic nerve atrophy).

She also faced daunting odds: in 2010, the year Diaz graduated from high school, nearly 37% of the children she had grown up with in Oakland had become high school dropouts, compared to 18% throughout the state of California. By the time Diaz earned her high school diploma, some of her friends from growing up had dropped out of high school, some had children of their own, and a couple were in jail.

Diaz said her family and her teachers helped to motivate her to defy the odds. Her TFA teachers in particular stuck with her — even after she graduated from middle school and moved to an East Coast boarding school for high school. She said they kept in touch, urging her to persevere, even through challenges.

“Knowing that I had people who believed in me made a huge difference,” Diaz said. “They’re the ones who really pushed me to keep going. My freshman year in high school, when I felt like I couldn’t do it and I was about to transfer out, they wouldn’t let me. They knew I could do it.”

One of those TFA teachers, Erika Strand, who taught Diaz fifth grade social studies, said she saw it as her job to help Diaz defy expectations.

“No one is like Victoria,” she said. “We knew she was going to change the world when she was in fifth grade.”

Strand, now an Advisory Teacher and Counseling Intern at California Connections Academy, said she didn’t know what Diaz would end up doing, but was impressed with her ability to do so much even with visual impairments.

Another of Diaz’s TFA teachers, Allison Ohle, also stayed in touch — and encouraged her to embark on a career in education.

With Ohle’s encouragement, Diaz became an intern at her old middle school, KIPP Bridge Charter School in Oakland, when she was a senior at Lewis and Clark College. As in her own class when she was a middle school student, many of Diaz’s students were “borderline,” meaning they were smart but not living up to their academic potential. Almost immediately, Diaz said, she saw her work making a difference.

“So many of my students went from getting C’s their whole life to getting A’s,” Diaz said. “Many of my students got their first A ever. To see their faces glowing, that’s really what made me want to go into education.”

Ohle, who is now Executive Director of KIPP San Diego, considers herself to be Diaz’s colleague and friend, and is excited to watch her in action as a new teacher.

“Victoria is a student that I would love to take credit for, but I can’t,” she said. “She’s done this all herself.”

Diaz said she hopes to model her classroom on the ones that Ohle and Strand created for her, and she is looking forward to building a long career in the classroom.

“I definitely want to continue teaching,” she said. “Part of the reason why I was excited to start at the Greenleaf School is that is has a great retention rate. There are teachers who have been working there for ten-plus years who really love their work. I want this to be a career.”