Not many can come to expect that a rather young man could understand their future places in adulthood after highschool, but it had been the experience of the Father Dueñas high school 9th graders to learn otherwise. During the 9th grade freshman retreat to the Santa Teresita Church in Mangilao, Guam, students were introduced to important activities designed to both create a degree of cooperation as a team, as well as individually identify personal facts regarding themselves. After being given the opportunity to review which of their peers had chosen not to come to the retreat, the students were instructed to listen to the church representative, whom began to tell his life story of how his past self, whom had graduated from the elementary school just across the street, had arrived at the house of god he was lecturing to 9th graders in. Focusing on the specific life changing events, and explaining in detail his motivations for his current role at the church, the representative issued thoughts of a future past high school, which had not been considered by the students leading up to that point. Moving on to the activities for the 9th graders, the church representative instructed the students to retrieve their Jesus bingo paper, and for them to find individuals who had the matching experiences on the sheet, then have them write their names accordingly. The goal of the bingo student-cooperation exercise was dual purpose, one, to have students interact with each other with the sole purpose of becoming more informed of one another rather than to complete an academic assignment, and two, to exercise the team work abilities of the students whom had, until then, mostly undergone individual work rather than group. During the first break, the 9th grade students expressed their exhilaration over having learned a new facet to their peers over a snack of tuna fish sandwiches, given freely by their 9th grade teachers, having them reflect on their current position in highschool among their peers.
In the following activity, pairs of resembling students were told in private to mimic the functions of a machine as a group, while the remaining 9th grade students were told to guess individually what the machine was. Following the first attempts at guessing the machine which was formed by their peers, the remaining 9th grade students openly blurted out answer after answer from the top of their minds, until eventually ending at the correct answer, the machine that the selected students were trying to create was a photo copier. Having proven that the concept of groups of students creating machines to be guessed at was an acceptable method of expressing an idea to the students, the church representative moved to the second part of the activity. Having the 9th graders organize my months of birth, the created groups were tasked with individually representing an assigned machine to later be guessed at by their peers. One by one, from a fidget spinner to a dump truck, the students expressed their group’s assigned machine, and at each time, the machines were correctly guessed by the other 9th grade students. Having completed the second activity for the retreat, the Church representative explained how it was through the trials which would be faced by the 9th graders, that they would eventually grow in mind and body to become better members of society, from a seed in 9th grade, to a root in 10th, to a plant in 11th, and finally a fruit of labor in 12th. As a better means of expressing his explanation of growth in years spent in school, the representative tasked the 9th graders with their third activity, that being to draw themselves on their first day of school in a way that they interpreted to be themselves. After having received a great variety of drawings, the students were then requested to list 1 to 13 of their greatest loves in life, as an exercise for them to understand what drives them to accomplish what they have set their heart on to complete. Following their fourth exercise, the Church representative dismissed the 9th graders for lunch, where they were given a high quality meal ordered through their individual contributions to the student fund. Alongside their high quality lunch, the students were also given the opportunity to use the recreational facilities located in the faculty room, namely the air hockey and ping pong table, as a manner of reward for working together, and also showing the payoff of individual focus on the work topic.
Putting forth tremendous effort individually after returning to Santa Teresita church, the students were given the opportunity to represent their accomplishments in sophomore year in the form of a drawing as a way of interpreting their future, as explained by the church representative. Following the completion of the task, the students were then told to look into their adulthood, seeing past mere sophomore year, and attempt to view who their friends would be after their education, making the students attempt to identify where their relationships might shift to, past the coming trials inherent to life as a member of society. Coming to grips that their current relations with friends, ones which they had come to accept even from middle school to be their lifetime companions, might not be there past high school, the students were heavily pushed towards what hope there was in a future past their education. Continuing after letting the reality of a shifting social community in the coming years sink in to the freshmen, the church representative then gave the last drawing activity to the students, one which told the students to take their interpretations of the future, of their social lives, and of their accomplishments in a few recent years, and to interpret it in a drawing to show their lives once they had completed their education, showing all that they hoped to succeed after all their toils in school, and even after their trials in adulthood. Into their drawings, the students represented choosing a career, becoming an informed citizen, attaining a higher level of education, their goals and future ambitions, and finally their drive which has propelled them all through and past their education. Closing the experience of the 9th graders at their retreat, the Church representative gave the final task of having the 9th graders individual write a letter to themselves, outlining their deeper personal thoughts on personality and their character, namely what they thought of as bad qualities, and what they intended to do in order to change them for the better. Of all the other tasks and activities assigned to the 9th graders, the action of creating an individual letter to oneself regarding their own flaws was the most difficult, as it had the 9th graders, whom were teenagers, focus on their negative qualities, which otherwise would be avoided due to their being contradictory to the positive focus on themselves, normally made by them in order to create a false hope in the face of an otherwise cruel and dark world which they had recently come to realize. Having completed their 9th grade student retreat, the Freshmen exited the Santa Teresita church to find themselves in a higher state of self reflection, future vision, and the understanding of how teamwork could provide a better future for all members of society, not only just for themselves.