“Hermanos [beloved family of Heaven]: demos gracias a Dios Padre, que os ha hecho capaces de compartir la herencia del pueblo santo en la luz…”

Colosences 1:12

Happy Easter to everyone…

This very “incarnated text” (really, no other way to say it) is being shared in the first “original sketch” form in Easter. The sketch was completed until part V on Easter.

The “farther end” to that side of the world that I am able to “see” is Honolulu: that is “the end of the world” around there for me… so because this is meant to be at the same time a beginning and an end, like it happens with the paschal candle… the beginning of this Crescere Communio was shared at the Easter time zone… of the end of the world…

What you can expect to be added in the already sketched parts… is more mystical content and more “personal context”… The parts that were meant to be still unsketched are because they are meant to be incarnated deeper… once again, through the Holy Spirit.

The whole text in the final version is meant to be shared at Pentecost… for very evident reasons, we think that can be seen.

Jesus Charity, we adore You with our whole growth…

Enjoy grow together in communion!

There is an amazing scene from the movie “Batman Begins” that you can see in YouTube:

It is titled “The Will to Act“, and although I am not an expert in superhero movies, you can bet this is an amazing training scene, a scene of literally “hands-on” learning. Please, don´t even dare to mention “swords-on” learning, don´t let students know that concept, especially second-graders. They will take it literally and bring their swords to the classroom. I had a bunch of second-graders who never stopped asking me to bring wooden swords to the classroom; that is why I say “second-graders.”

As you will soon realize as you read this second part of “Yes, We Can Grow Best!” that contains the keys to a growthful philosophy of education… how a growthful education for my students was meant to happen. Of course, I never was granted the freedom to fullly act according to my own will. I was always exposed to toxic environments and social control tactics that greatly limited the performance of my will to the extent of only being able to act according to what others allowed or not to happen, nor according to what I willed to happen… and now, finally, I can expose what was meant to happen in my growthful classrooom, what mattered to me and the education I meant to give to my students while I was a teacher.

Despite having the will to act, as a teacher I was never allowed to have the freedom to act according to my own “growthful will” to act. However… I do have had and currently still have the grace to act in a way that I can make it possible for my students to know what mattered to me most as a teacher and what should have happened in my classroom, but I wasn´t allowed to… so this is it, students, this is it what you should know when the appropriate moment comes. This whole part II of the text “Yes, We Can Grow Best!” shares the grace I have received to learn to be, to do, to grow, to glow, and to bloom in a growthful way. This whole second part of the text, as currently shared, is wisdom-based, the fruit of pure grace to act and of the experiences I had as a teacher, including the experience of being changed by what I learned from my students; I haven´t yet reviewed the proper philosophy of education references, as I will do for the final version of this text —expected to be shared on Thanksgiving Day—, to corroborate that what I have written is actually what is meant to be: the full philosophical exposition of a whole philosophy of education.

So… sometimes… the grace to act matters as much as the will to act. Sometimes you are not allowed to have a will of your own to act, everyone can be assured I could have never willed what my students went through… but still, then you find out you do have the grace to act according to what is meant by God to be in unity of being and act, if you let the Holy Spirit act and focus in what matters, not in what happens.

This whole second part of “Yes, We Can Grow Best!” shared that grace to act that I received as a teacher, shared as a final living lesson to my students so they could have growthful healing, too. Nope, the evil of what happened to you as my students was not willed by God nor by me. What you can read in this text was what was willed by God´s grace and by me. This is meant to be our grace to act.

Guess from where such a beautiful grace can only come from? From Jesus Charity´s Heart. This is literally hearts-on learning, in every growthful sense possible to be applied. All this is not only the fruit of the grace I received through my students´ gaze, simply for serving them and them being who they are to God-Love-with-us, but also the grace I received through Jesus Charity´s gaze upon them and me.

There is a beautiful song video made by Celine Dion in Las Vegas, of her song “If I could“. Is a song that any loving parent would sing to their children… and it would be an amazing song to transform into a “loving teacher” song. You can hear the song here:

If I could… this growthful education I am explaining now would have been the education I had given you, beloved students: the truth-based, person-affirming and fraternizing education you desserved and needed. I tried. I did my best. Now I share, with this second part of this text, what was meant to happen in the growthful classroom I tried to create for you.

If I could… I would have erased completely the hateful social context of your human right to receive an education centered on you as a person… being violated over and over again… But I couldn´t. As a matter of fact, as I am writing these lines, I can´t escape neither the forced social context of my human rights being systematically violated, over and over again, even by the very own authorities that are supposed to serve the citizens honoring those rights unconditionally… In the same way, I can´t escape the social context of human rights violations, and neither could you… and is not my fault nor your fault; it is a systematic social dysfunction. The human rights violations that are allowed systematically in a single part of society will necessarily repeat themselves in other parts of the same society also, because the dysfunction is systematic and social; it’s not due to a personal “fault” but due to a dysfuntion in the way a whole society works. Usually these kind of dysfuntions are accepted as “normal” by the society where they happen.

Well, as you can see, I haven´t accepted them as normal, and I have had plenty of times to choose to assume them as “normal.” I pray you also learn never to accept any violation of human rights, either committed against you or around you, as “normal.” Wherever they happen, whenever they happpen, whoever does them, violations of human rights destroy peace, destroy lives, and destroy society from within.

So… here we are. Attempting to make God-Love-with-us an offering of peace for future generations, as we are called to do it, in the middle of the most absolute and complete lack of the rule of law.

You, beloved students —making possible your most growthful personal formation— are the victory of the saints, the victory of a new albor of this Morning Star that makes all things anew with a new language, never spoken before: the language of an integractive human personal formation consummated as a living work of Love, each one of you a unique living work of Love, that adores Him with the whole growth in this altar of new albor, in this “altar de la Patria”, as our growthfulness —achieved by the grace to act, because nor me nor you willed these human rights violations to happen— makes possible a new albor for everyone else. In order to make possible that new growthfulness to be radiated in a new way… some doors must be closed, and that is totally necessary.

I cried a little bit while writing this “closing-the-door-of-my-teacher-stage-of-life” post, but it is good and healthy to allow you to cry at the appropriate times. Nope, what happened to us —what authorities allowed to happen systematically, one school after another— shouldn’t have been allowed to happen to any child or student, but we can all become growthful after what we have learned together… from the experiences —also known as “unwilling learning”— we have shared together as teacher-students since the very first time I began to be a teacher, way before being a certified teacher, although I don’t talk explicitly about that part of my teaching experience in this text, here I only tell explicitly the certified-teacher experiences. Lessons can be learned from all this, for the other ones to come after us. I couldn´t eradicate the social context of human rights violations committed against you, and around you; that is true. But I could choose to be the example that another way to conceive a civilization is possible, that another way to teach is possible, that another way to conceive the education of our children is possible, allowing them, and you, to become the best you can be according to who you are and who we are called to be. That is the “growthful dream” I explain at the end of this text as the harvest of a new civilization of Love, of a growthful society.

You won´t need to hide like I am literally doing right now in order to be able to function socially due to the extreme violations of human rights around me. You will be able to have a free life and a free mind if the lessons of what was allowed to happen with us and around us are learned.

Beloved students: keep the grace, and forget the rest. Keep the best, and forget the rest. Dont let your wings be cut by the trauma, because you are meant to reach very high heights as the star-seeds you had always been, as the growthful stars you had always been.

Truly, there is nothing to forgive of anything of what you had been forced to do. You were forced. Nothing was your fault, nor mine. We can simply choose to focus in what was supposed to matter, not in what happened.

This text, “Yes We Can Grow Best!“, focuses in what matters, for you and for many students more to come. The whole writing process of this text had been a truly graceful and growthful healing process to close an extremely traumatic stage of my life. There is only one thing worst than being tortured: seeing innocent people being tortured due to who you are (what was being done to you and to me was to not allowing me to be, neither as teacher nor as the best person I could be)

Dare to be growthful, beloved students! That is the best social healing possible in these circumstances.

I am truly thankful for the time I was able to share with you and help you to grow. I repeat now how I paraphrased Randy Paush at the conclusion: my dreams for my students are very growthful: I want them to find their own path to fulfillment and achieve their own dreams. And given that I won´t be there, I want to make this clear: students, don´t try to figure out what I want you to become. I want you to become what you want to become, as long as you become the best person you can be in the process of becoming who you want to become, according to who you are and who you are called to be as an equal and dignified part of a growthful “we, the people”.

As I explain at the conclusion of the text, using the same tone that Helen´s teacher uses to say, “SHE KNOWS!”: “THEY GROW!” YOU GROW! And yes, you were the ones who let what mattered be in my classroom; you were the ones who gave me “the key for a growthful philosophy of education.” Well, technically, there are 17 keys right now, not only one key, but you get it. You can see the scene I am referring to now and that I also use at the conclusion (A Growthful Harvest: Launching a Growthful Society) here. It is a scene from the movie “The Miracle Worker“:

Wherever you are and wherever you go, whatever you become, dare to learn how to be growthful and do your best, because that is the best last living lesson I could ever give to you as the growthful teacher I meant and tried to be for you all. You will ever be the act of my growthful dream come true and the beginning of the launching of a growthful society: yes, we can grow best!

A few final comments must be included in this post in order to make possible the best understanding possible of this text.

The first one: as you may realize as you read the text, the perspective is not legalistic at all. Yes, about a thousand laws were violated through everything I have shared, but that had never been the main issue by itself to me. I do assume a very concrete legal issue in the “Growthful Healing” section, when I talk about the privacy issue: to what extent should a teacher keep her privacy duty if a student´s integrity is at risk and there is clear institutional abuse evidence in the private information that the student provides? If the scenario is about domestic abuse, all teachers are clearly told that in that case, the teacher must provide all the evidence, even if it is private information provided by the student. However, no one tells you explicitly the same if we are talking about institutional abuse. Should I photograph my students’ notebooks to demonstrate the institutional abuse pattern, even if their notebooks are meant to be private? Should I photograph their IEPs simply to show how the documents are being manipulated for institutional harassment purposes, even if that means breaching the student´s privacy? Legally speaking, that was the hugest issue to me. It took me a thousand years to realize that if I had the evidence to prove institutional abuse in courts, it was my duty to provide it to the competent authorities by whatever means I could in my very difficult circumstances: whatever I did in my devices (posting private posts, taking a photo, take a note in the note app of the iPhone…) was being seen and used at all moments both to commit abuse and also by the authorities to assess what was going on, and it was the second which mattered most at the end, because the firsts were the ones committing the crimes… and trust me when I say, there is a moment you get tired of playing mind games with the abusers who you know that are accessing what you do in your device… I have gotten used, due to the nature of the abuse, to having a totally public life, because wherever I am, whatever I do, no matter in which device I do it… everything had been seen for years by both authorities and criminals. I had been systematically denied the very possibility of a private life since my whole life… but my students should be denied that possibility also? The issue was very real… and in the end, preserving the integrity of the students had more weight than breaching the privacy… because it was already being breached by the criminals, no matter what I did or did not do. I realized that very, very, very evidently when a eighth grader in my home classroom had a clear anxiety attack when I put the movie “Justice League” for the first time in the classroom (I hadn´t seen the movie myself, but I knew the content was appropriate for them) and the movie begins with a song that says “EVERYBODY KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWS, EVERYBODY KNOOOOOOOOWS…” She had a full-blown panic attack as she heard the song, and I gave her space instead of letting know to the very administration that was committing the abuse (they knew, of course, I described clearly what happened on my own device, and they hacked all my devices for their psychosocial control purposes). That factor was very determinant when I chose to “breach” the privacy of students on my own (that means: I knew whatever thing I put in my devices, no matter how “private” I could put it, would be seen by everybody who was hacking my devices): their privacy was being breached first by the abusers, and the students themselves knew they couldn´t do anything about that. I myself wouldn´t be helping them if I didn´t expose everything that was going on. The only way to keep the students empowered was by showing them explicitly, with the example, because no one would be able to recognize openly what was going on and why the abuse that the school administration did was wrong. However, my main issue is not legalistic at all; I simply limit myself to state facts, including evidently illegal facts… but for me… they were not only victims: they were people first, they were a personal identity first. I always had the “human dimension” of the whole abusive scheme very clear. If I did what I did was because I knew the students themselves deserved to know the truth, not merely as “evidence” to be shown in courts, but for themselves, so they could be able to understand at the appropriate moment why what was going on and what was being endured was so damaging to who they were meant to be as persons. This has especially deep connotations in the first school I describe in my text, which was the most institutionally abusive of all. I now know, I will face them in court someday, as I have clearly stated in my social media, that I know they read.

The second comment that must be made about this text is that… the lack of recognition of education as a human right is way more common than anyone could be able to realize. I myself had been a missionary in places in which students were totally unable to learn beyond very basic primary school (among Guarani indigenous in Paraguay), and we as missionaries could do anything about it because it was meant to be something done by the state, not by us (we did volunteer in the school, but our missionary focus was religious, not educative). Students among us may not realize what I have realized since being a missionary student in high school: not everybody has the privilege of being educated. Students have this tendency to think that school is mandatory torture, and they are suddenly shocked when you show them evidence that education… is still a privilege, not a human right at all. I read an article today or yesterday that said that 280 million children around the world are unable to go to school at all. I am not the best person at math at all, but doing very bad math here, and considering there are 2 billion children around the world right now… we are talking about TWENTY FIVE PERCENT OF CHILDREN OF THE WORLD BEING UNABLE TO RECEIVE AN EDUCATION AT 2024. Whoever thinks education is currently a human right is hugely mistaken: as it is right now, education functions more as a privilege for some, not as a human right for all. A lot, way a lot, must be done to reach populations in which schools are not yet built. I would dare to suggest creating a worldwide organization like Teachers Without Borders (like the organization Doctors Without Borders) to provide a regulated structure so there can be young teachers who volunteer to go teach somewhere where is needed and there are the language capabilities to teach (yes, you need to know the native language for being able to teach somewhere). Especial reinforcements should be given to the education provided to refugees or at war zones because that is the only window those children will have to a sense of “normalcy” in their infancy and childhood among such extremely exceptional socioeconomic circumstances. Schools should be unconditional sacred ground to everyone, especially in war zones… or in zones where there is no rule of law, as it has happened the facto where I had been teaching. Whoever dares to touch children and use them as war weapons, whoever dares to train children as terrorists, whoever tortures children at school, whoever kidnaps children from schools… should be prosecuted for a crime of war in international courts of justice. As a matter of fact, I have asked myself several times if the children´s holocaust I have described, very concretely in the first school, should be prosecuted directly at an International Court of Justice and not at a federal court.

A final comment about the revision process that will be followed next, after what is being shared now, with this Part II.

There are certain revisions of the text that I can´t be expected to be able to do now. One of the comments I have been made about the “progress” achieved in this text is that the glowers section is too short because I have no experience in how school mentorship works, what students think about the importance of school mentoring, and what difference it does to them to have a good mentor as systemic part of their educational background. Well, the observation is quite real, but the fact is: there is no school in Puerto Rico with mentors; I would have been commented that as a student teacher of the most important Faculty of Education on the island who already was doing comments about mentors being needed in schools. I had never seen a school with mentors, no one has them. So you may expect that in the long distant future, a wider revision of this text can be done when a growthful educational environment can begin to actually be reached, and I can know more about what a glower is meant to be from the student´s perspective. I could consider myself to have had “mentors” in my own school years because I had a very close relationship with some teachers and school personnel, but I had never seen a school-wide mentorship system work in a school setting, so I need more experience to handle the glowers section properly.

Despite that kind of evident limitations, totally normal to be expected in circumstances like these —there are things in this philosophical exposition that do not exist yet… worldwide. This is not merely a “national” limitation, this is not a matter of concepts like “psychopedagogist” or “psychohumanist”, among others, not existing yet in the United States: most of what I am exposing doesn´t exist yet in a worldwide sense—, the final version of “Yes, We Can Grow Best: Keys for a Growthful Philosophy of Education“, with all its revisions (including an “academic” and a final “editorial” revision, that will be done after the wisdom-based revision has been completed) is expected to be completed and shared on a next post in Thanksgiving. I won´t ruin surprises, but you can expect the following scene to be discussed in the Thanksgiving post:

Another scene that will be discussed in the Thanksgiving post, especially towards the topic of “closing doors” of my philosophical and certified teaching eras, will be this one:

Yes, this philosophical exposition is simultaneously the “closing scene” of my philosophical phase and my teaching phase of the growthful story of my life.

For now, the whole wisdom-based text version of “Yes, We Can Grow Best: Keys for a Growthful Philosophy of Education” is attached at the end of this blog post.

Let´s keep growing together in communion! 🌻

It is highly unusual that I share sketchs of a text I am in the process of palabrizing, but this time I will make an exception, for very mighty reasons. Be aware that because this post is a sketch, both English and Spanish will be used on it. As the text progresses, you can expect it to become a fully English-written text, using grammarly to express my ideas properly. Right now I am not even using Grammarly, I am simply sketching ideas in my iPhone note pad.

All this began with an email of my ex-thesis director, sent just before going to sleep, in which he told me —in a very fraternal way— “te quiero mucho”. I was deeply shocked for those words, not exactly only for the institutional sense —I won’t explain this further, but for now it is enough to assume that you can consider extremely rare than a person belonging to the institution he belongs can say something like that to a woman, especially a woman like me— but for the existencial sense: it is quite rare in my life that someone says me that, I am used to be gaslighted, mimicked, abused by everyone around me. I had no answet to the email: I had no idea how to answer to a human affective expression, not even if it was done in a very appropriate context. I do know how to answer to divine affective expressions… but until that email I was not aware that I have no idea of what to do if is a human around me who does the same than is being done in dreams.

We prayed this in last night dream, of course, and the appropiate way to answer him was prayed… and I did answered his extreme kindness during the day, when I felt prepared to do so. If I was unable to say it by words, I should do it by action. So, I did, quite literally…

And in the middle of the process of explaining him what should have been explained… well, a whole Growthful Philosophy of Education began to be conceived, palabrized and sketched in my iPhone. That wasn’t expected at all to happen today, and that is why I am choosing —as an exception— sharing the sketch of this uncoming text. This time I will share the sketch, the original text and the revised text. This is the sketch. 

De ahora en adelante, en lugar de el estudiante doctoral preguntarle al profesor o profesora X si acepta ser su mentor… va a pasar lo contrario, como pasó en el sueño de anoche: ahora lo que sucedió implícitamente fue un “intellectual proposal” en el sentido contrario, en el que el profesor o profesora mentora va a decirle al estudiante “te quiero mucho, quieres escribir esta investigación/research paper/tesis?” 😂 Its hilarious how all this thing happened… simply due an email, that was quite short but deep enough to have consequences. This time the “thesis director” will be the radiant one among my family of Heaven.

I feel I should clarify: aunque mi ex-director de tesis fue el que me dijo “te quiero mucho”, NO FUE EL QUIEN ME PIDIO QUE ESCRIBIERA ESTO (eso debe quedar claro), fue mi familia del Cielo la que me pidió que escribiera la filosofía de la educación que dejé pendiente por escribir, y dije que sí, pero no lo veía como algo que literalmente me fuera a salir inmediatamente, como me salió hoy. El título original de mi tesis de filosofía de la educación era algo así como “Keys of a Peircean Philosophy of Education” o algo así, mi ex-director de tesis insistió mucho en la palabra “keys”, eso lo recuerdo bien.

Realmente planificaba leer un poco de psicología antes de hacer lo que se me pidió anoche, no lo vi como algo que pudiera ser capaz de ordenar y palabrizar hoy mismo, sino mucho más adelante. Todo lo que pasó hoy was highly intense Holy Spirit action, again. El “intellectual proposal” de anoche se dio con una pluma nueva, no con una alianza, creo que el detalle es importante de aclarar.

Mi familia del Cielo opina que si mi ex-director de tesis hubiese hecho desde un principio lo que hizo en ese email, la tesis doctoral de filosofía de la educación que me pidió hubiera sido escrita hace años atrás, sencillamente debió pedir las cosas “con propiedad” 😂😂😂😂, like Jesus does with the women of the well in The Chosen scene: «I am sorry: I should have said “please”». Really, is too funny how my family of Heaven told me this contemplatively in the dream. 

La escena a la que me refiero puede verse aquí:

How we did choose to tell my ex-thesis director “yo también te quiero mucho” through action, despite being an email writen with words?

I feel I can share the email I wrote to him without any kind of problem. Here it goes:

Muy estimado profesor X [I wont say his name here]:

Your kindness is outstanding. No se preocupe por el momento en que logre tener el tiempo para contestarme. Esto se lo llevo diciendo desde mis tiempos de estudiante graduada: no tiene que contestarme los mensajes inmediatamente. 😂 

[Now I beging to answer with action to the email in which he said me “te quiero mucho”]

Cuando yo le decía “te quiero mucho” a mis estudiantes lo hacía —entre otros gestos, como crearles proyectos creativos que a ellos les gustaran— dándoles libros y leyéndoles cuentos apropiados para su edad, para la clase y para su crecimiento personal pleno… y ellos me decían “we love you too, teacher” sencillamente prestando atención a lo que enseñaba, aunque no fuera solo de la clase, sino sencillamente para su pleno crecimiento como personas. Supongo que se puede entender que para una maestra y persona con evidentes dificultades con la atención —como lo soy yo o cualquier persona con ADHD—, el que los estudiantes me prestaran atención fuera considerado un gesto de “yo también te quiero”, incluso si los estudiantes no siempre lo dicen explícitamente de esa manera. A edades tempranas sí que lo dicen, a veces hasta les es necesario según su developmental stage; cuando les leia cuentos también los abrazaba si era necesario y hasta los dejaba arroparse con blankets que había en el reading corner del salón, los niños pequeños necesitan ese tipo de gestos fraternos y creativos para aprender apropiadamente según su developmental stage, nunca he sido maestra de enseñar inglés solo con gramática, sobre todo porque en primer lugar yo misma no lo aprendí inglés gramáticamente y soy totalmente incapaz de aprender una lengua solo con gramática, usted vio eso muy bien con mis reiterados suspensos en Latín (es la clase que más he reprobado en todo mi historial académico, lo intenté cabezonamente una y otra vez).

Es importante enseñarle a los estudiantes que cuando se dice “yo también te quiero mucho, teacher [I love you too, teacher]” no solo se dice con palabras, también se dice con actos, como prestar atención al maestro que está tomando de su tiempo y esfuerzo cognitivo para enseñar lo que está enseñando y decir lo que les está diciendo. La importancia de la unidad de being y act es una lección de vida muy necesaria, incluso en edades tempranas como lo han sido mis estudiantes más jóvenes (he enseñado desde edad preescolar [4 años] en adelante). Aprender esa unidad necesaria entre palabra, significado y significación no es mera filosofía del lenguaje —el tema de filosofía del lenguaje se tiene que asumir necesariamente en una clase como la materia de inglés—, sino que es parte del growthful formation (formación dada en orden a formar su crecimiento pleno, no solo en orden a dominar unos skills académicos; “learning by forming”) de cualquier estudiante. 

Lamentablemente en la enseñanza de inglés como segundo idioma no es común que se recalque la importancia de los cuentos y del Childrens Literature, se suele recalcar más la gramática. A mí desde la universidad me enseñaron muy bien acerca de la importancia del Children’s Literature, mi profesora mentora en la Facultad de Educación se encargó muy bien de eso. Una de las formas con las que me servía para que mis estudiantes aprendieran a amar el inglés —esa clase es tremendamente conocida como la más odiada entre niños puertorriqueños— era leyéndoles cuentos en inglés o bilingues que a ellos les gustaran, aunque no fueran estrictamente parte del currículo asignado. Los padres entendieron esto bien y ninguno se opuso a mi petición de que cada padre me trajera al menos un cuento en inglés o bilingue que le gustara a sus hijos para que estuvieran en la biblioteca del salón, poniendo como único límite que el libro fuera en inglés o bilingue, que el contenido del cuento fuera del interés de su hijo/hija y que también fuera contenido apropiado para una escuela de formación católica; siempre y cuando se cumplieran esos criterios, los padres podrían enviar a mi salón de clase el libro de cuentos o incluso libros de contenido científico [he tenido de todo entre mis estudiantes: astronautas, inventors, maestros, toy creators, pastry chefs…; sabía muy bien los sueños de mis estudiantes y siempre los tomé en serio, particularmente recuerdo unos second graders cuyo grupo entero era casi totalmente de varones, solo había una niña, y ellos como grupo de varoncitos tenían sueños bien particulares… en fin, los sueños de mis estudiantes estaban dibujados por ellos mismos en un dream wall del salón] que quisieran.

A una persona como usted le puede gustar mucho el último libro que asigné a mis estudiantes: Pete the Cat I Love My White Shoes. Para ser un libro infantil y sencillo tiene lecciones extraordinarias, tanto para niños como para adultos. Puede verlo, cuando necesite un descanso para las neuronas (es muy divertido y es breve) aquí:

Después verá que menciono ese mismo libro en una de las revisiones del escrito. 

Compré algunos libros de psicología que aún no me han llegado, así que mientras tanto puedo comenzar a estudiar propiamente psicología por mi cuenta para proseguir con la próxima etapa de la integracción me tomaré el tiempo y la atención de leer la ética del intelecto de Peirce que en su momento me dio con tanto aprecio e interés en mi crecimiento intelectual (podrá ver la foto de la ética peirceana a la que me refiero en otra de las revisiones que añadí, aunque creo que se la puse en un email también).

Le deseo lo mejor en su quehacer en sus clases.

Ya le dije: no me tiene que contestar los emails inmediatamente —siempre me sorprendo cuando lo hace—, ni al próximo día, ni siquiera al próximo domingo, puede tomarse el tiempo que necesite. 

Un saludo fraterno,

Damaris

This was the email answer that started the whole conception of the Keys of a Growthful Philosophy of Education, and the text that will eventually be called “Yes, We Can Grow Best: Keys for a Growthful Philosophy of Education”.

Creo que en su momento, con lecciones vivas, mis estudiantes sí que lograron aprender que el mejor gift que podían hacerme y el mejor “te quiero mucho” que podían decirme era… sencillamente prestando atención a lo que enseñaba, no meramente siguiendo las instrucciones…

Pero… también requiere cierta madurez docente darte cuenta de que tú también tienes el deber de “manejar esa atención adecuadamente”: tienes que enseñar de tal forma que lo que estés enseñando —sea lo que sea que estés enseñando— sea meaningful to them.

O sea: no te estoy enseñando esto meramente porque esté en el currículo y necesites la nota…

Te lo estoy enseñando porque esto es necesario aprenderlo para tu crecimiento personal pleno, a tí mismo como estudiante te conviene atenderme si es que quieres cumplir ese growthful dream que tienes dibujado en la pared…

Ese ese es, sin duda, el mejor “I love you” que puede pronunciar cualquier maestro: enseñar meaningfully… enseñar de tal forma que lo haga haciendo posible una formación personal ordenada no meramente a obtener ciertas notas, sino ordenada al crecimiento más pleno de sus estudiantes. Sea cual sea la nota, que esa nota sea obtenida convirtiéndote en la mejor persona que puedas ser mientras la obtienes.

Si se aspira a enseñar de esa forma, el lack of attention no puede considerarse un mero lack of following instructions, lack of obedience or lack of discipline. El estudiante tiene todo el “derecho” de exigir al maestro que enseñe algo que a él le interese o que le sea pertinente a su crecimiento pleno y a realizar sus sueños, en lugar de limitarse a enseñar solamente siguiendo un curriculo. O sea: el currículo tiene que tener cierta flexibilidad curricular o apertura intelectual, como le quieran llamar, para abarcar la variedad de “learning meanings” de los estudiantes.

Si se enseña growthfully, el lack of attention tiene mucho más que ver con lack of meaningfulness (sin excluir situaciones en que el lack of attention también pueda deberse a otros factores más técnicos, como discrepancia entre el estilo de enseñanza del maestro y el estilo de aprendizaje del estudiante, o por ADHD): el estudiante no se está dando cuenta de para qué necesita aprender eso para ser mejor persona y para cumplir sus sueños, así que sencillamente no le interesa prestarle atención a eso y se aburre. O sea: mas que buscar un “mindfulness” para resolver los issues de atención que presentan los estudiantes de hoy en día de forma crónica, lo que se debe buscar es un “growthfulness”, brindándoles una educación que sea person-affirming y que abarce toda su formación personal, incluyendo lo académico, pero no limitándose solo a lo académico, porque son personitas en formación, personitas con dignidad incluso cuando están en etapas tempranas de formación, y han de ser tratadas de acuerdo a su dignidad inherente, recibiendo no solo una educación apropiada (la ley de educación actualmente vigente en los Estados Unidos sí que requiere legalmente que se le brinde una educación apropiada a todo estudiante, pero limitándose solo a lo académico), sino un growthful education que no fragmente la naturaleza de su formación personal (si la escuela solo asume lo intelectual necesariamente va a fragmentar esa naturaleza; de ahí que en la escuela se ha de recibir formación y no solo instrucción) los prepare para la vida y para formarse para convertirse no solo como ciudadanos de bien de nuestra sociedad, sino también como la mejor persona que puedan ser.

Viendo la educación de esta forma —learning by forming— se entiende la importancia capital del dreamfull wall y de que que los maestros sepan exactamente que sueñan sus estudiantes ser, quienes quieren ser, what are the keys of their meaningful learning, porque la escuela es su beginning to be who they are y necesitan comprender como ese learning los articula como la mejor persona que puedan ser, as the person they are meant to be.

These had been some of my thoughts about a growthful philosophy of education. 

I kept thinking and contemplating through the whole evening until reaching to begin —totally unexpectedly— what I agreed and consented to do in the dream: a very good and consistent sketch of the Keys of a Growthful Philosophy of Education. 

Here is the sketch:

Yes, We Can Grow Best: Keys of a Growthful Philosophy of Education 

Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart.

Mt 11,29

This text is dedicated to all my students. I have learned great things from you as we walked together through this growthful journey. You made a difference in my life, and I will forever thankful simply for who you are. This is only the beginning of the adventure.

I can´t begin this text without a thank you note to the Faculty of Education of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras campus: to its Dean while I was there, who made a huge difference in my life, making possible my graduation of BA as Student Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and eventually agreeing to be in the only professional evaluation I had received as a teacher along my whole career… I am also thankful to my professor mentor in the ESL teaching department, Christina, and to my teacher mentor at the UPR Elementary Laboratory School, Richard, along with Elizabeth (the other professor of the ESL teaching department), all the other fellow professors along the faculty and also to all my classmates, who were all so inclusive to my learning diversity and made possible my learning to be.

Without the “learning to be” that all you made possible, the “becoming” that I am sharing in this text wouldn´t be possible. You will see that influence of the motto of the Faculty of Education in my text is quite evident:

“Aprender a ser, aprender a aprender, aprender a enseñar y aprender a emprender ”.

In English: Learning to be, learning to learn, learning to teach, learning to launch.

They don´t have the “learning to do” in their motto because there is no specific required class of class management (the discipline is the “learning to do”, and managing discipline in a classroom should be part of a class management class; without “learning to do” there couldn´t be “learning to teach” possible, any teacher knows this basic didactic premise: without discipline, there is no teaching possible) in the Faculty of Education, but they should have it, that is my only critique to the teaching formation I received there.

Thank you.

Introduction: what should have happened, but didn’t, and what should have happened, and it did: the value of the example

My professional experiences as certified teacher: special education 5-12 grade ESL Teacher in a private school in San Juan that was financed by the Department of Education funds (although the school was a private school, most students of that school were there as part of their PEI provided by the Special Education services of the Department of Education… and so, their monthly enrollment there was fully funded by the Department of Education of Puerto Rico); 7-12 grade religion teacher, 10-grade history of Puerto Rico teacher and grade 12 responsible parenthood teacher in a private Catholic School belonging to the Order of Preachers in Bayamón Puerto Rico; RAE English teacher of a Public School in Corozal; a public school that belonged to the Department of Education of the Government of Puerto Rico; PK-4 ESL teacher in a Catholic Parish School in the Archdiocese of San Juan.

Why I am not teacher right now: post traumatic effects after witnessing students being abused, extremely low salaries, pbeing always the outsider and what happened when I tried to enroll as ESL teacher in the Bayamon School Region of the Department of Education of Puerto Rico.

Relating briefly my experiences as teacher. The first determining experience as teacher that I will tell is the fact that as an exceptional learner myself, I was, of course, I had always been an exceptional teacher in my methodologies. I never have done things as people around me does them. This has not been only due me being a diverse learning and having ADHD and also being creatively giftedness at the same time. My ethics were also different than those around me.

Facing institutional abuse: the second most determing experience of my teacher career is that I faced gruesome abuse commited against my students and was able to sucessfully document and get proper legal evidence of such abuse happening, even if that required endure more abuse myself as teacher. I recopiled enough evidence to make possible that the abuse my students endured couldn´t happen ever again to anyone else inside any school grounds, and that was important to me as teacher. Teachers have the sacred duty to guarantee that the dignity of their students its respected at all times. If you truly want a student to respect you as teacher, you must respect him or her first unconditionally as person, and you must teach them to respect themselves as persons too, to learn to do things because they respect themselves enough to do things in the right way.

My conception of teaching as a profession: the second determining experience of my whole teaching career is my conception of teaching in the context of an apostolate of dignity and a personal formation charism, believing in receiving Christian Formation is not merely an “aditional class more among the other subjects”: it is a way to be, being a catholic teacher is a way to be, even if you teach in non-religious schools. In a Christian School, everyone is formed learning to walk together like He walked. Why the personal example as teacher matters as much as what you are teaching, the importance of giving living lessons along academic lessons and asume your social role model duty along your academic duties.

Part I: Foundations for a Growthful Philosophy of Education

-Integraction: a systemic personal formation model

–Science is the Desire to Learn: a Peircean intellectual ethics

Part II: Keys for a Growthful Philosophy of Education 

–cognitive assessment (learn to learn)

Every student should be cognitively assessed at least once per learning level (preschool, primary school, elementary school, middle school, high school) to be aware of his own cognitive style: how he or she memorize better, which are his or her cognitive strenghts, which are their best talents, in which professions they would perform better with those talents…

Teachers and mentors should also be very clearly aware of their cognitive styles, and they should also be properly assesed for this at least once every three years, discussing their teaching strenghts and how to overcome difficulties while teaching or mentoring students with diverse learning in relation to their own cognitive strenghts.

-Growthful curriculum (learning by forming)

Curriculum is necessary, but it should be an open learning curriculum that is able to embrace all “learning meanings” of all students.

Curriculum in a growthful school should not be merely academic: they should have, besides inclusing integractive sciences in their basic core classes, formative content too, like arts classes and sports. They should have proper time in their curricular learning time to also form themselves as the best person they can be, and formative classes can be chosen according to the student’s best interests (they can vary: not everyone in the school must take the same kind of art, it is possible to avoid it, students should be able to gave some flexibility in choosing their formative curriculum content).

Use of electronic media for curriculum: in my experience, it is good to have electronic books and printed workbooks for the students to use to practice, especially if an electronic board is available at the classroom. I had never been able to teach without technological assistance, so I am quite used to it. A healthy balance between technology and printed media should be reached when applyding curriculum: students do need to use books, but they do need also to use technology appropiately, and that is a healthy part of a formative school curriculum.

–Growthful classrooms [learning to teach, the classroom as a vivarium]

Classrooms should mimick the actual scenery of a growthfull society, having plenty of “creative and personal space” —a growthful classroom should not merely be an “academic space” only— to allow the best growth possible to happen, exactly as it should happen in a growthfull society.

–Growthfull Didactic (teachers as “growers”)

Teacher is not meant to only teach a subject: they are meant to teach their subjects in a way that is meaningful towards achieving a formation ordered to the best growth possible of their students. Both the what you teach and how you teach it matters for growthful didactics.

In a growthful didactic environment, no teacher can have more than 15 students: in order for a growthful education be able to happen, it is essential to be able to have a personal relationship with your students, and there is no human way that a teacher can establish a personal relationship if he or she has too many students assigned in his or her classroom. I know this poses a huge difficulty to certain schools that are overcrowded or that don´t have the physical capability to have enough classrooms to cover all their student´s enrollment if they only place 15 students per classroom. Eventually, this will require a whole architectural redesign of schools buildings, so classrooms can be designed to meet the specific needs of a growthful education… but for now, if a classroom has assigned more than 15 students, two teachers must work as team teachers in the same classroom. This also resolves a current huge assessment issue: if we are real, it is currently impossible that teachers can be able to make a proper graded assessment of their students if they are assigned more than 15 students per group. The reality is: the whole education system right now relies in the unpaid labor of teachers, both outside of laborable hours or outside school property. It is way too normalized that teachers are expected to take their ungraded work home and bring it graded to the school on time to meet the digital roll book school policy, that usually requires teachers to put their grades in the digital system of the school aroun three days after the evaluation date, but they give no proper time to the teacher to do that in school time, and it most times is actually impossible due the amount of students per group. Enabling an education system that requires unpaid work of teachers to function must stop. Teachers must be given appropiate size groups with which they can forge personal relations and that they can grade and assess properly within their regular working time period. Teachers are the only professionals that arrive early to their works, to being able to prepare their classrooms properly, then not having enough time to complete their work at working time, so they take their work to home, where they must also do —besides the extra work they brought because they were unable to complete it at school— the school work that was already planned to to at home, because they already know that working hours won´t allow them to do all the work, school administrators also know and everyone allows it to happen… so the teacher keeps awake until late, to keep up with the extra work and the already planned work to be done at home… simply to wake up even earlier the other day, and the whole trafficking cycle begins to happen again in the next day, in the same way, or even worst. That is dehumanizing, energy-draining, and even unhealthy for anyone. Teachers are being slaved with work they are not paid nor have enough time to do, and that must change. That change begins with reducing the class sizes immediately. If it is not currently possible to have enough physical classrooms to fit all the school students in 15-per-classroom classes, two teachers must be assigned to the same physical classroom and practice team teaching. Yes, that increases the cost of education, but it is already costing the lives and health of teachers —yes, in these circumstances, teaching can be considered a psychologically hazardous work environment, and someone like OSHA should notice such psychological hazards the same way they notice the chemical and physical hazards in work environments— and it also reduces the student learning capabilities heavily, especially in the assessment capability aspect, not only in the lack-of-personal-relation-with-the-teacher capability aspect. Use less federal budget for wars and give schools their proper, fully functional operational funding, without expecting teachers to fill the gap of your incompetence with unpaid labor and psychological hazards that lack of appropriate school funding creates for teachers. This goes to the Federal Department of Education: don´t slave teachers to fund your incompetence in budgeting what must be budgeted properly in any humanizing, legally, and ethically functional organization. Education is meant to be one of the biggest chunks in any federal budget; no surprises there, education literally is meant to form our future as a nation. That is what taxes are meant to be used for, in case you haven´t noticed: to form a growthful society for everyone, in the present and for generations to come, and that formation begins with families and schools, both public and private. Have you noticed that each generation is becoming more and more less educated and more and more bored in school? Well, do something before your incompetence destroys us all as the growthful nation we are meant to be.

In a growthfull teaching system, there would not be almost no substitute teachers, because the learning process is meant to be personal. That means: if a teacher needs an extended leave due, for example, family leave (due the birth of a baby or the adoption of a baby), well, yes, for extended leaves you need a substitute teacher that can stablish a personal relation with the student during that extended leave. But if we are talking about a one-day absence of a teacher, no substitute teachers should be expected in that circumstance, because for growthful learning to happen, there must be a personal relation between student and teacher, and no substitute teacher can substitute the personal relation of the regular teacher, if we are talking about short-term abscenses. So, when a teacher is absent, and we are talking about short-term absences, the school is meant to have a games room or a creative room —or both— and send the students there to have guided socialization time during that period in which the teacher is absent. A mentor can be sent with them to guide them. Learning socialization in school is important and should be an active part of their school formation. Also, it is very realistic that in no profession is someone expected to leave planned work for an unplanned absence —like becoming sick or needing to handle a personal or family issue— and it is unrealistic to expect teachers to need to leave planned work for their absences, they should be able to be absent like any other professional would, without having to have even more workload if they need to be absent due needing to create substitute plans.

The systemic extremely low salaries of teachers in the whole United States, especially if compared to other professionals who require similar professional formation and work schedules, must be corrected. Right now, the career of teaching can be considered modern human trafficking in the United States. The whole Education system relies on teachers’ unpaid labor. The federal government should not only pay teachers a fair salary but also give them SEEDS cards (like the seed funding that entrepreneurs receive when they launch a business) to fund their teaching needs in a proper, legal, and ethical way. Also, the summer period of the teachers should be a paid formative time so teachers can keep up with their professional development duties and formative development duties in paid time, also having the proper rest that a profession like teaching requires: if you expect a teacher needing to be generous in his or her time dedicated to parents meetings, school activities and all kind of other appointments during the academic year, besides their teaching duties, you should also expect them to have a generous paid summer time to compensate that extra availability through the academic year, exactly in the same way medical doctors are paid more for their 24 hrs shifts and nurses and caregivers are paid more for their 12hrs shifts. It is unacceptable that teachers need to seek second and even third jobs to be able to survive, besides also needing to fund their classrooms and students’ needs as part of their teaching needs. It is especially unacceptable that teaching has become the most family-incompatible career of all.

–Growthfull Assessment (learning to be)

Growthfull is not meant to be only quantitative (also known as traditional grading system). The growthful assessment must also be formative and progressive.

Formative assessment assess how the student is achieving to become the best person he or she can be through what they are learning. This is the “how” the learning should happen. Both what the student and how the student is learning it is important. This kind of assessment should be achieved with the collaboration of school mentors.

There is another kind of assessment that must be taken in account in a growthful education: the progressive assessment. This kind of assessment assesses which has been the degree of progress of the student since the last evaluation. Two students can get the very same grade, but one progressed way more than the other since the last evaluation, and that growth must be taken in count in a growthful assessment.

No student should required to be assessed through formal testing and formal academic grading in Pre-School (Pre-K and K) nor in Primary School (1-3) levels. Those years are the most important social formative years: what they learn socially during that period will shape most ofwho they are as citizens later. Academic testing at this period shouldn´t be assumed more important —as it is right now— than teaching the students the proper social notions of how to become citizens that serve the common good and aspire to learn to be who they are and also to become the best person they can be. At this stage, they must be only assessed for skills, including academic skills, focusing on getting the required skills for their appropriate developmental age, including social skills explicitly. The Japanese Education System is a tremendous good example of how the youngest learners must have a strong social formation focus first before beginning to be graded academically; that is part of respecting their proper formative development as persons, who they are as persons, and who they are meant to be as persons must be learned and assessed properly first before the formal academic grading system begins at grade 4 (Elementary level).

–Growthful learning (students as growthful seeds)

Students are in all their right to request a teacher to teach in a way that is meaningful to them. They should not be only required to memorize or retrieve information: they must also be able to give that instruction their own meaning, determining how that instruction can make them able to become the best person they can be and who they are meant to be according to both their own self-assessment and according to the formative assessment given through mentorship.

–Growthful discipline (learning to do)

Discipline, in growthful terms, is related with the student learning to self-assess himself and determine progressively by himself or herself which behaviours are most appropiate in order to him or her become the best personhe or she can be and who she or he is meant to be. This is what they should expect to be able to do in a growthful society: to act according to their best growth possible, learning to grow together as the best person we can be: yes, we can grow best!

We should not teach our students to behave according to minimums. Yes, norms are necessary, but they are the minimum expected, and they should be aimed and affirmed to reach their maximum potential, not merely the minimum.

Norms are necessary, but obeying is not the only necessary, and it is wrong to only ask them to obey norms: they must be able to have the freedom to self-assess (think by themselves) and self-determine —in a way that is appropiate to their developmental age— who they are and how to become the best person they can be, the best person they can be, growing together as “we, the people”. They have their right to get “creative freedom” as part of their discipline system and be allowed to learn to act in the school as they should behave in a growthful society.

Growthful Discipline Informs should be given regularly to the parents in order to let them know what the students are doing best in the classroom, which are being the strenghts in which they are progressin more at the current moment, and what is what they need to learn to do better at the current moment. Discipline informs should not be limited to only inform to the parents what the students do wrong.

Paraphrasing Randy Pausch: “Sometimes I think I got more from pursuing a dream, and not accomplishing it, than I did from many of the ones I did accomplish“. You can expect that students will “switch” dreams as they keep maturing, evolving, and progressing, and such changes are something to be expected: dreams can and will change over time, both in the what and in the how they are meant by them to be achieved.. Not all childhood dreams are meant to be achieved, but what they make learning possible at the moment they were present as the determinant of the students´growth objectives learning and as the purpose that guided the students behavior. Students will always need their dreams to a growthfull discipline be possible… and trust me when I say —because I have faced the three instances as a teacher— that there is nothing more sad than a student that is unable to have dreams, than a student who refuses to learn to dream by his or her own, or than a school that destroys the dreams of their own students. A growthful discipline is also meant to be a dreamful discipline.

Our students need to go through the process of both be corrected and correct themselves in an appropiate, growthful discipline way, so they are able to configurare their affective profile (their self-steem) appropiately. In words of Randy Pausch, describing his experience with futbol coaches:

“When you´re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they´ve given up on you.

That lesson has stuck with me my whole life. When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody´s bothering to tell you anymore, that´s a bad place to be. You may not want to hear it, but your critics are often the ones telling you they still love you and care about you, and want to make you better.

There´s a lot of talk these days about giving children self-steem. It´s not something you can give; its something they have to build. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone. Self-steem? He knew there was really one way to teach kids how to develop it: You give them something they can´t do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just repeat the process”.

–Growthfull mentorship (glowers) 

Besides having “grower” teachers, students need glowers: mentors who make possible for them to create their own project of life according to their own inherent dignity and creative freedom, in a way that is appropiate to their developmental age and growth stage. Traditional school systems only provide “extra help” to those who have deficits. 

In a growthful education that is person-affirming, every student is entitled to receive the appropiate “extra help” (called “growthful mentorship”) to make a meaningul learning possible and a true “learning by forming” posible. You don’t need to have behavorial problems to get “extra help” in growthful learning: you are entitled to it simply to help you to learn to be who you are and who you are meant to be and radiate the unique light you are called to radiate to our society and civilization (that is why mentors are the “glowers” and teachers are the “growers”. In a growthful education, all students must receive appropiate formative assessment (mentorship) to be able to learn how to be who they are and who they are meant to be.

Glowers would establish “growth objectives” systems parallel to the learning objectives systems already well established in current learning settings. They would help the students to project their learning as a part of their own life project, helping students to establish objectives and goals to achieve their dreams, establishing at the same time why those objectives and goals are pertinent to what they are learning in the classroom and how what they are learning in the classroom helps them to become better persons and who they are meant to be.

-Class planning (becoming)

The class planning system should not merely be organized to teach learning objectives properly: there must be also growth objectives that are determined according to the best interests of the students, simply to make possible that everyone can learn becoming the best person they can be.

The class planning system should embrace the whole personal formation of the student, making possible an integration, an action, a realization, a proyeccion and a connection of what is being learned.

I as teacher did this making a planning method of the first weeks of the month focusing in integraction, action and realization; the last week of the month would be the projection. The connection would be achieved as a group level, everyone shared the “fruits”of their learning to the school community in fairs or expositions.

–Parents and community (seeders)

Parents have the very grave responsability to form their children as the best person they can be. Teachers nor mentors nor anyone is meant to substitute their parental responsability: they are meant to support it appropiately.

This is especially important to be taken in count by the glowers: it is the parents —not the school— who determines the early formation of a student, the school duty is simply helping them to be able to achieve the best formation of their children as students of the schools. That means: the values that are taught at school —especially in the earlier stages of development, in which students are way deeper naturallydependant of their parents to know who they are and to become who they are meant to be— should be common civic values-based in the best personal growth of everyone in the school, without any kind of ideological agenda behind how the students are being formed, nor any other agenda that is not achieving the best growth possible of that student, both academically and as person-young citizen. 

A growthful formative fellowship must exist between the parents and the school, so there are no “formative discrepancies” between home and school. I repeat myself because this is important to be understood by both growers and glowers: they are not meant to substitute the parents’s formation, but make to the parents possible to provide their children a formation that makes them all able to become the best persons they can be. The school can provide regular growthful formative workshops to parents and community seeders too, so everyone can learn together how to form these children as the best person they can be.

–administración escolar (dirección as the “bloomers” of the school)

The role of a school administration, including the directors, is not micromanaging and controling everyone, but making sure to create a progessional and learning environment that makes possible the “blooming” of everyone in the school (that is why they are called “bloomers”). 

-growthful farmers: the auxiliary staff of the school (educational therapists, classroom aides, food workers —usually known as “lunch ladies”—, especial education aides, cleaning staff, school custodians, school social workers, school nurses and school administrative staff)

Please notice I am leaving the “school farmers” to the end of the exposition of all the components of a growthful educative system. They may be the most “simple” of all these components, but they are also the most important ones. No school can function properly without a fully well-formed and effective proper auxiliary staff. They are equally important to the growers, the glowers, the bloomers, the growers, the seeds, and the seeders. Their importance in today´s school is gruesomely neglected in many senses, including in the fact that they are not fairly paid nor given fair work benefits neither, especially the classroom aides and the school custodians, who may not need to study a college degree like glowers, bloomers and growers to be able to be hired in their positions, but they also desserve equal professional growth opportunities and all their fair due wage according to the cost of life, so they may also able to afford a dignified environment and even become glowers, growers or even bloomers if they receive the proper school support to get the appropriate academic formation if they are called to such professional transition. Specific scholarships should exist in Universities to make it possible for the farmers who feel called and prepared to do so to become growers, glowers, or even bloomers. Also, they should all be prepared to handle a classroom as farmer mentors if there is a need for some of them to supervise a classroom while a grower, glower, or bloomer can´t be able to supervise a student group. For example: if on a particular day the school has too many glowers and growers absent at the same time, there are too many student groups without supervision and the bloomers are not enough to assume such supervision appropriately —either being with the students in the creative room, in the game room or in the sports facilities… or any other designated area for students whose grower is absent— yes, farmers should be provided the needed formation to assume that duty satisfactorily in such circumstances, despite almost most of them not having a college degree. A professional post-secondary certification in growthful education can be designed for them (they would only need a high school diploma to access such certification) if they wish to accomplish that in a professional sense —besides also giving them the opportunity to study to become a grower, a glower or a bloomer eventually if they feel called and are prepared to do that in the undergraduate college level—, but it is the school itself that is meant to form its farming staff appropriately. This, de facto, already happens in schools: it is quite usual to see school secretaries, or even school nurses, substitute a teacher if there is no one else to supervise a group when too many teachers are absent at the same time). Schools are in immense debt to these auxiliary staff, and their crucial importance for a growthful philosophy of education to be able to be applied fully in a school environment should not be undermined, so I gave them the most important spot, the last one.

I still remember the name of the custodian of my primary school; she cared for us all so much; she gave me clean spare uniforms (the school had some spare uniforms for students who needed to change their uniforms while in the school) when mine became a huge dirt mess because I loved to play with dirt and to literally chase butterflies in the school garden: her name was Lucile. She also taught me to stop “trapping” butterflies because they would die, she taught me to enjoy the butterflies but also taught me to respect them as they are, to respect them being alive, not killing them unintentionally when I finally trapped one. I even remember they were white butterflies, and that later I was explained the metamorphosis process by a teacher (she explained it for the whole classroom, letting us see in an appropriate glass bowl —not like the vases I used when I tried to trap butterflies, this one was a bowl specifically designed for trapping insects humanely— the process of metamorphosis, from the caterpillar to the cocoon to the butterfly actually spreading the wings and let be free). I was still very small, probably in first grade (in the period all this happened, I belonged at that time to the classroom that was in the lower part of the primary school building, and that was the first-grade classrooms zone; as far as I remember second and third-grade classrooms were in the second floor, and the kindergarten classroom where in a whole different building, along the lunch room), but I already was an asker student (In Spanish: una estudiante preguntona… Peirce would say: an inquisitive student). I have always loved butterflies since I was a small child, and that school had plenty of them in certain zones of the gardens. Even the school custodian answered my questions and corrected me in an appropriate way (I was never penalized in the disciplinary sense for getting dirty due to insisting on chasing butterflies, nor for getting wet for splashing water and enjoying walking under the rain… but I was given spare uniforms by the custodian for not remaining wet or dirty during the whole academic day and was explicitly asked to learn to remain clean while I explored nature in the garden) for my age, especially when she saw me wandering around chasing butterflies, and she realized I was achieving to learn how to trap them with my hands and accidentally killing them without me even realizing yet that if they stopped moving in my hands or in the glass vases I put them, it was because I was killing them; she properly —and even tenderly, not in a penalizing, fear-inducing authoritative discipline way at all, in a very appropriate way for a way too-wandering first-grader— taught me to respect life and to respect nature, I and wasn´t allowed to trap them in vases nor in my hands anymore, but I could enjoy if a butterfly posed in my hands naturally, as I began to learn to observe them instead of chasing them.

I also knew the director of that school directly (we had the same names) and chatted a lot with her in her office: I learned from a very early age what proper respect for authority should be; true respect comes from a personal relationship and unconditional respect to the humanity of a person’s fist. I never had a single disciplinary issue with that director, I did have a single disciplinary issue in primary school due to beginning to scream when I shouldn´t, and I knew I shouldn´t. I was beside the stairs and all the students were messing around and screaming, I don´t remember right now why, but it wasn´t because we were scared for something, we were deliberating wanting to cause troubles and we chose to revolt, I have no idea of why now… and I knew I shouldn´t follow that behavior, but I simply chose to disobey the teachers who were trying to control the situation, and at the very same moment I began to scream hidden behind the stairs beside the direction office —I was very young, but clever enough to know I should hide to do what I was doing—, the head director arrived, and as I screamed and she searched for who was screaming that way, she directly me saw me doing what I was doing wrong, she took me by my hand and took me straight to the direction office besides other “unruly” (revoltosos) classmates that were doing the same… but at that moment the head director was an older one which I didn´t have a personal relation with, that older director was a quite authoritative one. The other director, the one I had a personal relationship with, at that moment, was an auxiliary director, and became very surprised to see me in the office for a disciplinary issue… and as you may realize, I never dared to repeat any kind of disciplinary issue again, especially when she became the head director, I truly respected her because I knew who she was as a person. I would have a huge issue, but not a disciplinary issue, in third grade, that would eventually cause my progenitors to change me of school, probably to avoid their abuse being discovered, because the school did call them to inform them that something was wrong with me in the emotional sense and they were unable to understand exactly what was wrong with me because they seemed “responsible parents”… No one in that school —nor no one else in their sane minds— would be able to even imagine the kind of abuse I was going through at home, not even myself as a child was conscious of the gruesome emotional neglect and abuse of my own progenitors, although I did know something was wrong between my progenitors and I: I wrote in a whole third-grade test “my parents don´t love, I want to be with God; I want to die”. I was sent to the office immediately after the teacher realized what was going on, with the teacher evidently shocked while the whole thing happened. Everything began when my classmates realized I was doing the test with the book opened in my lap and began to call me a “cheater”, but I didn´t see the book at all; I claimed to the teacher, scared and crying that I wasn´t copying, I was crying for other reasons, I haven´t realized the open book was in my lap, and then she saw what I wrote in the tests besides the correct answers I did learn to do by own… and the teacher, called Lisa Torres, did know I was the kind of student who didn´t need to copy for being able to pass a test academically, but she was absolutely disturbed when she saw what I wrote in my test borderlines. We both went —me crying; she seriously concerned— immediately to the office, and no one was able to realize exactly what was wrong, why I felt too “unloved” having such parents. Yes, I was cared for by others who were paid to care after school, but as far as the school knew, there were no signs of physical abuse happening at home. They —nor I myself— would be able to realize then the gruesome and devastating psychoeducative effect that parental emotional neglect and abuse can have on a young child.

Of course, students are also meant to have a personal relationship with the school farmers. They should know their custodians and aides by name; they should know all their farmers by their proper name. There can be sessions in which they are integrated explicitly into the classroom environment in a didactic way like it would happen —for example— if a custodian goes to a classroom to read a book to kindergarteners. Students can also be asked to help this staff in certain tasks if is a part of their proper personal formation expected for their age, as it would be asking high schoolers to learn how to trim the grass along the custodians, not for doing the custodian job, but to learn how to do it by themselves when they become independent citizens. It could also be asked middle school students to help the custodians with some cleaning duties so the students can learn to be properly responsible for their environments. Farmers, all of them, no matter if they have a college degree or not —you may expect some kind of farmers, like social workers, librarians, and school nurses, to have a college degree; but of course, other kinds of school staff, like cleaning staff and school custodian won´t usually have a college degree— are a direct part of the personal formation of the students inside school grounds, they are not “accessory parts” of a growthful education philosophy—: they are hugely necessary part of making a growthful school able to function integractively and of students learning the art of empathy socially, learning to not look absolutely anyone as their inferior or as their superior: in the school, yes, it should be learned and assume there are different social roles —exactly like it happens in a real-world society—, some with more academic or administrative authority than others, but still, in a school, one of the most important lesssons to be learned by students and all personel inside of it is to learn to see and treat everyone as an equal brother and sister, including their farming staff. I would dare to say: especially the farming staff. Their crucial importance right now is way neglected and overlooked.

I will give a practical example of this: I had never known of anyone in the Faculty of Education researching the importance of the custodian role in a school setting. The importance of school nurses, librarians, and social workers has been studied and even discussed academically… Yes, in my classes as a teacher-student of the Faculty of Education of the University of Puerto Rico, we did learn the proper importance of such staff, they were explicitly mentioned in our classes… but you see no one researching academically the importance of all the school farmers, not only the importance of those with college professional formation or professional certifications required. Especially the farmers who don´t require a college degree, they are treated like accessories and even almost accidental parts of the school system, and they are even more unfairly unpaid than the teachers —who are already severely underpaid— and have almost no benefits at all, besides absolutely never being given the opportunity to progress in order to their fullest growth possible and prepare to become a grower, a glower or eventually a bloomer if they are called and equipped to do so. The real-world fact is that not anyone can be allowed to work on school grounds; no matter what your role is in a school, you must have a teaching and a “formator” vocation (in Spanish: “formador“), no matter which role you professionally assume in the school. Ask any teacher with some real-world teaching experience about the crucial and essential differences that farmers make in their everyday teaching performance, and they will corroborate very accurately what I am saying. No one realizes this with all their consequences: farmers are also an essential part of a true learnign environment, and that applies to a growthful classroom too.

I shared some early life experiences I have shared simply as a dear example in my own memory about why teachers are totally unable to teach, and schools are totally unable to function growthfully, without the proper auxiliary staff formed properly and functioning effectively in the same growthful way that bloomers, glowers and growers are expected to treat and respect all students´ current personal formation processes according to their own developmental stage and cognitive capabilities, and this is especially true in exceptional education circumstances.

-Fraternizers and the issue of bullying

As a survivor myself of bullying throughout my whole school lifetime, I think the issue of bullying is serious enough in our school systems to be assumed in a specific concrete way like I am doing as I assign to the issue a whole section of the growthful philosophy of education. Enduring school bullying can be one of the cruelest, most gruesomest, most traumatic things for a student or anyone on school grounds —be aware: bullying to a teacher, either if it comes from students or from fellow teachers, or even from the school administration, can also happen; I have also had to survive that kind of bullying too— to endure, and it has even caused suicides. So, let´s assume this issue in a specific way, with all the seriousness and intellectual rigor it requires.

I have made allusion to this before, but I am going to mention it explicitly again here: one of the biggest social lessons a student —and all the school staff along them— is called to learn in a growthful school setting is that in a society, in the same way that should happen in the school, we are all equal brother and sister with a human dignity to be unconditionally respected as persons…

But, as you may expect, if the educative system is the first one that systematically doesn´t respect the personal formation of the students first, the students will be totally unable to learn in school how to respect themselves and other as equal brothers and sisters with an unconditional dignity to be respected. If they don´t learn it in school, a growthfull fraternity won´t happen in the society neither. That is why we have a society with far too many cruel adult bullies wandering around: they weren´t correct when they should have been corrected, and in adulthood the bullying issue is far harder to correct. Then you see intolerant leftist people who constantly sabotage and bully those who doesn´t agree with their idea, doing if with tremendous psychological agressiveness, when not also using physical social violence (violent riots to impose their ideological agendas). As Martin Luther King Jr says, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools”. That growthful fraternity learning begins at schools, and this is what will end the current bullying epidemic from its roots, not merely with a bunch of punitive disciplinary meassures.

No one in a school will be able to learn to be fratenal if the educative system itself is not meant to be person-affirming first, and now I am talking about a person-affirming educative system that affirms EVERYONE (including its employees, not only the students) as who they are and as who they are called to be. This requires a huge transformation of the current notions of what an education system should be. Right now, they are currently seen as the administrators. No, they are the fraternizers. They are the ones who actually make a growthful fraternity be implemented as an educative policy in a school-wide sense.

Of course, administrative aspects of such fraternizing duty must be assumed… but first and foremost, a school district and a school education department are meant to be the systematic fraternizing element of a school: they are the ones who set the fraternal tone that grows schools need to function. That implies a lot, from paying their employees fairly and having a humanizing workplace environment to actually providing the students with all the growth opportunities that belong to them according to their all-due rights as persons, students, and citizens.

This is imperative to be understood in a growthfull philosophy of education: students must be able to learn in school grounds that everyone is an equal brother and sister, with an inherent dignity that must be respected unconditionally… but how on Earth they will be able to learn that if the only interest of the school districts, and the only economical support they provide to, are for standarized tests and to whatever is required by law, doing only the bare minimum by law instead of creating an education system that aims for making possible the maximums, so students themselves can know not only the proper academic content but also how that academic content is meaninful towards them realizing their dreams and become tho they are and who they are called to be, the best person they can be?

The school districts and the own Departments of Education are the first one defraternizing, depersonalizing and dehumanizing education with their obsession in standarizing testing focus. You need a growthful focus to be able to let students learn how to recognize each one as an equal and dignified brother and sister in a systemic way, in the same way the school district makes possible that a growthful fraternity happens systematically along the whole school district as the students also are given the tools and growth choices to achieve all their proper academic development too.

No one saw this coming: the first responsible ones for the bullying epidemic in our society and schools are the school districts and the Department of Education themselves, not the schools, not the teachers, not the parents, and, of course, not the students neither. If the students are unproperly educated systemically, you may expect them to behave unproperly in a systemic way too. If the school district and the state-wide or even federal-wide Department of Education doesn´t have an explicit growthful fraternity educative policy itself… well, guess what, of course, you will be seeing very serious issues along the district in relation with the students —sometimes even among gloomers, bloomers, glowers and farmers also— being totally unable to unconditionally see each other as the equal brothers and sisters we are all meant to be… and they will be totally unable also to respect each other and themselves unconditionally as they are and as who they are called to be, as the best person they can be. So, either the parents take disciplinary punitive measures to try to correct the issue by themselves, modeling their sons and daughters’ behavior at home in the same way it should be modeled at the school… or a gruesome systemic de fraternizing bullying issue will be evident to see to anyone who has the wide-angle-vision to see it.

Yes, teachers are quite tired of being assumed as the direct responsibles of the bullying issues in the classroom. They aren´t. Of course, glowers, bloomers and growers must be expected to take active inmediate meassures when bullying is found to be happening, but they are not the responsible ones of bullying happening systemically in a school or a school district or a state-wide Department of Education. Educative professionals had been even fired due issues of this nature that didn´t directly belonged to them to deal with in a systemic way in the first place. Not even the schools are the direct responsibles of the bullying epidemic issue —nor of any other defraternizing issue that may happen in a school district, like being gruesomely underpaid and having to endure human trafficking professional features if you want to become a teacher— . The whole bullying issue root, the direct responsibles for bullying or any other defraternizing issues happening at a school —for example: if there is racism issue in the school happening, that can be another very real possible defraternizing issue in a school, even if it only happens implicitly—, are the school districts and the state-wide Department of Education, if they don´t assume with all the practicalities it requires an explicit person-affirming educative philosophy and an explicit growthful fraternity educative policy. Fraternity begins as a systemic policy, and then it becomes a social habit in students as they see it through the whole educative system leadership. Without unconditional fraternal leadership —leadership that is unconditionally fraternal first, respecting unconditionally as persons (with all that implies) those who are under your supervision first, instead of being authoritarian first and commanding obedience only upon your career position first— in a school educative system, there is no fraternization possible among the students neither.

Randy Pausch gives a very accurate description of what I am describing as “fraternal leadership”:

There is this skill set called “leadership”.

I learned so much by watching this guy in action. He was the distilled essence of the dynamic manager, a guy who knew how to delegate, had the passion to inspire, and looked good in what he wore to work. He never professed to have skills greater than his subordinates. He acknowledged that they knew what they were doing in their domains. But he established the vision, the tone. He was in charge of morale.

I will now pharaphrase a Randy Pausch phrase that should be the “educative mantra” of any educator in a fraternizing leadership position: “I don´t believe in a no-learning scenario“. That is especially to be applied to those students who learn in an exceptional way, as we are going to explain further in the next section.

-An Exceptional Way to Be (concrete considerations for a Growthful Exceptional philosophy of Education)

No student should be expected to learn exactly in the same way, and that is why assessment must be quantitative, formative, and progressive, departing from the grounds of a good cognitive assessment that gives everyone the idea about which the cognitive strengths of the students and which the student learning style are. Special education students, here named and known as “exceptional students”, because this is not a matter of them being “disabled to learn”, but them being able to learn in an exceptional way. Everyone should be considered able to learn if given the appropriate growth opportunities to do so according to their own concrete personal formation being bioma. The stigma of being told you have a disability is disabling by itself is real: no one wants to be mainly known and identified by what they are not able to do, nor is socially healthy to do so. Their PEIs should state clearly not only their deficits but also their strengths and which are their aspirations, and dreams. Each student has their own way of being, and that is all right and even a healthy thing to happen inside school settings because that is how it should happen in a growthful society.

It is especially important to cater to exceptional students’ specific learning needs, especially in the direction of teach them how to reach their most independent learning possible. They need to know what they are capable of doing independently, developing the use of coping systems and the use of their own best skills and strenghts to compensate their deficits. If that requires a particular assistance or reasonable accommodation, it should be provided without hesitation, not only according to the law but also always looking for the best interest of the student, even if such assistance may require to need an especial educative assistant (also known by the code “T1” in the Puerto Rican Department of Education system) in the classroom to aid the teacher. T1 and all learning specialists who provide therapies for special education students are an essential part of the Exceptional Education scenario, and they also should be paid a fair salary for their services.

-Discite a me: concrete considerations for a growthful Christian philosophy of education

the best person that can a student become as a Christian is a saint, so we should expect and teach sainthood and sacramental fraternity to all Christian students whose parents deliberately chose a Christian-Catholic school to give Christian formation to their children.

Parents should not only expect better, more personalized education at Christian school settings: they should also expect Christian formation be given in the school in a very “organic way”, not only in a Faith Education class, but in what all the teachers in the school live and “preach” in the way they teach, that in a Christian School must be both person-affirming and Christ-centered. 

A Christian schooling system should never be used to force a particular articulation to the student. It is supposed that if a student is enrolled in a Catholic or Christian school, the student also receives Christian formation at home, so there is no “forced articulation” in the fact that the school gives specifically Christian personal formation… but in the cases in which the student does not have a Christian denomination or the student is not Catholic, the school should not enforce in the student a Christian articulation of life if the student doesn´t chose to: the student will be present in the Faith Formation class along all the other students, but in such circumstances, the student can´t be expected to practice the faith in class and must be only evaluated by the religious facts that should be learned by all students. Never, absolutely NEVER, use a Christian school system or a Catholic educational system to enforce a Christian articulation to a non-Christian student; the school must know this when the student is being accepted and have the appropriate measures to deal with those exceptional circumstances in a respectful way towards the student´s own life articulation. If a student articulation is such extremely opposed to a Christian-Catholic articulation of life, the student should not be admited to the school in the first place, a Christian-Catholic school should be the first one to recognice their limits in such circumstances and a personal interview with the student should be made to have a explicit consent to such different articulation to be possible to happen, if the student is mature enough to give such consent (elementary level and beyond; first communion age and beyond).

The huge importance to be humble enough to learn how to teach like Jesus does: discite a me… The Jesus Charity I began to contemplate at the same time I began to research observing learning dynamics in real classrooms and observing how my students needed to learn in order to become the best person they cold be… well, He, a Jesus Charity, would eventually become my very first example as teacher. Paraphrasing the last scene of the movie “A Beautiful Mind,” He eventually became all my reasons and my only reason that made it possible for me to learn among all the circumstances I had to endure as a teacher, to teach from Him, learning to teach like He does, humble and meek of heart. This text nor my whole teacher career wouldn´t be possible to be articulated with a growthful focus in all the education perspectives possible —cognitive assessment, growthful curriculum, growthful classrooms, growthfull didactics, growthfull assessment, growthful learning (growthful pedagogy), growthful discipline, growthfull mentorship, growthful planning, growthful seeders, growthful bloomers, growthful farmers, growthful exceptionalities…— without His help, as I learned with the help of the Holy Spirit to incarnate His best-known biblical lesson about how learning and teaching are called by Him to happen: learn from me, who am humble and meek of heart…

That biblical quote had been very well plasmated in my heart through all these teaching years, and also now, as I begin to conclude this text: discite a me…

-A Growthful Healing: Concrete Considerations Related to Facing Institutional Abuse in Educational Environments

In this section of the text, it will be discussed explicitly a growthful way to deal with something that no Faculty of Education prepares anybody to deal with, including their legal implications: how to deal with institutional abuse when it happens within a school or even within a school district.

A teacher has the deontological duty to act if a pattern of institutional abuse against her or his students is evident: in such particular circumstances, all the measures needed to document properly and prove the institutional abuse in courts must be taken, both in the most systematically way possible and in the most safely way possible toward the students and abuse victims implicated. If a teacher or any other educational professional is proven to not act upon institutional abuse, their teaching license or any other professional license must be terminated immediately after all the evidence shown at a fair administrative process proves —the teacher should be given the opportunity to explain himself or herself if he or she feels it necessary— that they actually failed to act upon institutional abuse or even committed it directly and deliberately. Let´s be clear on this: abuse —any kind of abuse— can´t be tolerated in our schools, nor anywhere in a growthful society.

A growthful healing process must be made possible for the students and educational professionals who endured or witnessed without being able to do anything such abuse. The time of merely reacting institutionally upon abuse as “image washing” the schools and school districts instead of openly recognizing when things went wrong is over. Keeping a good image is not more important than taking all the measures that must be taken to guarantee that all the involved students and educational professionals can learn and teach in a safe, nurturing, and humanizing educational environment that embraces their dignity in all the senses applicable to the circumstance.

What a growthful healing process means is simply to make it possible for all the abuse victims involved the growth opportunity to keep growing on after the abuse they endured. Lessons must be learned. Changes must be made. Life must keep growing in the most growthful way possible for everyone, especially for the victims of institutional abuse.

–Conclusion: Learning to launch a growthful society

-Lo que pasa primero en la escuela en lo pequeño, sucederá después en la sociedad a lo grande. A growthful society begins at schools.

Importance of teaching unity of being and act for achieving the best personal formation possible of the students, both academically and personally, giving equal importance to what is being done (the be of the learning process) and how it is being done (the act of the learning process) and teaching them to always aim at school to become the best person they can be, instead of merely aiming to only get the best grades they can get, no matter what the mean for achieving that is… sign, meaning and the process of signification are all important, because when they become citizens at 18, no one will tell them what to do, they must be able to learn from school how to behave in a society being citizens of good who aim to their best and not merely acting to obey minimums (the laws). You have a unique light to give to this humanity, a unique apportation to give to your country as you, student, learn to “vivir el encanto”: your achievement of your best growth possible is the very first apportation anyone should learn to give to their family and homeland, and that “growthfull apportation” is equally important to your country to the taxes you are required to pay according to your income. No children in school can be required to pay taxes, but at that developmental age they do should be required and expected to “apport and serve their country” becoming the best person they can be during their most intense formative years of their life. That way, everyone would receive an equal opportunity to reach the truest American Dream: becoming together the best persons we can be, the best “we, the people” we can be, growing together in communion.

Randy Pausch: “Tenacity is a virtue, but it is not always crucial for everyone to observe how hard you work at something”.

Randy Pausch: “Brick walls are there for a reason. They´re not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something [… and] sometimes, the most impenetrable brick walls are made of flesh”. Yes, the systemic abuse of my progenitors had been an impenetrable brick wall for me… but I had always had teachers who also made me able to learn how to dream, who I am and who I am called to be as a part of a “we, the people”.

“I Have a Dream” (We Have a Dream) Martin Luther King Jr Speech

“If you can dream it, you can do it.” Walt Disney Yes, we are truly meant to learn how to launch a growthful society we dream to belong together, as a new “we, the people” able to fully consummate the new American Dream: becoming together the best persons we can be, the best nation we can be. Such a launch really begins at schools. NASA may not hire “social engineers” for their launches, but yes, our society does need to train and hire “social engineers” for our schools in order to be able to truly launch, together, the growthful society we are meant to be, in a whole new integractive way, with the very same novel meaning and implications that Christopher Colombus had when he discovered a whole new world. What we are now “discovering” is the end of the colonization era and the beginning of a new era of new fraternization, in which we become to be formed to walk together as the brothers and sisters we are called to be, as the new civilization of Love we are called to be (this is being written both in the 40 anniversary of Saint John Paul visit to Puerto Rico and also in the “Día de la Hispanidad, when the discovery of America is celebrated, I think you should know that). Paraphrasing Walt Disney: If we can dream a new society, if we believe that a new growthful society is possible… we can do it… we can BE it. As I taught to my students: Puerto Rico is known as the “enchantent island”… but the enchantment of Puerto Rico are not their beautiful beaches, or any other outsanting touristical feature among the many we have as an island. The living enchantment of this island is you, as you become the best person you can be, we are all as Puerto Rican citizens to “vivir el encanto” (that was the title of the art exposition I prepared for my student´s art work, in which I was also meant to share for the first time a “Jesus Charity” that would eventually change my life forever, as I explained in the Discite a Me section).

“A lot of professors give talks titled “The Last Lecture”. Maybe you´ve seen one. It has become a common exercise on college campuses. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can’t help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?” Randy Pausch (page 3) This text´s nature truly is a “last living lecture” to my students, because in it you can see what mattered most to me as their teacher, whatever class I would be teaching: to them be able to become, in its due time, the best person they could be. This is the most important lesson I always strived to teach my students: “Yes, we can grow best!”

I should clarify a few practical observations I was given in contemplative prayer towards the process of writing philosophical texts before ending this post.

The first one of such practical observations —this was more a warning than a mere practical observation— is that I should stick to what I chose to do during my time as a teacher. We all know we went through a lot when I was a teacher. I should not focus on what happened around me and not even mention it, except in the case that mentions it is really necessary to understand what I chose to do and what I am exposing in the philosophical text. Thats it. I should not let the text be distracted by traumas that should be left in the past, keeping what matters: what I chose with the time that was given to me. I was explained this with the words of Gandalf to Frodo that you can see in the following scene of Lord of the Rings:

Other practical advice that I was given for writing a philosophical text is that I should avoid copy-pasting at all costs. I can´t do copy-paste the ideas of others, even if I think that they can express them better than I can. I must go through the process of learning to express ideas philosophically with my own words, quoting whatever bibliography I want, but not copy-pasting anyone, no matter how better I think they can express.

Other practical advice I was given is that I should have accessible a reading that is not related to my writing at all, a reading that is simply used for mind breaks. It is important to “treat the mind” properly in the biological sense while writing philosophically and have mind breaks. I bought this book simply to enjoy it later, but now I am going to use it for mind breaks, I truly love the lessons it conveys.

Regarding the biological implications of the writing process, I was also recommended to have routines to let my body get used to the writing process (usually, I walk a little bit before writing, and I always drink a coffee and pray a rosary when I begin to organize ideas for the day). And… no matter how hungerless I may feel due to using Adderall, I must make my snacks and hydrate at the appropriate time; I am not allowed to simply keep writing and skipping snack time or stop drinking liquids to avoid “losing time going to the bathroom.” How to handle my attention is also important: if I know my attention keeps focused as I keep focused on adoring Jesus Charity with all my growth as I am writing, I should begin each writing day with a kiss to the last Sunday Gospel and keep a rosary nearby to adore Him as I am writing (I kiss the rosary constantly). How each person handles their attention varies, but that is what works for me.

I must be aware that writing a philosophical text is not only sitting down and writing as it happens to narratives. Thinking philosophically requires a great effort in terms of organizing ideas, reasoning in an appropriate way, and expressing them in an appropriate way. I am not writing a novel; I must “restrain” intellectually to what I am meant to be doing in each section and how I should be reasoning in each section. Some are narrative sections (mostly the introduction and a little bit of the conclusion). Several are quite analytic sections (especially the ethics part). Most are “expositive reasoning” sections: I am meant to expose my philosophical reasoning logically and coherently in most parts. All require a certain degree of philosophical creativity, to one extent or another. The first one to learn to respect my own “philosophical voice” is myself. How much I am progressing is not to be determined by myself, that part must be discussed together before proceeding to the next part.

Yes, I should enjoy what I am doingbecause it is a work of Love, not merely an intellectual adventure.

So, now you know, the Holy Spirit will keep surprising us all —including me— in unexpected ways. Now, in a totally unexpected way, you can expect a new text for November 1, 2024. It is a realistic date to complete this. This is the Day of All Saints, and it is a beautiful day to share this: there is no better lesson to your students than teaching them how to become saints, that is the best person you can be as aChristian.

Enjoy this as much as I am enjoying this! 🫶🏼

Let’s keep choosing to grow together in communion…

It is not easy to palabrize everything that happened in last night’s dream. I will try to do it —the parts that I am meant to share now, because not everything is meant to be shared right now— in the humblest way possible because, with God’s Love, humility is always the way of learning to walk more and more like He walked.

In last night’s dream, we had an amazing conversation among brothers, and I, the sister, was the only woman among all. Yes, I had flashbacks of Jesus Charity and the Holy Family of New Albor, even one flashback of a beautiful contemplative conversation with Our Lady of New Albor, but in the actual dream, I was the only woman present.

Well, this time, the Archangels were all three present, and what Saint Gabriel told me was truly, truly, truly beautiful: “Rejoice, full of grace, princess of Heaven, because you will be called “mother” through generations…” Of all that he said, that is the only thing I will quote in explicit, literal words, because it deeply impacted me, not in a bad sense… but in a true sense: I am still not able to see what he means, and in the middle of the life stage I am, in which I am more and more conscious that my biological years of being able to have a biological son or daughter are practically over, well… being called “mother of faith” and being told I would be called “our mother” for generations to come is way deeper than anyone could be able to realize.

What happened last night was not exactly like the annunciation, at least not in the biological sense… I already gave my fiat in that Santiago´s way 20 years ago, and I already contemplated my consecration to charity in Roncesvalles… but as right now my “becoming” is developing, he is right: as we become more and more conscious of the responsibilities we embrace as “full of grace”, our lives change forever according to the living Word of God that keeps being incarnated in us as living Church, as living Eucharist (that second part was explained by Mikhael, not by Gabriel).

My family of heaven, which has accompanied me through this journey, has also been part of this “learning to see”: it is through me that these spiritual fathers have also learned to see what they should have seen long ago, and having men around you who acknowledge that things should not have happened that way is not exactly normal in my life narrative. Through the years, they have told me their many sins, without telling me exactly where or to whom they committed them; they simply reflected with me about their mistakes about their priestly and spiritual fatherhood roles… but last night, it was finally clear, wide clear: I, a woman, was the one who helped them to be conscious of everything they should have been done and didn´t, not due malice, but because they weren´t conscious as they are now, thanks of how I had allowed the Holy Spirit act in me, of how things do should be,

I it’s a very, very, very humbling experience seeing someone correcting himself simply because they are helped properly to see what they weren´t able to see before… because if they would have been able to see it by themselves, their “institutional pride” (understand “institution” as “Catholic Church”) would haven´t allowed them to act as they are acting now, with the whole humility that they should have been able to incarnate since they began their respective ministries.

Men are not meant to be able to see the whole scenario on their own. By nature, they need the help of the being, the help of a woman. It is not normal at all in the Catholic Church to recognize not only the full equality of womanhood and manhood “spiritual parenthood” (just to give a simple, practical example of this: seminarians are not required to have a spiritual mother, but they do are required to have spiritual fathers… and many examples of the lack of ecclesial feminine genius can be given, I am only saying one right now, for illustrative purposes). but also, the explicit need for a woman to make men able to be conscious of how they should act. We don´t think that at this time in human history, there is a need to realize the importance of men to make women realize how they are called to be: history has plenty of examples of women being told by men how they can be. What is needed is a realization that that happens in both ways, not only in one… and as man becomes more conscious and able to see more, their wrong acting will also be corrected. We both need each other because we, both man and woman, were created in His image and likeness. This is how it is meant to be.

I have explained this before: ontologically speaking, men are co-creators of the act, and women are co-creators of the being. Both are equally needed for a personal human formation that is ONE, the one we are all meant to be in unity, not only between being and acting and between all the personal formative processes, but also between our living bodies and the heart of Jesus. Both unities can be fully achieved in their truest way possible only through the infusion and action of the Holy Spirit. Such ontological happens in everyone, including atheists, but it is the Holy Spirit who can grant the fullest consciousness of all the repercussions of such unity, in all senses possible.

We, women, have been granted by God’s Love the amazing capability to help to be, to help to see and become conscious… and no man can be asked to become more responsible for their acts if they are unable to see first. In the same way, no woman can be asked to become more responsible for her words if she is unable to realize the “weight” of her words first.

Now, I am reaching a point in my life where I am starting to become “responsible” for my words. This developmental maturity doesn´t happen at the same time in everyone. As a matter of fact, my whole family of heaven reached in Heaven the maturity to realize what they should realize on Earth… That means: it can happen that the humility must be such that you must realize how you should have been acted or how you should have “palabrized” your life once you reach Heaven, by pure mercy of God, not because you deserve it at all, and because you had such tremendous humility you were able to grasp the fullness of Heaven´s grace in the way you should have done it Earth…

Your humility is more powerful in heaven than anyone can realize. In the same way no one will be able to love more in Heaven than how much he or she loved in Earth, no one will be able to be humbler in Heaven than how much he or she humbled himself or herself on Earth… and the degree of your humility on Earth can be by itself a reason to be granted the sainthood grace state of Heaven. Humility is the beginning of Heaven on Earth: the humbler you are, the more capability of loving like God you have. Even the worst of sinners can be granted heaven if there is enough humility to confess in the proper way that Jesus Charity is God-Love that makes all things anew, and you clearly know how such a huge sinner I am; I don´t need to clarify that further… and Heaven begins to be lived in this Earth, as we let the Holy Spirit inform us, conform us, realize us, project us and connect us in Love, with Love and by Love, loving God, ourselves and everyone as He has loved us first. I will say this in Spanish because I was told this in Spanish in the dream: habemos personas que nos ganamos el Cielo no por haber sido santos, sino por ser lo suficientemente humildes como para dejar a la gracia actuar hasta alcanzar la santidad, porque la santidad es posible para absolutamente todo aquel que acoja la gracia para alcanzarla y se deje ayudar a ver como Dios Amor nos ve… I am one of those, and being granted such kind of grace is also the giftedness of a lifetime

Men in the Church need to realize, in a very humble way, that women are as equally necessary as them for the Church to function as the living Church and the living Eucharist it is meant to be. I have explained this before, too: the living Church is a “she.” She is the Bride of the Holy Spirit, the living body of the Heart of Jesus.

Saint Raphael’s words were powerful, too: No one had been able to see before in the whole history of the Catholic Church what is being granted to men to see now, thanks to a woman, the same way he cured the blindness of Tobit.

It is in the context of what I was explained in this dream that I now share the final revised version of the text “On the Growth of the Human Personal Formation: the Nature” that I already shared for the first on the day of Saint Michael the Archangel. It took me another week to complete the revision. The version I am sharing now doesn´t need further revisions at this point.

To reach the point of sharing that text in the way I am doing it, I have gone through several developmental stages: the beginning of be (school years), finding the freedom to be (Faculty of Humanities), discovering who I am (University of Navarra), unleashing the creative being (Universidad Central de Bayamon), learning to be (faculty of Education)… until finally reaching the “Becoming” point I have begun to reach as my words begin to have the weight they are meant to have and I begin to palabrize them the way I was called to be. I am not still in the stage of “being one”: I am still limited by my environmental parallel realities… but I am in a huge process of breaking all those parallel realities and simply being the one I had always meant to be: one as unity of being and act, one as unity of living body and Jesus Charity´s Heart, one as living Eucharist and the action of the Holy Spirit. That “being one” is the next stage… to finally realize the stage all human beings are meant to reach according to the inherent dignity of their nature: the stage of “I am,” following the image and likeness of our Creator, the “I-am-Who-I-am.”

In the same way, the Virgin Mary asked how such an annunciation could be possible if she wasn´t known by any man, I also asked how such an “annunciation” like the one that happened yesterday could happen without “being known” by any family on Earth; my only family is my spiritual family of heaven. I got my answers, which I am still processing. I, princes of Heaven, will also be called “mother of faith” and forever be “our mother” for generations to come.” You can clearly see this is not related to a biological immaculate conception: this is all being done in a very social sense, not biological. Don´t expect this to be a biological pregnancy; it is an intellectual-social-ecclesial conception, as Jesus Charity, the integraction as a personal formative model, and the theology of light had been.

Yes, I confess I am very, very humbled by everything that happened last night, even if I am not yet able to fully grasp all the meanings I should be grasping, as I was made aware.

Being also called “madre de la Patria” is a very humbling thing to happen. That is another very unusual thing: it is quite often talked about founding fathers in history, but you never read about founding mothers. I have no memory of a single instance of a “founding mother” being named in the whole spectrum of history courses I had been taught, and I had studied a lot of history courses through the decades, besides being a history teacher myself in a period of my life.

You may “digest” everything I have told here in the best way you can. I am simply telling what happened in last night´s dream in the humblest way possible because I have seen the huge power of humility in Heaven.

So, here is the revised version of “On the Growth of the Human Personal Formation: the Nature.” May it help you to be more conscious of who you are and who you are called to be, the same way I am becoming progressively more conscious of who I am and who I am calling to be as I palabrize, share, and confront intellectually what has been shared in that text.

The only detail that is not being mentioned in the text that I could have mentioned but chose to let the text remain as it is and not change once more is the detail that my ex-thesis director was the first one to explain what the expression “being a late bloomer” means. He considered me a late bloomer —you can see another such example in the original Disney movie “Mulan”, in the conversation with the cherry blossom flower— and… among other things, he was quite right when he said that, far way more right than I was able to recognize at the moment he explained me that.

Everything that is essentially needed to understand the intellectual conception of integraction as the first personal formation model ever being known by humanity has been told in this text. In this text I evidently did not explain everything that I have gone through, not that was the intention: I simply mentioned what was essential to understand the intellectual conception of integraction, doing it in the humblest way possible.

We hope reading this text can be as blessing as conceiving it, preserving it, and sharing it has been to me. All this is as epic as Jesus Charity himself has always been. May the moon always remain as a powerful sign of who we are meant to be as humanity, as human family, as… amoreros: viva Dios Amor, viva Jesus Caridad… even unto life, even unto death. As Ro 14, 7-12 says:

None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself.

For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.

For this is why Christ died and came to life, that he might be Lord [the King] of both the dead and the living.

Why then do you judge your brother? Or you, why do you look down on your brother? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of God;

for it is written:

“As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bend before me,

and every tongue shall give praise to God.”

So [then] each of us shall give an account of himself [to God].

The text is being attached at the end of this blog post in both Word and PDF versions. In order to make you able to clearly distinguish between the revised and the non-revised versions, in the revised version I wrote my name only with the initials. The most important parts that changed in content in the revised version are writen in color red. The color red means: either it is new content being added to clarify the text better, or it was already in the original text, but the clarification that has been made there is important enough to be written in red and let the reader be explicitly aware of the change of palabrization. Not all the changes among both versions had been marked with red, only the most important ones in order for the reader to be able to grasp the truest meaning of the text.

Let´s keep growing together in communion and let´s keep becoming who we are called to be!

Today, day of Saint Michael the Archangel, I humbly share the text “On the Growth of the Human Personal Formation: the Nature”… not only as the first quite systemic exposition of the nature of the integractive human personal formation model, but also as an intellectual exposition of the whole process of conceiving integraction as personal formation model. It is not a theory: its a model. I think that a lot of theorical concepts of several theories can be fitted inside the model, if properly conceived intellectually for such purpose.

Right now, I don´t have too many other words to share. I am simply deeply humbled and amazed of I had been granted both the intellect, the body and the grace to being able to share in this text, that was writen in a two-week period. That is amazingly short, both considering the leght and the depth of a text of this nature, besides its undeniable creativity.

What else I can say besides what I can say? I can only repeat the Coca Cola slogan: enjoy!

The text is put as attachment (both as a Word Attachment and as PDF attachment) at the end of this blog post.

Let´s keep choosing to radiate light.