NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

The Forum on the Importance of Second Language Learning that I helped organize last week at UOG was a huge success. We had a massive crowd of students and members of the community. The comments that were made came from all types of people. Some students spoke about how important it is to requires students to take second languages because it will provide them so many long term benefits that they may not be able to perceive yet. Some community members spoke about how this idea of English-only or focusing the education at UOG on a single language was like a slap in the face to the dozens of languages that are spoken daily in Guam. Some business owners talked about the need for more languages to be taught at UOG and that more languages make you more intelligent and marketable. Some teachers talked about how students who know more than one language perform better in school than those who are monolingual. The conversation was fantastic, we stayed an hour and fifteen minutes beyond our sche…

As someone who also went to community college (3 semesters prior to transferring to UOG), I support President Obama's plan to make community college free, and also concur with the message of Tom Hanks in this column from the New York Times. 
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I owe it all to community college by Tom Hanks New York Times 1/15/15
IN 1974, I graduated from Skyline High School in Oakland, Calif., an underachieving student with lousy SAT scores. Allowed to send my results to three colleges, I chose M.I.T. and Villanova, knowing such fine schools would never accept a student like me but hoping they’d toss some car stickers my way for taking a shot. I couldn’t afford tuition for college anyway. I sent my final set of stats to Chabot, a community college in nearby Hayward, Calif., which, because it accepted everyone and was free, would be my alma mater.
For thousands of commuting students, Chabot was our Columbia, Annapolis, even our Sorbonne, offering courses in physics, …

I have never watched Game of Thrones, but simply because it is discussed so much and a favorite of so many people I know, I by default absorb so much information about it. I know most of the major characters and most of the major plot points. From all that I know however, it still seems baffling to me that so many people find the show so engrossing. There are those who say it is the violence. The writing. The realism. The creativity. The intrigue and drama. The relationship to real history. I've heard so many different types of arguments.  So much of this reminds me of the first time I read Shakespeare's plays. I had heard for so much of my life that the works and words of William Shakespeare were the pinnacle of human creativity and expressive achievement. That these were great plays that were timeless in their quality and boundaryless in terms of their importance. When I read them I was intrigued but not that impressed. To this day when I read or hear Shakespeare I still don…

“Shakespeare gi Guinaiya yan Chinatli’e’” Michael Lujan Bevacqua Marianas Variety 4/30/14
Shakespeare’s Hamlet asks, “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them?”Hamlet is paralyzed by the fear of death or suffering, but ultimately moves toward decisive political rebellion.
Similarly, the African-American lesbian poet, scholar, and activist Audre Lorde speaks of the radicalizing crisis in her life when she faced a diagnosis of breast cancer: “I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself.My silences had not protected me.Your silence will not protect you.”
Most might assume that it is ridiculous to compare a “great” writer such as Shakespeare to an activist like Lorde. One of them so many seem to accept as the height of human achievement whereas the other is generally read only within feminist and ethnic studies circles. There is some…