NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Next Friday,  February  21st, from 4:00 - 5:30 pm, Senators Kelly Marsh-Taitano and Jose "Pedo" Terlaje will be holding the first of their public safety roundtable series called "Håle' Kumunidåt: Social Science Solutions to Drugs, Crime and Other Problems."  Over the past year, the senators have attended many public safety forums and hearings and there has always been a consistent theme from police officers, social workers and others; these issues are complex and have deep roots. To tackle them the island has to use multi-prong well-informed approaches, and the Håle' Kumunidåt roundtable series hopes to provide a space for developing somme of those ideas.  The first roundtable will focus the questions, "How did we get here? What what can we do next?" and we'll be hearing from historians, social workers, political scientists and mental health specialists. The public is invited to attend at the Public Hearing Room of the Guam Congress Buil

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

University of Guam Mangilao, GU April 26, 2015 Press Release For immediate release Forum on Changes to UOG General Education Curriculum UOG Professors to Lead Community Discussion on Removal of Second-Language Requirement Is “ENGLISH ONLY” Good Enough for the University of Guam and Our Students? A public discussion on keeping second-language-learning requirements in the University of Guam general education curriculum will be held on Thursday, April 30, at 6 p.m., at the CLASS Lecture Hall on the UOG campus.  The event is free and open to all concerned members of the public. Recently faculty endorsed and approved changes to the General Education curriculum at the University of Guam to remove second-language learning from the undergraduate requirements.  Learning a second language will become optional.  Until now, all students have been required to take two courses (8 credits total) in a language other than English.  Chamorro, Japanese, T

When we look at the media landscape of Guam it is pretty simple. There are two main newspapers. Their ideological difference is sometimes stark, sometimes not. The PDN reflects a clear ideological agenda most of the time. They are the mainstream source of print media, the towering megalith and as such they tend to see their job as guiding the island and sometimes saving it from itself. The Marianas Variety is a worthy challenger at times, showing more ideological breadth and willingness to be critical of things the PDN is not. But the Variety is ultimately a challenger and something which is out there, but not read as much or supported as much in terms of advertising.  For TV there is a similar dynamic, with two stations offering daily news, KUAM and PNC. PNC offers more ideological flexibility, whereas KUAM often times appeared chained to the ideology of the political families and parties it is closely associated with. Some argue that PNC has a similar bias to the opposite side o