Math And Music

Are you one of those who believes in "discovery learning" and thinks students should "invent" their own ways of doing math problems? If so, imagine if that methodology were applied to teaching music.

Race Stupidity

As long as some people remain fixated on race, situations like this will arise:

Reginald Fentress wants to succeed Yvonne B. Acey as president of the Memphis Education Association, and he is not willing to wait. However, the Memphis Education Association board of directors has said he must.

The board voted April 1 not to include Fentress’ name, or that of any other African-American candidate, on the ballot for the 2008-10 presidential term. Since Acey is African American, Fentress was ruled ineligible to run for the office because the next MEA president must be white.

“We voted to follow the bylaws,” said Acey.

According to bylaws formed when all-white and all-black teacher associations joined in the mid-1970s: “The position of president shall alternate from white to ethnic minority.”

I think situations like this are fantastic. The more often race considerations bite people in the butt, the sooner they'll get past this idiotic preoccupation.

Local Union Does Good

In my previous post I vented about what happened at yesterday's union meeting. After getting that out of my system, though, I emailed my school's union rep and suggested that we meet and identify which items are "union things", that I can be excluded from, and which are "bargaining unit member things" that I cannot be excluded from. He referred me to our local union president.

I sent the president my dispassionate view of what transpired at the union meeting, and offered to meet him to identify that which is union and that which is bargaining unit. I closed with the hope that we could resolve this issue quickly so that we may, at this time of impasse in contract negotiations with the school district, present a united front instead of bickering amongst ourselves.

The union president contacted my site rep to get his view of yesterday's events, which I assume was close to mine. Within a couple hours today I received word that the union's executive board met and decided that bargaining unit members--which includes all teachers, not just union members--can now "vote on such things as calendar, salaries, etc."

I emailed the president, thanking him for his rapid attention to this matter and for offering such a fair and reasonable resolution. I asked for a clarification: does this really mean I get to vote on such things as contract ratification, strike authorizations, and the like? The response was that the executive board only discussed contract ratification, not strike authorization--but we can now vote on our contract.

Dear readers, this is BIG. Even though it's the right and just thing to do, legally they're not required to let me vote on my contract. Right now I don't know or care why they chose to resolve the problem this way, to change the longstanding practice of disenfranchising non-members; I'm still too swept up in the euphoria of being on the receiving end of justice and fairness.

I now have a vote.

When unions do the right thing, I will give them credit for doing so. My local union has done the right thing here.

Is this the end, is there nothing more I'd like or expect from them? It's not the end, and there is more. But there's plenty of time to move on those goals later. My local union has taken a very big first step, made a very powerful statement. Let's celebrate that for awhile.

Union Mentality?

After our staff meeting today, we teachers remained behind for a "union meeting." I'm not a union member, but I'm entitled to be at such meetings because I do pay for representation and am thus still a "bargaining unit member", or BUM =)

Our district is looking at changing our overall calendar--school start date, school end date, and vacation days. Our union rep gave us the four options being considered and asked for our input, so that he could take that input to the union, who would compile the "will of the teachers" and take that information to the district.

As we started to vote, one teacher called out, "Some people here aren't entitled to vote because they're not union members." That comment was stifled by the agitated mumbling of the group--but you've got to love that kind of mentality.

How can you represent me before the district if you don't find out how I want to be represented?

Sadly, though, I'm sure CTA would agree with her. This is exactly why union membership should be voluntary, exactly why so-called "fair share" agency fees are a farce, and why the legal requirement for the union to represent even non-members is un-American.

Update, 4/11/08: How could I post about this and not mention the California Teachers Empowerment Network? Teachers who encounter what I did will find that CTEN welcomes their voluntary association.

Update #2, 4/14/08: There's been a very positive resolution to this, one I've written about here.

Still Crazy After All These Years (in Delaware)

Last fall I wrote about the University of Delaware's thought control/indoctrination program for freshmen. Thanks to FIRE's involvement, the Head Rooster backed down:

“I have directed that the program be stopped immediately. No further activities under the current framework will be conducted.”

Ah, those halcyon days of last year, when we thought that would be the end of the nightmare. How naive we were.

Last fall, University of Delaware President Patrick Harker appeared to pull the plug, once and for all, on a totalitarian-style dorm program for indoctrinating freshmen in the full complement of today’s radical dicta. But in fact, as the Wilmington News-Journal now reports, Harker passed the buck, as university administrators are wont to do in time of controversy, by lobbing the program to the faculty for what has proven to be a feckless “review”...

However, the faculty’s overriding failure, as the News-Journal and others strongly decried, was not to give example to all higher education by terminating the program, simply and irrevocably. Instead, as Faculty Senate President Alan Fox now vaguely notes, the faculty anticipates approving, later in the year, a “new program” with a continued but less narrow focus on diversity and gender. Moreover, the same Gestapo-like Residence Life administrators, who ought to have been summarily fired, will continue to administer it, albeit with annual faculty oversight.

I know that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, but this is ridiculous. Let's pull out another old saying about liberty--maybe it's time to water the tree of liberty with the blood* of some (University of Delaware) tyrants.

U.D. President Harker got it right when he decreed — with false promise as it turned out — that the campus’s repressive dorm program had to “be stopped immediately.” Shame on him, and all other university administrators, trustees and professors who cower before despotic campus “change agents” intent on upending American society. Shame on them all for flagrantly violating the public trust.

Jobs have got to be lost over this.


*(Speaking metaphorically there, not advocating violence, you leftie turds who'd accuse me of that just to try to score a debating point.)

Taxpayers Paying For Islamic School?

I'm not one of those teachers who believes public schools are sacred. Universal public education is sacred, but not public schools. I've always been a fan of vouchers.

If vouchers came into being, though, how would we stop this from happening?

Recently, I wrote about Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote religion.

Evidence suggests, however, that TIZA is an Islamic school, funded by Minnesota taxpayers.

I'm a big fan of accountability for taxpayer dollars. If you get taxpayer money, you have to accept some responsibility for results--I support standardized testing. I don't have a problem with religious schools, as long as they teach the academic content they're supposed to. I also don't think the state should fund the religious instruction--and I'll let legislatures figure out how to do that.

In the story above it appears that Minnesota is not following its own rules. Perhaps the citizens of Minnesota will hold their legislators, or at least the Department of Education, accountable....

Socialism In A Nutshell

Michelle Obama--you remember her, the one who wasn't proud of her country until her husband ran for President--says it about as succinctly as anyone could:

"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."

I'm curious how much pie Princeton- and Harvard-educated Obama is willing to do without. You know, for the little people.

Carnival of Education

This week's Carnival is hosted by The Elementary Educator, and includes my post about letting communists teach.

March 2008 Issue of California Educator

CTA President, again, reminding us he's Hispanic--in case we didn't know. Check.

NCLB is the cause of all evil in the world, including global warming. Check.

State budget cuts cannot touch education, even though education is half the state budget. Check.

Art and music classes are going away. Check.

White male teachers underrepresented in photographs. Check.

Six of seven "CTA-sponsored and co-sponsored legislation" items don't relate to K-12 education. Check.

OK, we've got the usual stuff out of the way. That leaves only one mildly entertaining thing on which to comment: an advertisement.

On page 37, a certain travel "group" advertises "2-for-1 Savings" on a popular cruise line. Wow, 50% off, that's pretty good. Not good enough to join the union for, but not bad.

Oh, but it's only for specific week-long cruises: one cruise departing September 27th, one departing October 12th, and one departing November 29th.

I don't have any of those weeks off school, do you?

CTA President's Numbers Don't Add Up

This morning on the way to work I heard David "Si se puede, por que no" Sanchez on a CTA radio spot about budget cuts. I've written here about California's budget crisis and education's share of the California budget, so I know the numbers we're talking about. Sanchez' numbers don't add up.

He laments the "almost $5 billion in cuts" the governor has proposed. That's less than 10% of the entire education budget. Yet Sanchez says that such cuts will require class size increases of more than 1/3. I'm not making this up, the text of the ad is here.

Perhaps Sanchez is stretching the truth a bit, like that surprises me.

Learning Algebra From a DVD

Every time I hear about the I CAN Learn program, the story just gets uglier and uglier.

I CAN Learn is a dvd-based program to teach math. Students sit at computer, put on headphones, pop in the appropriate dvd, and watch an instructor on video teach math. They are then quizzed on the material and based on the results of that quiz either repeat the lesson or move on.

In February 2005, the Fort Worth Weekly published an article about that company called I CAN Earn. I'll summarize: kids aren't showing improvement, and there are suspicions that bribery has been involved in getting school districts to adopt the program.

I'm not surprised. I worked in a school district that forced that program on its teachers against the advice of the math department chair of every school in the district. I know this to be true--I was the district's math chair, and I was the person getting the recommendations from each school. We all agreed that the program itself might have some value in certain circumstances, but it could not be the primary method of pedagogy for teaching Algebra 1.

I won't go into further detail--the post would be exceedingly long--but here's the condensed version. In addition to the program itself each school had to buy all the computer hardware to run the software. Additionally, furniture was needed--our district chose glass-topped desks with the monitor under the glass, so the students were always looking down. But the glass reflected the overhead lights, so the curtains had to be closed and the lights covered. Teaching in those circumstances was like being in the Bat-cave. Teachers no longer taught; they were reduced to being "the answer guy" and the classroom IT specialist (someone had to keep that network of computers running). It was while several of us were undergoing training in the first Bat-cave that the superintendent said that he was imposing this program because "every superintendent has a pet project, and this is mine."

Oh, and the guy was a crook, and I'm absolutely convinced he received kickbacks. I ended up leaving that old district, partly because I couldn't accept that computer program. When the Fort Worth Weekly reporter later contacted me about I CAN Learn, and told me her suspicions and where the evidence led her, I could only nod in agreement based on the limited experience I had in my own district.

A couple years later, that district dropped the program because students weren't performing any better. "It no longer fits our needs", said the district spokesman.

If you read the entire Fort Worth Weekly article, you might recognize two names--one of them is Mike Huckabee, and the other? Guess.

So why do I dredge up this story from seven years ago? Because I CAN Learn is in the news again.

Mose Jefferson, the eldest brother and chief political strategist of embattled U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, was indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday on charges that he bribed Ellenese Brooks-Simms, the former president of the Orleans Parish School Board, to ensure her support for a computer-based algebra curriculum he was selling.

Two of the seven felony counts faced by Mose Jefferson, 65, stem from what federal prosecutors describe as two attempts to cover up the bribes by meeting with Brooks-Simms and trying to persuade her to give the feds a bogus explanation for the $140,000 she accepted from him.

Unbeknownst to Jefferson, Brooks-Simms had already cut a deal with the government. At both meetings, she wore a wire to record her conversations with Jefferson, according to a source close to the case.

The Congressman keeps $90,000 in cash stashed in his freezer, and his brother bribes school district officials to buy the I CAN Learn program. Nice family.

The charges against Mose Jefferson have no direct bearing on William Jefferson, who is awaiting trial in Virginia on 16 unrelated corruption charges.

But the case does have close links to the congressman. John Lee, the founder of JRL Enterprises (the company that sells I CAN Learn), has held fundraisers for him. William Jefferson has been a big supporter of "I CAN Learn," arranging for at least some of the $45 million in congressional earmarks the company has received.

The exact amount of money the congressman set aside for the company is unclear, because until recently bills containing earmarks passed by Congress did not identify which member inserted the request.

Lee said JRL Enterprises did nothing inappropriate.

In a previous interview, Lee described the commissions paid to Mose Jefferson as the going rate for "introductions to the decision-makers." Lee has said he does not know which members of Congress arranged for JRL's earmarks; regardless of who inserted them, the company's hiring of Mose Jefferson was unrelated, he said.

I hope they're able to pin some of this on Lee. Too much taxpayer money in too many states has gone to this man--who's crooked, in my opinion--and it's got to stop.

Yet Another Reason To Be Against Socialized Medicine

When the government pays for your health care, the government can make some extreme rules "for the greater good":

To curtail Japan's overweight population, the Japanese health ministry recently mandated that all waistlines among its 56 million workers over age 40 be below “regulation size” of 33.5 inches (for men). Any company failing to bring its employees’ weight under control--as well as the weights of their family members--will be fined up to 10% of its earnings by the government.

The Bloomberg story linked in the post above is a little less exclamatory:

Companies will be required to cut the number of overweight workers and dependents by 10 percent as of 2012 and 25 percent by 2015. Failing to do so will result in a surcharge of as much as 10 percent on contributions to a fund for elderly care. Insurance groups paid 6.4 trillion yen into the fund in 2004.

Still, the threat is ominous. It shouldn't be against the law to be fat, and companies shouldn't be penalized because their workers are fat.

Update, 4/10/08: Socialized health care isn't polling well, but it's polling better than makes me comfortable.

The Imperial Presidency

This is so good that I'm going to repeat the entire Instapundit snippet:

UNPRECEDENTED EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY -- Bad when it's used to fight terrorists, but good when it's used to fight "global warming!"

That's the idea behind a new study from a team of researchers at the University of Colorado law school, who worked full time for nearly six months on a project that could help the next U.S. president make sweeping climate-change policies -- fast. The new report probes the edges of executive orders and lays out the authority the next president could use to introduce global-warming policies without waiting for legislation to wind its way through the notoriously slow congressional machine.

"Given the extreme importance of climate change, this is a way for the next president to be able to take rapid action," said Kevin Doran, a researcher at CU's Center for Energy and Environmental Security. . . .

The report is part of a larger project, the Presidential Climate Action Project, which has created "a bold, comprehensive and non-partisan plan for presidential leadership rooted in climate science," according to its Web site, www.climateactionproject .com.

Guess the days of worrying about the imperial presidency have come to an end.

Must be an election coming up, or something.

Why Teachers Leave

The NEA has a story on their web site, originally published in their mouthpiece rag, about why teachers leave the profession. Here are their main reasons:

--lack of respect
--NCLB
--underfunding

Go read the story if you can stomach the stupidity, if those are the best reasons they can come up with. Here are the easiest replies to each of them:

--NEA contributes more to the lack of respect than any other single organization
--if you really claim to want to help kids, especially those who are most at risk, you want those students identified, and you want the schools that aren't teaching them identified
--can you teachers identify how much money your state spends on education, and if you claim it's not enough, explain how much would be enough?

Remember, folks, these union types are college-educated and they're teaching your children.

The Horrific Economy

Must be a Republican in the White House--everywhere we're told that we're in a recession, and it's a bad one.

Can any of my doom-and-gloom-economy readers tell us what an economic recession is? By definition, it's two consecutive quarters of negative growth (contracting economy). We don't have the numbers in yet for the 1st quarter of this year, so we can't know yet whether or not we're in a 2nd quarter of negative growth.

Why we go through so much hand-wringing over these cyclical occurrences, I don't know. The economy can't grow forever. It stops, takes a breather, then picks up again. Market forces. To steal a line from the new Battlestar Galactica: all this has happened before, and it will happen again.

But when Republicans hold the White House and there's a possibility of a recession--I've been hearing about recessions since January 2001--you'd think we're one step away from 1933. So what's our current situation? A little perspective is always helpful, brought to us by Power Line via Instapundit:

I'm sorry to see unemployment climb to 5.1%, but by historic standards, that's not exactly a "grim picture." For example, nothing like the unemployment rates that, along with runaway inflation, propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. But I wondered about a more recent comparison. Do you remember 1996, when Bill Clinton swept to an easy re-election victory over Bob Dole, on the basis of what pretty much everyone in the press considered a near-perfect economy? No "pink slip nation" in 1996!

Actually, though, the unemployment rate in November 1996, when Clinton rode a soaring economy to victory, was 5.4%. That's right--three tenths of a percent higher than the "grim picture" of a "pink slip nation" painted by this month's unemployment report.

To all those people who expect the President to "run the economy"--think about exactly what that means, and what you expect him to do. Tell me exactly what President Clinton did to make such a great economy.

Presidents can affect the economy positively in only a couple ways. They can sign into law bills passed by the Congress, bills that economists tell us will help an economy--like tax cuts. They can lead from the bully pulpit to encourage tax cuts. And they can choose, every decade or so, a new fed chairman. Anything else?

There are lots of things a president can do to affect the economy negatively--like put 1/7 of it under federal control, a la HillaryCare. Raise taxes. Put on a sweater on national tv and tell your fellow Americans to make do with less.

Now I know what you lefties are dying to say. "The war is draining our economy!" Check out the percentage of GDP our military is eating up today--in a kinda-shooting war--and compare it to 1945 (WWII), 1952 (Korea), 1969 (Vietnam), 1979 (no war), 1985 (no war), and any year in the mid-90s, then try to justify your claim. Lefties, I won't post any comment of yours about the economy and the war unless you do this. It's my blog, my rules.

Update: Instapundit adds another post this evening, saying

This may well be true; we're overdue for a recession -- we haven't had a really deep one in over 25 years -- and my sense is that there remains a lot of economic idiocy still to be wrung out of the system, which is what recessions are for.

Speaking for myself, though, I'm not an econo-blogger. I tend to be over-pessimistic, but I guess I have tuned out a lot of the media econo-doomsaying because they've been predicting massive economic collapse for pretty much my entire sensate life and so far it hasn't come. Plus, at the moment they're playing their usual pre-election gloom-and-doom game in the hopes of helping the Democrats.

Which doesn't mean that the economy is necessarily doing better than they say, since their bias is exceeded only by their laziness and ignorance. As I noted some years ago about their Iraq reporting, the fact that they're transparently playing up bogus bad news doesn't mean that there isn't genuine bad news that they're not reporting, because reporting that would require knowledge and effort. So you can't just apply "Kentucky windage" and assume that things are better than the reports say. They may actually be worse, just in a different way than is reported . . .

Pretty much true.

Update #2, 4/9/08:

Here are more comparisons with 1996. Love how those goalposts change.

Well, This Is One Way To Fund Your College Education

Sicko.

Real World Schools

I teach in an upscale area, and many of my students are shielded from the realities that exist just a few miles away. They don't understand that there are entire schools where kids don't learn, where violence stalks the hallways, where street cred is the coin of the realm.

They have no understanding of this type of reality.

An anti-violence rally at George Washington High School turned ugly Thursday when a series of fights broke out in a crowd of students being dismissed for the day.

Parents and students had gathered at 3 p.m. to protest what they said has been escalating violence between black and Latino students at the school, at 3535 E. 114th St. on the Far Southeast Side.

Tensions between the groups have persisted for years, parents and students said. But this week has been particularly violent, with several flare-ups that caused some parents to pull children out of school for their safety. Several parents said they would not allow their children to return to school until the violence was addressed.

The protest came on the heels of a larger rally Chicago Public Schools held earlier this week calling for an end to the shootings that have claimed 20 students this year. (emphasis mine--Darren)

I'm glad my students are so far removed from this type of school system.

Hat tip to EIA.

Local Blogger Harassed By Craigslist Founder

Two stories in one day on the web site of the major Sacramento newspaper:

Like an online Goliath girding for battle, Craigslist.org moved Thursday to quash a Sacramento man who launched the first national blog about the classified ad Web site that has successfully cultivated a populist community and image.

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster fired off an e-mail to blogger Tim White that told the 38-year-old to change the name of his site, a move that would make it tough to find.

"We need you to stop using the infringing domain CRAIGSLISTBLOG.ORG immediately, and arrange for transfer of it to us asap – using/selling/transferring infringing domains is illegal, and penalties up to $100,000 per domain can be applied," Buckmaster wrote to White.

Apparently this made news in more than just Sacramento, because this evening came with a second article:

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, feeling media pressure, on Friday acknowledged he had been "acting like a jerk" a day earlier to push a Sacramento man to cease and desist in his Craigslist blog.

Buckmaster, while saying he was "getting some well-deserved flak" for his heavy-handed e-mail to Tim White, also charged that White had placed "deceptive" ads on his unofficial blog before taking them down and contacting the media Thursday.

"We have no interest in shutting down blogs about Craigslist, critical or otherwise, and have never tried to do so," he wrote on the official Craigslist blog that was born Thursday. "But in the strange world of trademarks and copyright, it's poor practice to allow a confusingly similar domain or business name to go unchallenged."

Good for everyone concerned.

Commies Soon May Not Have To Hide Under The Desk

Two years ago I wrote a post about the sections of California education code that refer to communists and communism. To summarize:

-You can't teach and be a member of the Communist Party.
-You cannot teach about communism with the intent to inculcate in the minds of students a preference for communism.
-You cannot let communist organizations use school property.

Are you ready for this? A state senator has introduced a bill that will reverse these laws.

And I haven't found objective evidence yet, but I'm told that the only sponsors of this bill are the state teachers unions, the CTA (NEA) and the CFT (AFL-CIO). Maybe they're trying to make up for this.

What possible good could come from this bill? Our government should not be required to lend assistance or hire people whose political philosophy is the destruction of our form of government.

Freedom Is A Little Piece of Broken Concrete

I--Growing up in Cold War Sacramento

I lived just down the street from McClellan Air Force Base; I remember watching from my front yard once as an AWACS came in for a landing, looking like it might touch down right at the end of my street. McClellan was a major logistical base; aircraft were repaired there. It was just north of downtown.

Mather Air Force Base, just east of downtown, was a Strategic Air Command base. There were bombers there, and most assuredly nuclear weapons.

In downtown, and just northeast of downtown in Roseville, were major railroad repair depots. My father worked at the Southern Pacific yard downtown.

East of downtown, in Folsom, was the Folsom Dam, which included a power generation station. Southeast of downtown was the Rancho Seco Nuclear Power Plant.

South Sacramento held the Sacramento Army Depot.

In West Sacramento is a deepwater port, capable of supporting ocean-going vessels. And Sacramento itself is the capital of what was at the time the 7th largest economy in the world.

Sacramento was an inviting target indeed. We went to school every day knowing, in the back of our minds, that there were Soviet nuclear missiles targeted at us.

II--The Soviet wheat harvest

I believe it was during my first trip to Germany, in the summer of 1974, or perhaps it was my second in 75, when I heard on the radio about a bad wheat harvest in the Soviet Union. The President had decided to sell American wheat to the Russians. I remember thinking, at only 9 or 10 years old: "Let them die." Why would we help the enemy? Détenté or not, they were the enemy. Why not finish them off?

III--The Hawk battery tactical site

In the summer of 1985, the summer after my sophomore year at West Point, I was sent to an active duty air defense artillery unit based in Schweinfurt, West Germany. Each day I rode the troop bus from our battery headquarters out to our "tac(tical) site" near Massbach, West Germany.

B Battery was "on the leading edge of freedom's frontier, guarding the skies of NATO Europe." The thought was that before the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact invaded with ground forces, they'd soften us up with air attacks; our battery's mission was to destroy the attacking aircraft with Hawk missiles. There was only one problem, though--we were within range of ground artillery. The Reds would take us out before the first aircraft flew overhead, before we could ever get a shot off.

Germany in the summer can be rainy or hazy, but one day the weather was exceptionally clear. I climbed to the top of one of our radar towers, and in the far distance I could see a thin strip of dirt winding its way through the trees.

It was the East German border. A fence and probably a minefield, not to keep us out, but to keep them in. A thin strip of dirt--freedom on one side, tyranny on the other.

IV--NORAD

Only a couple months later I was an exchange cadet at the Air Force Academy. The 6 of us from West Point, along with the exchange cadets and midshipmen from the Coast Guard and Naval Academies, were taken on a tour of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex south of Colorado Springs.

Cheyenne Mountain was partially hollowed, and an entire base built inside. In it was housed the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which tracked everything in orbit around earth--down to and including flecks of paint that had come off rockets. They also monitored our satellites which spied on the Communists.

Like the Greenbrier facility in West Virginia, only not a secret, the Cheyenne Mountain Complex could be sealed off from the outside world with a huge steel door--in the event of a nuclear war. I stood in the control room, I saw the phone that connected the commander directly to the President. I touched the phone myself.

If a launch was detected anywhere in the world, the staff in the control room had about 20 seconds to analyze the flight dynamics and determine if it constituted a threat to the United States or its allies. Fortunately, there never was such a threat; if there had been, the commander would have picked up the phone and told the President. This would have put into play a lengthy series of steps culminating in the launch of nuclear missiles from our triad of forces--ground-launched ICBM's, air launched missiles and bombs like those at Mather, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

It was called MAD, mutually-assured destruction. You fire at us, we'll fire back at you. Our missiles will pass each other over the North Pole. You don't fire at me, and I won't fire at you. Deal?

It was an insane policy, but it worked.

V--Tienanman Square

I was on a rotation to the National Training Center, outside of Barstow, CA, when we got the news. There had been rallies and protests in Beijing since April, but by early June the Communist leadership had had enough. The Chinese sent troops into Tienanman Square to end the protest once and for all.

We were very isolated out in the desert, not even having non-military radios. The only news we got was from the observer-controllers who were evaluating us. All we knew was that the Chicoms had sent the army into Beijing. They began shooting. We heard reports, later proven to be inaccurate, that some military units were firing on others in defense of the protesters. We wondered about a civil war in a nuclear power.

Those reports were wrong. No military units mutinied. It was a massacre. Only weeks later, when we finally returned home to Fort Carson, did we see the iconic picture of White Shirt Guy standing in front of a tank. Tanks are very effective anti-personnel weapons. But one man, a man craving liberty, can be brave enough to stop a line of tanks.

For a little while.

VI--The Wall comes down

Late 1989 was a surreal time. All across Eastern Europe, protests against Communist rule occurred. Why then? It's hard to say. The borders were becoming more porous, and more people were escaping to the West. President Reagan was fueling an arms race, one he knew would bankrupt the Soviets--and governments began to collapse under their own weight and that of their citizens who yearned to breathe free. Gorbachev promised even more democratic reforms, more perestroika. All the lines were converging.

It all happened so quickly. First, East German strongman Honecker resigned in October. On November 7th his entire cabinet resigned. The Communist Party dismissed the ruling Politburo in response to huge anti-government protests. Two days later, on November 9th, the East German government opened it's border and The Wall. Other Eastern European governments also faced huge protests, and within weeks they fell.

The entire Warsaw Pact had collapsed without a shot being fired. The world order that had existed since before I was born evaporated in less time than it took to get a visa.

At that time, most people in the world had never heard of Nicolai Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator. Most had no idea how bad life was in Romania. I had only read his name so couldn't pronounce it (it's chow-shes-coo), and I had only the faintest idea how bad it was there. I remember telling a friend of mine, "I'll believe this is real when that Co-ses-co guy in Romania falls." A few days before Christmas I got a phone call early in the morning; my friend said, "Turn on your tv." And there was Ceausescu, under arrest in his own country.

VII--The Baltic Republics

It seemed that in late 1989 the entire Eastern bloc was protesting communist rule. The biggest underdogs, though, were the Baltic Republics.

Unlike the Warsaw Pact countries, which were theoretically independent but in reality answered to Moscow, the formerly independent countries of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had been absorbed into the Soviet Union itself. Special attention was paid to these three Soviet republics by the press. While the world marveled at the sight of people from both east and west standing atop the Berlin Wall, or striking it with picks and sledgehammers, news reports continued to show non-violent protests in the streets of these three small lands.

I didn't understand how fast everything was changing, I couldn't believe it was real. I thought I was going far out on a limb when, in the fall of '89, I bravely predicted that "the Baltic Republics will be free within a decade." There might not be a fight, but no way was Moscow going to slice off parts of its own country, not any time soon.

In December, Lithuania abolished the Communist Party. In March of 1990, it declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Latvia and Estonia followed only two months later.

VIII--The Quinones family

A retired sergeant major died, and I was tasked to be the widow's Casualty Assistance Officer. I was to escort her to the funeral, and later help her with the myriad activities that no one wants to plan for--dealing with insurance companies, getting all the household bills put in her name, having the deed to the house placed in her name, getting a new military I.D. card, and meeting with lawyers, among others.

One of her sons was a major in the Berlin Brigade, the US garrison that had been stationed in Berlin since the end of World War II. He appreciated the efforts I'd expended on behalf of his mother and family, and before returning to Berlin after the funeral asked if there was anything he might do for me. I'd already told him that I would be leaving the army soon, so no, there was nothing, but thank you. And then, with my usual sprightly manner and a smile, I said, "You know, sir? I would like a piece of The Wall." That was just me being funny, fending off the discomfort of talking about getting out of the army.

A few weeks later I received one of those bubble-wrap envelopes in the mail. It was from Major Quinones, and inside the envelope, inside the ziplock baggie, and inside the paper towel--was a little piece of broken concrete. The enclosed letter said he'd gone to The Wall himself to get it for me.

IX--Dénouement

I've seen freedom born--in Vilnius, in Riga, in Tallinn, in Moscow and Tirana, and more recently in Kabul and Baghdad. I've seen the looks on the faces of people as they took their first breaths of free air, their first tastes of genuine liberty. It's a wondrous sight, an honor to watch. Because you see, freedom isn't an abstraction, not to me. Freedom is something real, it's concrete--it's that little piece of broken concrete sitting on my shelf.