We decided last year that we wouldn’t do the Santa Claus thing with our kids. That doesn’t mean that we just say “santa isn’t real”. No, we just decided to handle it a little bit differently. We tell our kids the true history of St. Nicholas and that he used to be a real person and we commemorate his kind acts of Christian charity today as a Christmas tradition. We are very careful to tell them that some people like to have fun with the idea of Santa Claus and act like the presents come from him, so they shouldn’t spoil it for other kids. But what’s our motivation for this in the first place? Well, there are several.

First, it’s the truth. I’ve heard all the arguments for and against pretending that Santa Claus is real. I’m just not compelled by them enough to trick my kids. I want them to have total faith in what I tell them; that it’s the truth, as fully and complete as I know it to be. When kids finally do find out that Santa isn’t real, it is usually from other kids. I remember when I found out that Santa wasn’t real in the lunchroom at school back in the 3rd grade. I was so embarrassed. I remember a couple of bullies, Anthony and Brian making fun of me for “still believing in Santa Claus” and the other kids at the table laughing at me. A child’s self-esteem is so fragile and I don’t want them to feel like I tricked them, and that’s what got them embarrassed in front of their friends.

Second, I want them to know that their presents came from us. Maybe it’s a little selfish, but I want them to know right now that we care about the things they like and that it’s we who love them and know just what to get for them. I don’t want that love and care to be laid at the feet of some made up character who doesn’t exist. Kids get lots of gifts during the holidays and if you’re not careful, Christmas will be over and they have gotten lots of gifts from lots of people, but the gifts they should be getting from their parents are instead coming from Santa Claus.

Thirdly and most importantly, to a child, Santa Claus and other fictional holiday characters are just too similar to the secular view of God for my taste. On one hand you have Santa Claus whom you never see but he evidently knows everything about you and keeps up with whether you are being good or bad. He gives you good presents if you’re good and bad presents if you’re bad. He loves you and brings you toys (which God doesn’t even do). And Mommy and Daddy tell you all these stories about him and how he is real even though you never see him. My question is what in a child’s mind makes that any different than God? If Mommy and Daddy lied to me about this person who I can’t see but who loves me nonetheless, why should I believe them when they tell me that we can’t see God but he sure does love me?

If you think that’s far fetched then just read this article about some teachers in the UK who told their students that Santa Claus was not real, and then read the very first reader comment in the feedback section:

“I think next they should start going to funeral homes and telling the loved ones of the recently deceased that there is no Heaven or afterlife and that their loved one will just rot in the ground and they’ll never see them again. This would be especially good to do to any small children who lose a parent.”

- Peter, Houston TX

The fact that Peter from Houston associates Santa Claus as being the same as Heaven and Hell proves my point. The secular world today lumps Christ in right alongside Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. I see no reason to give them extra ammo with my kids.

Now for the disclaimers: I Dave Jones, being of semi-sound mind and unsound body do willingly acknowledge the following:

• Millions of people believed in Santa Claus as kids and were not made fun of when they found out.
• Millions of people believed in Santa Claus as kids and did not lose their belief in God.
• Millions of people believed in Santa Claus as kids and still knew their parents loved them.

That is why we don’t get all preachy about it with other parents. As far as I’m concerned, issues like this should be decided by each parent based on what they think is best for their children. It doesn’t bother me one bit when a parent tells their kid that Santa Claus does exist. But my conscience won’t let me tell that to my own kids, because my mind tells me they might not handle it as well as other kids. If you want to say that I’m an insane, overprotective, right-wing, puritan worshipper as a dad, then you would probably be right. As a dad, it’s my job to be overprotective and to worry. That’s what dads do. But I also think my points make good sense, and reason should always accompany concern as a parent’s guide.

On July 25, 2011, the Miami-Dade grand jury released several sweeping recommendations in a detailed report on the Nubia Barahona case. The murder of 10-year-old Nubia, apparently at the hands of her adoptive parents earlier this year in Florida, was a heinous crime for which the perpetrators should be severely punished, if convicted. Her death was all the more tragic because, as the grand jury report makes clear, if governmental officials had properly followed existing procedures, it likely could have been prevented.

While it is right to conduct a thorough review in the aftermath of tragic events in an effort to prevent similar tragedies, it is also important not to overreact. Unfortunately, the grand jury report overreacts in its recommendations to amend Florida’s homeschool laws because of Nubia’s adoptive parents’ claim that they were homeschooling her for the seven months leading up to her death.

The grand jury recommends that the law be amended to require every notice of intent for a home education program to “be forwarded to DCF to determine if any reports have been made to the DCF Hotline.” The grand jury went on to recommend that if parents had ever been the subject of a Department of Children and Families (DCF) investigation, they were to be immediately subject to a new investigation by DCF and required to submit to a period of monitoring, even if the previous investigation completely cleared them.

These overreaching recommendations are of great concern to Home School Legal Defense Association, the local homeschool community in Florida, and the wider homeschool movement around the country. The recommendations are stunning because they assume that the lawful decision of parents to teach their children at home must be examined by DCF every single time. Even more concerning, is the grand jury’s declaration that if parents had been falsely reported up to seven years ago and completely exonerated, they would be subject to an investigation and undetermined period of monitoring by DCF.

While the purpose of such an investigation is “to make sure motives are pure and covert child abuse is not the true goal,” these recommendations go well beyond the realm of reason and what is warranted by this terrible situation. They would result in parents who choose a valid and legal educational option in Florida being treated as suspected criminals. Additionally, these recommendations would not have prevented the events in this case. While Nubia was a public school student, her adoptive parents had been investigated multiple times by the DCF for serious allegations of abuse and neglect. These investigations occurred while they were foster parents, during the adoption of the children, and afterward. In fact, they pulled the children out of the public school in the middle of yet another DCF investigation.

While many serious concerns about Nubia’s adoptive family were reported time and time again, state officials failed to properly follow up on them, resulting in the death of a young girl. The solution to this tragedy is not to treat everyone who chooses home education with suspicion or to investigate and supervise every family who had ever been the subject of an earlier report to DCF. The recommendation is not practical, is not legal, and would likely be held unconstitutional as well.

–HSLDA e-Lert

Looks like the grand jury is trying to cover up neglect on the part of the DCF. And what better way to do it than to treat every homeschool family like potential murderers.

This other section of the article floored me though:

According to Florida DCF statistics, in 2009 there were 204,202 reports of child abuse or neglect. Of those referrals, 153,733 were actually investigated. Over 50,000 of the reports made in 2009 were determined to not involve any type of abuse and neglect.

Of the 153,733 reports that were actually investigated, 123,486 were determined to be “unsubstantiated.” In other words, in over 80% of all reports investigated in Florida, there was “not sufficient evidence under State law to conclude or suspect that the child was maltreated or at-risk of being maltreated.” According to the recommendations by the Miami-Dade grand jury, innocent families like these would be subjected to another investigation if they ever decided to homeschool their children.

While these recommendations carry no legal authority and can only be acted upon by the Florida legislature, HSLDA is closely following this situation and will immediately notify our members and friends should the legislature decide to act on the recommendations. Until then, know that HSLDA is determined to vigorously fight for the right of parents, presumed innocent by the law, to teach their children at home.

–HSLDA e-Lert

Erik Demaine quit school at the age of 7.

If you had run into him a dozen years ago, it might have been in a bus station somewhere between Halifax, Nova Scotia and Miami Beach, on the road with his father, a silversmith and glassblower whose only degree was from Medford High School.

And yet, there he was on Friday, lecturing a roomful of scientists on his obscure specialty: computational origami. Demaine, at 20, arrived in the fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the rank of assistant professor – one of the youngest the university has ever hired.

But the thing that is truly unusual about Demaine is the story of the path he took to get there – and of his father, Martin Demaine, who has devoted much of his adult life to educating Erik in a decidedly unorthodox way. Raised among hippies and jugglers and free thinkers, Erik Demaine has found himself at the center of a field where abstract math somehow intersects with street performance. That he is a prodigy is not even a question, say people who have worked with him; the question is what will amuse him.

”I think the sky is the limit,” said Anna Lubiw, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who has coauthored papers with Erik since he was 15 years old. ”I don’t know anybody else like him, never mind young. To try to assume anything on the basis of what other people have done is nonsense.”

These days, it would be hard to pick out Erik and Martin Demaine at MIT’s computer science department, where they both took offices last September – Erik on the second floor as an assistant professor, his father on the third as an unpaid visiting scholar, which Erik said was an incentive, although not a condition, of his choice to come here.

But eight years ago, when the father and son walked into the computer science department of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, they seemed to have emerged from nowhere. ”His dad and he walked into our department and just said he wants to join the university,” said Sampalli Srinivas, an associate professor.

Administrators looked at them like they were crazy. Erik was 12 years old, he had no board scores, and no high school diploma. But they allowed Erik to take advanced courses in abstract algebra and programming languages. The result was clear by the end of the term: ”He aced every single course,” Srinivas said. ”I recognized him as one of the brightest students I had.”

Over the next few years, a growing number of Canadian academics heard the story of Erik’s migratory education. It was a project that kept father and son on the road for five years, eating $1 meals in rented rooms, and strolling into prestigious universities to talk to professors.

And it rested on a risky assumption about the academic world: That If you called up a professor and said your son had some questions about his work, that professor would invite you in, and start teaching.

”People always seemed curious to meet us,” said Martin Demaine, 58. ”Then I would tell his age. I think there certainly was some mystery about us that we allowed to exist.”

For the first years of Erik’s life, the Demaines lived more or less by the rules in Halifax, with Martin working long hours as a silversmith and Erik enrolled in Montessori school, Martin said. But after a painful divorce – neither father nor son was willing to talk about it on the record – Martin came to the realization, as he puts it, that ”I didn’t know how to bring up a child.”

So Martin threw himself into it the way he had thrown himself into glassblowing, silversmithing, puzzlemaking, and filmmaking, among various other pursuits. He fired the nanny and came up with a plan: They would live on $5,000 a year. They would travel by bus, support themselves with craft shows and the proceeds of the ”Erik & Dad Puzzle Co.,” and attempt to feed themselves on a budget of $1 per meal per person (a goal Martin admits sheepishly now they did not always achieve). Martin would work as little as possible.

The father’s educational theory went like this: Apart from one hour of home schooling a day, the child should pursue his own interests. They spent a few weeks at a commune in Tennessee, a year in Providence, six months in Chicago. During a three-year stint in Miami Beach, he sat Erik down with a neighbor to see if he was interested in learning Chinese; the language instruction went nowhere, but the neighbor had a computer.

They borrowed missionary textbooks from a group of Seventh-day Adventists. Martin Demaine can remember three bookstores where the staff became so accustomed to seeing the Demaines poring through their merchandise that they set up tables as a study area for the two.

”We would go to a museum,” Demaine said. ”Anything he pointed to or mentioned, I’d go to the library and find a book and leave it on the table. Sometimes after three days the books would disappear.”

The result, according to Erik Demaine, is that he pursued his own interests, circumventing years of cramming for tests and memorizing facts. ”Memorization is not such a big deal. You remember what you need to remember and look the rest up,” he said.

His father insisted that he try school regularly, ”To make sure,” Erik Demaine said.

”In Miami Beach, I went to school for a month because there was this cute girl,” he said. ”It was a fine experience, but it was a much, much slower pace than I was used to.”

Erik understands why people put such an emphasis on studying for tests: ”You need grades so you can do something you want to do afterward. You need to take the tests to get the grades to apply to graduate school.”

But none of that ever applied to him. At 9, Erik took over the home-schooling teacher’s manual and began teaching himself.

At Dalhousie, and then at the University of Waterloo, the Demaines made an unusual pair, the gangly teenager and his ponytailed father sitting together in class. ”The thing that really struck me was the way his dad motivated him,” said Srinivas. ”When Erik was sick and felt under the weather, his dad used to attend my lecture and make a tape.”

And Martin Demaine, who had made forays into physics and law graduate programs but had never finished a college degree, began to hear people describe his son as a prodigy. ”To be honest, I just thought he was above average,” he said.

They continued to work together, though, as Erik’s interests wandered from tectonic plates to liquid dynamics to parallel computing systems. It was Martin, with his background in the visual arts, who introduced his son and his professors to the ancient Japanese art of folding paper.

Long the exclusive terrain of a few researchers, origami math has woken up slowly in recent years as researchers began to apply it to a lengthening list of real-world applications: to the folding of proteins in human DNA, or the unfolding of enormous lenses in orbiting space telescopes, or the folding of air bags in automobiles.

Erik also became interested in the study of linkage, the dynamics of rigid-sided polygons in two dimensions. Last year, with the help of mathematicians Robert Connelly and Gunther Rote, he solved the infamous ”Carpenter’s Ruler” problem, which had stymied scientists since the 1960s, proving that any such polygon can be unraveled without breaking – work that would be relevant to the fields of robotics and genetics.

By last year, when he interviewed at Stanford, New York University, and Carnegie Mellon, Erik was a coveted hire. Leigh Deacon, from her desk in MIT’s computer science department, watched the hiring process with fascination. ”I said, unless this man has a third eye, everybody’s going to want him,” Deacon said.

The news that he had accepted and that she would be working as his administrative assistant made her more than a little anxious. She had already spent too much time around geniuses, enough to know that ”almost none of them know how to behave with other humans.”

”I thought to myself, what am I going to get? The most arrogant, egotistical person on the planet? Am I going to get someone just short of insane? There’s got to be something wrong with him to compensate for his brilliance,” said Deacon. ”I was just shocked … He has this sort of quiet humility. He’s got this nice expression on his face.”

Then there was the strange business of his father accompanying him. It’s an unusual arrangement, agreed one colleague, but it’s worked so far.

”Anyone who takes the time to know what Erik is about would know that separating him from his father would be a bad idea,” said Thomas Hull, an assistant professor at Merrimack College who has conducted research with the Demaines on origami.

Lubiw, who was one of Erik’s thesis advisers, said there is no question that the Demaines’ work is a function of synergy. ”Even me, I can’t tell what is his gift, what is his obsession, and what is his hard work,” said Lubiw. ”I do take moral lessons for the way Marty raised him.”

At 20, Erik is nearly out of prodigy age range, and his lanky 6-foot-3-inch frame makes his age barely detectable anyway. He will explain, with a sweet smile, that our society is far too age- segregated: ”It is my single passive political stance,” he said – and argues that a lot of other people could do what he does if they had the same encouragement.

In the Waterloo department that was home to this strange duo until last fall, there is a twinge of regret at their departure. But Ian Munro, Erik’s thesis adviser, said he is just glad they came in the first place.

”You don’t regret things like that happening to you,” said Munro. ”You think: It was great to have Erik as a student.”
–Ellen Barry, Globe Staff, 2/17/2002

You can actually watch the entire thing here while it lasts on Google Video. The quality is terrible though. It’s better to get the disc from Netflix.

He wrote that “rationality belongs to the cool observers” while the common person follows not reason but faith. The cool observers, he explained, must recognize “the stupidity of the average man,” and must provide the “necessary illusion” and the “emotionally potent oversimplifications” that will keep the naive simpletons on course. As in 1650, it remains necessary to protect the “lunatic or distracted person,” the ignorant rabble, from their own “depraved and corrupt” judgments, just as one does not allow a child to cross the street without supervision.

–Chomsky, Force and Opinion

So, really, the name calling comments I received(and I’ve gotten some before in email) weren’t really about Glenn Beck. They were more about my being a threat to what conservatives currently see as their salvation: namely, getting Republicans back in office. Most “Hot Air” conservatives will say things privately such as “they all need to go”, speaking of Congress. Or, “we need to vote every last one of them out and get some fresh blood in there.” But, what they really mean is that we need to vote in all “real” Republicans and vote out the RINO’s. The problem with that line of thinking is that it’s backwards from reality. The RINO’s are the real republicans. They always have been. Reagan and Goldwater were anomalies, just as JFK was an anomaly within the Democrat party.

When I criticize Glenn Beck, people hate on me because they think I’m jeopardizing the potential for a return to a Reagan style takeover of D.C. But, what I’m saying is 1). that won’t happen anyway and 2). even if it did, we are playing on a totally different ball field than Reagan was in 1980. He was only a few years removed from the gold standard, which Nixon ended in 1971. Thus, an inflationary balloon to boost the economy was something he could get away with without too many immediate negative consequences. Things are completely different now. The economy is literally on the brink on a daily basis. Government employee unions have a stranglehold on public budgets. And, the national debt vs. GDP is completely unsustainable. There is no easy fix.

What we need now isn’t Reagan. We don’t need another leader who will just try and nudge the system in a different direction. We need radical changes to take place if we are going to avoid financial ruin. Politics just isn’t the answer any more. The free market must be set loose and allowed to work in full force. We must stop giving life-time pensions to government employees. We must abolish the Federal Reserve. We must bring all the troops home and stop policing the world. We must open up competition in our currency and repeal legal tender laws. All of these things will hurt. They will hurt bad for a while. And that’s why there is no politician, Republican or Democrat, that will be willing to do them. It would be political suicide.

Now don’t get me wrong. I think any anti-Washington rally is a good rally. I never said I was against it, or that it shouldn’t have happened. But, Glenn’s problem is that he still thinks the Constitution is what’s going to save us politically. But, when has a bunch of words on paper ever kept a government from over stepping it’s bounds? He goes on and on about how we need to return to a strict adherence to the Constitution and the founding fathers. But, he must not realize that Alexander Hamilton(a founding father) had as his personal crusade to undermine the Constitution. He hated it. Almost from day one, he and his successors down through the generations have sought to redefine the meaning of the Constitution to give the Federal government limitless power. To make the Feds the sole arbiter of the limits of their own power. Putting your hopes and dreams on the Constitution is a fruitless venture.

Thomas DiLorenzo gave a really good lecture on this topic at the Las Vegas Mises Circle. I’ll post it below. It’s really worth your time to listen to. I approved the name calling comments on the last post just for kicks, but I’ll be deleting them in the future. I don’t plan to waste my time on comments that just call me an “idiot” without ever backing it up with facts or cordial discussion. Please continue to comment, but if you are going to disagree with me, do it in a way that opens the floor for a good, robust debate. Don’t just name call. That wastes everybody’s time.

DiLorenzo – The Fatal Conceit: The Myth of Limited Constitutional Government:

2010 Overview from LifeWay VBS on Vimeo.

It’s obvious what’s going on. The old guard Republican establishment is terrified of the Tea Partiers and anybody that smacks of libertarianism. That’s why Dick Cheney and Mitch Mconnell came out in support of Rand Paul’s primary opponent, Trey Grayson. Mconnell even went so far as to privately mislead James Dobson about Rand Paul’s views on abortion. Dobson later came out and switched his vote from Grayson to Paul after he learned that he had been mislead. Obviously the GOP elitists hate Rand Paul with a passion. And then, out of nowhere comes this big hubbub about his criticisms of the Civil Rights Act, originating from the neo-con blogosphere.

The dirty little secret of historical fact that they leave out of every story is that the Civil Rights Act was soundly criticized by many people at the time it was being debated, especially libertarians. Their criticism had nothing to do with race. Instead, they were thoroughly disgusted with the amount of power that the legislation gave to the federal government. Even though most of the CRA was justified(specifically titles I and III were long overdue), there were real causes for concern in other parts of the bill when it came to civil liberties of blacks and whites.

Most criticism of the CRA was focused on Title II, which attempted to outlaw discrimination in businesses. I say “attempted” because, as we recently explored, laws can never properly fulfill their stated goals. No law can outlaw racial discrimination. It can ban certain behaviour under threat of punishment, but it can’t ban discrimination itself. That’s impossible. So, what title II did was force people to behave in ways that they weren’t comfortable with. This may have helped blacks get a better table in a restaurant, but I can guarantee you that the cook spit in their food. Why? Because the CRA didn’t change what he actually thought about race. It just told whites and blacks that they had to play ball or else they would be punished. That’s not a solution to racism. It’s a recipe for exacerbating racial hatred.

Title IV was also a focus of criticism by many. The fear was that it would lead to quotas and forced busing. Although the CRA’s proponents routinely denied this, it nevertheless happened:

One of the most “damaging” arguments by the bill’s opponents was that once passed, the bill would require forced busing to achieve certain racial quotas in schools. Proponents of the bill, such as Emanuel Celler and Jacob Javits, said that the bill would not authorize such measures. Leading sponsor Hubert Humphrey wrote two amendments specifically designed to outlaw busing. Humphrey said “if the bill were to compel it, it would be a violation [of the Constitution], because it would be handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race.” While Javits said any government official who sought to use the bill for busing purposes “would be making a fool of himself,” two years later the Department of Health, Education and Welfare said that Southern school districts would be required to meet mathematical ratios of students by busing.

–Civil Rights Act of 1964, Wikipedia

This forced desegregation by forcibly transporting black children across town to white schools was a clear violation of black people’s civil liberties. It opened up black school children to being beaten by white kids and being shunned by white teachers who were being forced out of their comfort zone too fast. That’s the danger of omnipotent legislation. The natural flow of society is jolted. Racism is a mental scar that needs a lot of time to correct itself in the hearts of men. Rushing the process by threat of force might speed it up, but at the cost of large short-term harm to the very people it’s aimed at helping.

One of the persistent critics of forced school desegregation was black author Zora Neal Hurston – author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Although she totally opposed segregation on moral grounds, she feared that such things as the court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education set a dangerous precedent of encroaching on civil liberties. Although she died in 1960, it’s clear that the portions of the CRA that expanded the size and power of the federal state would have troubled her greatly. Her famous letter to the Orlando Sentinel is a fantastic read. Please go read it before it goes down the collective memory hole.

On a personal note, I find racism abhorrent, as I’ve posted before. But, what I find equally abhorrent are demigod politicians and black robed dieties forcing society to conform to their image by threat of physical and financial harm. Racism itself is idiotic. It makes no financial sense to restrict trade because of the color of a man’s skin. As people come to realize this, racism naturally falls by the wayside as an artifact of history. A black man’s money is the same as a white’s. A black man’s labour is the same as a white’s. This fact alone would have driven racism out of our culture as people began to see, more and more that racism itself is foolishness. Opposition to title II and title IV of the CRA isn’t an endorsement of racism. It’s a principled opposition to a piece of far-reaching legislation motivated by an equally strong commitment to the preservation of personal liberty.

Sometimes a love of liberty and a love for people come down on different sides of an issue and it’s hard to make a decision between the two. If I saw a restaurant owner turn away a black man for being black I would probably go over and punch him in the nose. But, that doesn’t mean that I think title II of the CRA was appropriate. Personal liberty is too fragile and too easily discarded. It must be protected. Maybe I’m naive, but I think racism in the U.S. was destined to be eradicated by society itself, without the help of legislation; except such legislation that was necessary to correct racist laws that our government had already passed.

Clearly, if you go to a charter school, you will be unable to properly cut out things with scissors and will develop a habit of slapping primary colored large words hap-hazardly onto scary concrete walls. Please. How silly.

Of course, as a homeschooling family I don’t really have a dog in the hunt, but it’s still interesting to watch the mud fly from the sideline and develop some commentary. The thing that really got me were these phony reasons they are giving. They are so funny. Here’s how the site lists them out [my commentary in green brackets]:

• Charter Schools Drain Funding from Local Schools. [$10,000 per student is what Alabama government schools spend. Briarwood private school tuition is $6,375.00 per student. Go figure.]
• Charter Schools Compromise Teacher Quality. [This is probably the same teacher quality that the AEA fought so hard against a few years ago when No Child Left Behind required "highly qualified" status for all public school teachers.]
• Charter Schools are Plagued by Abuse, Corruption, & Failure. [LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!]
• Charter Schools Perform Worse than Other Schools. [ "Because charter schools vary as widely as traditional public schools, their academic achievement also varies widely. It is difficult -- not to mention scientifically invalid -- to make blanket comparisons of charter schools to traditional public schools." --NEA Website. Someone needs to get the AEA and NEA on the same page quick.]
• Charter Schools Weaken Accountability, Standards, and Local Control. [Somehow, this will be the first time in human history that competition has weakened accountability. It's a miracle!]
• Charter Schools are Being Forced on Us by Federal Bureaucrats. [Somehow, I imagine that if we already had charter schools and the Feds wanted to make them illegal that this bullet point wouldn't be on that list. :)]

–Nocharterschoolsalabama.org, AEA

Please. Give me a freakin’ break. Nobody believes for a minute that the AEA cares about any of this baloney. The AEA has one purpose. To use education as a cover for getting more money into it’s stakeholder’s pockets. That’s it. End of story. If a certain law, policy, agenda, event will bring more money to the AEA and it’s members/leadership then they will back it. If it doesn’t, then they will come out against it. The actual content of the item in question is irrelevant. The AEA is a public employees union, and the fact that charter schools don’t require their teachers to be unionized might have something to do with their opposition. Ya think? Just maybe?

Also, I want to mention that the technical part of this bread recipe can be made in one of two ways. The modern version that’s fast, or the totally from scratch pioneer version that will blow your tongue off. It’s up to you which route you go. I’ll explain the modern variant in this post and the totally(and I mean totally) from scratch version in the next post.  This is the version I’ve settled on for awesome sandwich bread, but this recipe is very, very changeable.  It’s a great starting recipe to use and adapt to make all different types of yummy rolls, bagels and french breads.

The Modern Version:

Dry Ingredients:

• 2.5 Cups of Wheat Flour
• 1 Cup of Bread Flour
• 1 TBSP of Salt
• 2 tsp cocoa powder

Wet Ingredients:

• 8 oz. warm water
• 5 oz. warm whole milk
• 1 oz. of vegetable oil
• 2 tsp Instant Dry Yeast
• 1 TBSP Sugar

Instructions:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl.  Don’t add the yeast or sugar to the dry ingredients.
2. Mix the water, oil and milk together in a large cup and warm it up a bit.  Not hot, just warm.  A little more than luke warm.  You don’t want to kill the yeast.
3. Now add the dry yeast and sugar to the warm liquid and stir it around with a fork vigorously until all of the sugar is dissolved.
4. Now walk away and let the yeast liquid sit and fester for about 15 minutes.  The yeast is going to get really active and start to party.  Don’t crash it.
5. Come back and dump the liquid/yeast mix into the dry ingredients.
6. Get your hands wet with some water and begin to mix.  You will get messy, but it’s worth it.
7. When everything is mixed thoroughly, flour the countertop and dump the dough out onto the flour.
8. Knead the dough for  6 minutes until smooth, adding plenty of flour as needed.  Don’t skimp.
9. Now stretch and shape the dough into a ball with the seam at the bottom.
10. Clean and dry out your mixing bowl and then spray it inside with cooking spray or wipe it with oil.
11. Drop your dough ball into the bowl seam side down and shoot it with a light shot of cooking spray also.
12. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a hand towel and let sit for an hour until it at least doubles in size.
13. After it doubles, uncover and punch down the dough to get all the air out.  Don’t punch it hard, just make sure it’s deflated good.
14. Now turn it out on the floured countertop again and knead it very lightly for about a minute.  You just want to work it a little to get it back to a good shape.
15. Now, crisco the inside of a loaf pan.  Use plenty of lard/crisco.  You don’t want the loaf sticking to the pan.  That’s a disaster.
16. Cover and let sit again for about 30 minutes.  It will rise quite a bit, but don’t let it get too big where it’s ballooning out over the sides of the pan.
17. Lower your oven rack to a little below center and put the pan on the rack.
18. Set the oven to 400° F and set the timer to 30 minutes.
19. When the timer goes off the bread is done.  Let it cool on a wire rack for about an hour.

That sounds like a ton of steps, but it’s really not that hard.  Try and make it a few times. You’ll get better each time and it tastes delicious. You’ll never eat sandwiches with store bought bread again. Once you’ve nailed down this recipe, you’re ready to kick it up and go old-school.  That involves hand grinding your wheat flour, using home cultured yeast and making a pre-ferment.  I’ll show you how to do that next time.