In July, 1928, sliced bread debuted at the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri. The town now promotes itself as "The Home of Sliced Bread."

Chris Lehmann is the principal of the Science Leadership Academy, "a partnership high school between the School District of Philadelphia and The Franklin Institute. He recently spent 4 days at the Constructing Knowledge Conference (CMK), where he had the "chance to listen to, talk to, break bread with people like Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Marvin Minsky and James Loewen,...."

"Break bread...."

Breaking bread has, for many, religious overtones. It's not a phrase you hear much anymore, and when you do, it's rarely literal.

At most conferences we share meals on our own sanitized plates using steam cleaned steel utensils to eat food made by strangers who often speak a different tongue.

Before Otto Rohwedder's bread-slicing machine became ubiquitous, we had whole loaves in our homes. We literally broke bread at mealtimes.

I think we were closer together when we did, because we did.

***

I occasionally make bread. I grind the wheat (a workout), then mix the flour, yeast, butter, water, and honey. I knead (another workout), let the dough rise, punch it down, let it rise again.

It's good, it's healthy, it's whole. I share the first piece with Leslie just about every time. We break bread together.

When we have close friends over, we may leave a whole bread loaf on the table, to be broken by our hands. Sometimes, sadly, the loaf stays unbroken.




One year we grew wheat in class--we had dozens of stalks on the windowsills. 2 or 3 times a week I would remind the students where the wheat stalk "stuff" came from: water and the carbon dioxide from our exhaled breaths.

The emerging wheat berries amazed the children, as it still amazes me. Kids in these parts rarely see mature grass. They saw the wheat as just a giant grass plant until the berries appeared, just like the same berries they planted.

At the end of the year, we got a handful of wheat berries and I ground them up with others, made the bread at home, and after a brief chat reminding the class where the bread came from, we broke bread.

Some of the class could not stomach the idea of trying a piece--I'm not eating anyone's stinky breath! Those who tried it mostly enjoyed it, especially a few who grew up on real bread before they came to the States.

***

What does any of this have to do with Chris Lehmann?

He writes about the frustration of building a robot at the CMK conference last week. His team (barely) succeeded, and he writes about the value of the process, about the value of gumption when things we try do not work well.

I've always wanted to make bread from scratch in class. Truly scratch. Grind the wheat berries. Churn the butter. All kinds of science would be involved.

I could never figure out how to do it, and am still not clear, but I'm going to try it anyway. I'm going to present the problem to the class, and we're going to solve it, or not, but learn in the process.

If we come up short, I will still end the year with a home-made loaf of bread, to break together in class to honor of our time together.

The poster is from the town of Chillicothe--you can order the poster here.

The woman baking bread and the wheat photos are from the National Archives.