Burned my Bread

I baked bread yesterday and I burned it.  It was either because the thermometer I used to measure the internal temperature was broken (the plastic melted when we stuck the magnetic back onto a too-hot oven door) or the inside of the oven was too hot.  I turned up the temperature to 500F because according to the oven thermometer I got, the inside of the oven takes a long time to heat up.  That itself may be due to the addition of the 2 large clay tiles I bake my bread on.  Being too hot could mean the sugars caramelized on the outside of the bread too quickly for the inside to finish baking.

I had actually hoped I would burn my bread some time soon.  I've under-cooked it so many times that I knew how to avoid that problem.  Now I know - instead of just checking the thermometer, I should check the look of the bread itself as well.