Greetings,

If you're viewing this page, you might be a parent, guardian, or 8th-grade Dunkirk Middle School student, or college student enrolled in my Fredonia State course. I sincerely welcome you all to my classroom, or more appropriately, my digital classroom. Here, you'll find every resource I provide, every policy I enforce, and every lesson plan and material I teach during the year. I encourage you to read deeply, click curiously, and explore the farthest reaches of this site. It represents my life's work, and as such it evolves as rapidly as my learning in the field of education.

I bid you my sincerest welcome.

Mr. Karpie

Enjoy the images of my classroom above. It's a great place to hang out and learn. If those images pique your interest, click the image below to take an in-depth, digital field trip of my classroom complete with explanations describing the reasoning behind its spartan aesthetic.

These week's news: 8th Grade ELA

I created this visual to show how our "choice weeks" cycle will work, augmented by some of yesterday's images. [Pictures really help students learning English to know what they should do.]

Students will largely progress at their own pace, but if they fall too far behind, I'll try to reach out individually to make sure they catch up.

The trick to teaching is to make sure students understand the mistakes they're making in an emotion-free context before moving on to attempt a similar activity for a second time. The Peardeck-enhanced Slides we'll use weekly will show students how their annotations are being graded, and engage them in the grading process themselves, before they move on to their next choice-week text selection.

Unconscious Bias Unit: Choice Weeks

Unconscious Bias Unit

**Our equality unit occurs between Halloween and St. Patrick's Day. With Veteran's Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, President's Day, MLK day, February break, etc. planning for five-day weeks for our equality unit is just short sighted. Instead of planning Monday-Friday weeks, the outline below shows the work our students will do for each text. Those days might span part of a single week, or several calendar weeks depending on how they fall. Regardless, students will chose three of the six texts below with which to read and engage.

Runner's World Bias Connections

Please don't think that I am promoting this magazine issue in an effort to make any kind of money. The 300ish people who view my website each week would have no impact on Runners World's bottom line.

Armed with the knowledge shared from the issue to the left, I enjoyed the Syracuse 1/2 Marathon through an entirely new perspective about running equality on 11/10/2019.

Obviously, Runners World magazine has been reading my website, and is aware that our 8th-grade unconscious bias unit is in its infancy. The magazine decided to devote its most recent issue to the inherent inequality between male and female runners (mostly based on relative safety, but also based on body image, shaming, objectifying, etc.) 

While many of the stories border on the "adult content" side of inequality between men and women, there are some real statistics, some real stories, and some advice that can help us avoid the "toxic masculinity" that both causes and doesn't help to end the unequal treatment of female runners in our country. 

At first, I thought to strongly recommend the link to the left to the parents of female athletes, then I realized that really defeats the whole point - everyone should read these stories, especially the parents of male middle school students who can end the harassment of women on the run once they grow into men.

Extra Credit Opportunity:

Any student interested in pairing any of the articles shared in the issue above with any of our close read tools will enjoy extra credit early this marking period. These articles share important, real-life stories of inequality, but as a runner, and avid advocate for gender equality, it would be absurdly self indulgent to include them in the main texts of our Unconscious Bias unit.

The Interdisciplinary Educator Blog

Read

I maintain an education-based blog to chronicle my learning in the field of education. Right now, I am primarily publishing a book I prepared, but never published about classroom management. I'm not a paper-based educator, so a paper-based platform was always too permanent to chronicle my learning in the field of education...

All the writing in the field of education is done by educational researchers at universities, who don't teach real students, or text-book and education-software corporations, who don't teach real students.

I believe that teaching real students is important when claiming to understand how to teach real students.

If you agree, click the link or button above to read my blog.

Our four, "big" units in 8th grade ELA:

What universal experiences do all refugees share?

September - Halloween

In this, our first serious unit, students read the book ​Inside Out and Back Again​ as the central text for learning about how all refugees experience the tragedy of life twisting inside out, and how only the "Lucky Few" ever enjoy life coming back again.

​We link this novel with a series of news articles, Ted Talks, and documentaries to learn about refugees' experiences across countries and decades.

How does unconscious bias still affect America? 

November - Christmas

Our unconscious bias unit traces inequality from the 1860's through today. Specifically, the unit focuses on unconscious bias, and how much of the inequality that lingers in our country isn't the blatant, purposeful racism of the 1960's, but is in fact more subtle, and in some ways, more insidious than that. We'll even engage in a Harvard Study to measure our own unconscious bias, and to help advance the field of inequality research.

Which food chain should feed the future of America?

In our "Food Chains" unit we learn about the four food chains that feed America, and we attempt to weigh the pros and cons for each. This unit culminates in students creating a website which will share information, and attempt to guide the eating choices of their fellow Americans. While we use some supplemental texts, this unit is based on the book The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Instead of using the cover art from the book itself, the cover art to the right was created by Amisaday Cedeno as part of an assignment for class. We agreed it was better than the cover of the actual book.

Inquiry-Based Research

In our inquiry-based research unit, students ask their own questions, find and evaluate their own sources, organize and complete their own close reads, and basically drive their own learning, at their own pace.

​This is our capstone, where everything that's been learned all year comes together to allow students to take their learning beyond the confines of the classroom.