With Honors

This fall, Project Hail Mary became more than a class novel. It became the backbone for all our learning, through research projects, class discussions, projects, and novel study. By reading Andy Weir’s story early, students used it to fuel a STEM-centered research project, and then after Thanksgiving they returned to it for deeper, more thoughtful discussion. In this episode, my co-teacher Drew an...

In 2026, Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary is coming to the big screen, but before that, it was our class novel for Fall 2025. I read the book last year and fell in love with Weir’s appreciation for science, his underlying notions that humans will be able to think our way out of any problems (if we really allow ourselves to). It resonated with me like his previous work, The Martian , and movies...

As we approach the end of the year, we come in with a sackful of episodes. This week, Saydee and Kate end the year by drafting their favorite Christmas movies. While Kate may be shy to warm up to the pod mics, she and Saydee get energized when they think back on what these Christmas movies really mean for us: nostalgia, warmth, family. With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find With...

I was born in Tennessee, but when my parents split I moved to Ohio. Forever after, I’ve found myself chasing that need to come back home. To belong to this land and to fit in with these people, my one true original community. And I’ve been blessed to be raised by so many wonderful women along the way: my mom, her sisters, my dad’s sisters and in-laws, grandmas, cousins. But there’s one iconic Tenn...

In this special (and belated!) Halloween installment, I get to sit with one of my brand-new, sharp-witted sophs in a deep-dive through the haunted heart of 1980s song lyrics. With the classroom bathed in eerie orange lights and spectral figures of legendary singers drifting behind us, Jackson leads me through his TPCASTT analysis of the lyrics to uncover how these singers reveal what haunts them:...

Halloween is finally here! My favorite holiday of the season. The pinnacle of my time of year. I wait eleven long months to finally embrace October. It’s the month my wife and I got married, the month our first son was born, the month for leaves changing and cooler temps bringing a relief from oppressive summer, the month for foggy mists and woodsmoke hanging above the eaves. There is no scent qui...

This week, two of my favorite students sat down to dish about their favorite book: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice . (Barf.) I mean, not “barf.” I just never wanted to read the book. I know, I know, I’m being a stereotype right now probably, but it was never my scene to read Jane Austen. I’ve tried her work before, and I just didn’t like it. But I really like Summer and Ainslee’s work, their goo...

I’m so lucky to be able to partner with Tennessee Tech University and be a mentor teacher to practicum students and student teachers. Student teachers stay the entire semester and are expected to take over as much responsibility as possible during their time. Practicum students, on the other hand, come by for a month or two during one class period, mostly to observe but also to get what hands-on e...

Most families send their kids to school, hopefully see them that afternoon or evening, and hear something about the school day. It’s a rare treasure to be able to spend the entire day with your kids, though, working in the same school they attend. You’re here with them for pep rallies and standardized testing, for class changes and ceremonies, for lockdowns and fire drills, for hall duty and bake...

In this week’s episode, two of the sweetest, nicest, kindest Honors kids venture into a lawless wasteland, an outlaw territory where rules do not follow and where the all-seeing eye is forbidden from watching. High school bathrooms. But Summer and Andrew aren’t here to just bewail the state of high school bathrooms. They also want to remind us why we can all be a little better. We need to stay hyd...

In this week’s episode, Maddie and Maylee discuss their initial impressions of sophomore year as well as the summer reading. Maylee went with the assigned novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Maddie asked to read the alternate assignment, Yann Martel’s classic Life of Pi. Here, the two friends discuss overlapping parallels between their books: the search for identity, th...

Each week we’re showcasing one of the brilliant minds behind this season’s show. This feature gives them a shot at telling you what they care about, what their perspective on the world is, and where they’re going from here. This week we’re featuring another AP all-star. My first memory of her is when she and my daughter made a funny video their freshman year. And now, four years later, she’s grown...

Ever fall in love with a book, get excited to see they’re making a movie out of it, and then get offended because they changed a character, or deleted a major detail, or added irrelevant material instead? No motion picture is ever going to live up to the hype you’ve generated in your own mind for a book you’ve spent weeks, months, or years with. But this week, three of the AP Lit girls walk us thr...

Each week we’re showcasing one of the brilliant minds behind this season’s show. This feature gives them a shot at telling you what they care about, what their perspective on the world is, and where they’re going from here. This week’s first voice is one of the quietest, laconic voices I have in class this year, yet he’s also one of the most brilliant. Meet Camarkis. With Honors is a Free Zone Rad...

It’s a new school year with a new group of students! In both Honors and AP, students complete the traditional first step of our journey together: the summer reading assignment. This year, the novel was Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Zevin’s novel was about video games (which first hooked me), and true love, and friendship, and grief, and loss, and living all over again. In...

Ever since I first taught Honors English at our school, I’ve assigned a summer reading assignment. Beyond being a tradition or an assignment, I still believe summer reading is a healthy, useful routine. So many voices complain about “learning loss” during the summer months (and I agree, there is likely to be some, but not nearly enough so that I would ever, ever advocate for eliminating summer bre...

S1 Summer School E2: Crockett, Haston, and Bryce "The State of Education (Part 1)" There are plenty of conversations that don’t need a microphone to matter. Those long, meandering ones that stretch across classroom desks or lounge chairs or chipped laminate tables in the teachers' workroom. Those end-of-the-year conversations that drift from lesson plans to life plans to whatever’s on someone’s tr...

Today’s episode was supposed to be a treat. Just a fun, end-of-the-year moment for Kylie and Hayley, two students who’ve helped anchor our podcast this season and who originally pitched this very idea back in their first recording. They wanted to taste-test Crumbl cookies and rate them, just for fun, just because. And we did. We laughed and told stories and joked about lemon cookies and Oreo overl...

I grew up in the pixelated TV light of the 1980s, when Nintendo and Sega didn’t just entertain. They baptized us into something new. I was nine years old when I first played Super Mario Bros . for the first time at my cousin Darrin’s house, and I remember that moment the way some people remember their first kiss. It was instant. It was electric. The 8bit music was like neon-pink candy in my ears....

Some seasons in the classroom feel like an airliner taking off: loud, kinetic, every system strained to its edge. Other seasons feel like landing that jetliner: calculated, quiet, nothing flashy, just the long exhale of something safely brought home. And some feel like landing that jetliner in a fury of storm, screams, and alarms. This year, we felt a little bit of it all. And now, we're in the fi...

Some relationships in this job stretch far beyond the bell schedule. They're not neatly tucked into gradebooks or graduation years. They don’t end with a final exam or a diploma. Some relationships, like the one Kyla and I share, just keep circling back, evolving, deepening, surprising us both with where they land next. In this episode of With Honors , I get to sit down once again with my many-tim...

Some Fridays just hit different. It was skinny block, we had coffee that could only be described as delicioso , and the three of us—Alondra, Coach Haston, and I—sat down in what can only be described as a perfect pocket of time. No formal script. No real agenda. Just a conversation that rolled from student growth to teacher growth, from being teens to becoming adults, from English class to the wei...

In this (and every) episode of With Honors , we try to do something simple but important: have a real conversation. It seems that more and more often, we can't openly discuss the important things, because the important things lead to louder and louder arguments. Vitriol. Venom. Ideological entrenchment. But my purpose as a high school English teacher is to train our students to be better writers,...

Get your opinions ready and your feelings slightly bruised, because Bella, Miya, and Ily are loaded with hot takes in this week’s episode of With Honors . The trio makes its debut on the pod by lighting the match on the class's attitudes toward books, names, music, whatever. First on the chopping block? Fahrenheit 451 and that ending everyone either loves or pretends to understand. Then it’s onto...

Zoe and Callie crack open the emotional and ironic heart of Kate Chopin’s "Story of an Hour" in this week’s episode of With Honors . Chopin's story is used every year in ELA classrooms. It’s one of those tales that hides a whole thunderstorm of truth in a single moment: about the rules of marriage, social expectations, freedom, and the things we assume about the people closest to us. The girls tak...