With Honors

We continue our conversations about The Big Summer Read— The Lord of the Rings —by taking a trip to Tennessee Tech University and spending the morning with Dr. Shirley Laird. She’s a beloved, long-time veteran professor of English, specializing in courses for sophomores, teaching Shakespeare, Chaucer, Tolkien, Anglo-Saxon studies, and grammar. Dr. Laird is fondly remembered for her delicate and er...

This week, my co-teacher Drew Haston and I discuss The Odyssey and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a film whose setting and music and characters resonate with those of us in the South—a people forever clinging to the notion of home, hospitality, and old timey truths. With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on major platforms like...

This week, we joined forces with Drew at A Deadman’s Books to present the first check-in episode of the Big Summer Read: Fellowship of the Ring. With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on major platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Also, throw some love at our brother podcast with Drew Haston, A Deadman’s Books...

The Odyssey is a story of many things, and for me, it’s ultimately an adventure story of fathers and sons, the story of a man spending years of anguish trying to undo his mistakes and just get back home to the ones who love him. For Father’s Day weekend, I sit with my son and we discuss both The Odyssey and his summer reading assignment, How to Read Literature like a Professor . With Honors is a F...

Over the summer, my Honors and AP English students are asked to read a text in common. In this week's episode, Drew Haston and I are exploring Thomas C. Foster's helpful guide, How to Read Literature Like a Professor . With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on major platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. https:/...

Summer break is finally here! In this first epiosde of our Summer Series for the podcast, we’re meeting up with a friend at the coffee shop and getting to discuss a book she considered for her Honors class: The Names by Florence Knapp. With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on major platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and...

It’s the season finale! On the last day of school, I recorded with Chloe (and eventually Trever, Owen, and Athena) about generative AI, Lord of the Rings, moral relativism, and C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man. What a way to end the year! With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on major platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts,...

It’s the end of the school year. The seniors have graduated, classrooms are packed up, and we’re coming to the end of Season 2. Maylee joins me again as we reflect on what we did this semester and Hamlet . With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on major platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Also, throw some lov...

This week, we stayed after class and played Dungeons & Dragons in preparation for meeting Matt Dinniman, legendary author of the hit series Dungeon Crawler Carl . With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on major platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Also listen to our brother podcast with Drew Haston, A Deadman’...

It’s graduation week, and we are approaching the end of Season 2. AP Lit culminated their study with a viewing of Dead Poets’ Society . We brought in their AP Lang teacher, Tobi Swift, and had one last hurrah, one last barbaric YAWP before signing off on the school year. With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on major platfor...

It’s the first full week of May 2026, and that means it’s Teacher Appreciation Week. In this episode, I get to be a good student again and learn from the master, Gail Adcock. We also get to sit with the legend Amy Hawkins.. Together, we examine Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel The Kite Runner , what made it classroom worthy, and why it matters just as much to readers of 2026 as it did twenty years ago...

This week I talk to Whittney, a kid who knows just as much about pain and loss as anyone. She chose to explore how some of our popular literature examines that question too. Not “What’s the meaning of life” (which is probably just a trap question anyway), but “What makes life meaningful?” With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage...

Is The Great Gatsby still relevant to America in 2026? Is America in 2026 still a place where the wealthy billionaires cavort like Greek gods, and the poor trudge away in the valley of ashes between them? Jackson and I discuss his 5 reasons why this book still reflects America today. With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on...

There’s two starter types of Honors kids: the typically academically gifted kid, and the underdog hard worker who works their tail off for you. We’re five weeks out from graduation night. And this week, I’m sitting with one of those underdogs. One of our all-time favorites. Big Kev. With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on m...

This week, the seniors have come back to the table and wanted to talk about what they could have done differently in their four years. With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on major platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Also, throw some love at our brother podcast with Drew Haston, A Deadman’s Books . You can...

This week comes with a bonus episode, one of several that are airing through graduation season, all about the typical high school senior’s experience in 2026. Have things changed so much since the 1980s? Were attitudes really that different when I was a senior in the 1990s? Are we basically seeing the same things now in the 2020s? With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show...

Among the secular celebrations, March is also National Reading Month. And this week, some of my students wanted to discuss the emotional impact they get through reading. Maybe you won’t feel it the same way, but again, just because they celebrate this doesn’t diminish what you get out of it. Because like we always say in this classroom: “People are people are people.” With Honors is a Free Zone Ra...

It’s here at last. On Friday, March 20, 2026, Project Hail Mary arrived in theaters, and for our class, this wasn’t just any old trip to the movies. This was an epic launch. With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on major platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Also, throw some love at our brother podcast with Dr...

It’s so rare to find poetry in the wild outside the classroom, but this week, we sat down with a legendary poet of our own. Dr. Erin Hoover teaches at Tennessee Tech University here in Cookeville, TN. She’s a single parent by choice, a poet, a professor, a prolific writer, and this year, she is Cookeville’s first-ever Poet Laureate. You can find more of Erin Hoover on her website: https://erinhoov...

Last fall, Jackson wanted to pod about song lyrics, the way we study them in class with the TPCASTT framework. Today, he and Christopher are back to spend an afternoon of sophomore laughter and honors-kid thinking on song lyrics. With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage , on major platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTu...

Basketball season is coming to an end again. Last year, three of our Honors girls involved in basketball sat down to recap the season. This year, two of our guys — Lucas and Henry — spin it again, not only to recap the current season but also to look ahead to their new role as commentators for next year’s football and basketball game live streams. But first, the boys’ and the girls’ basketball tea...

We’re wrangling again with social commentary and with that familiar leap between what happens inside this classroom and what’s happening beyond it. Students were asked to debate the pros and cons of the US forcing an annexation of Greenland. Whether they personally agreed with the issue or not, they researched Greenland and developed positions for and against, to strengthen their debate skills and...

It used to be fictional names like Katniss Everdeen, or Winston Smith, or Guy Montag. Now it’s Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. It used to be dystopian fiction, but now it feels every day like dystopian reality. This week, Honors English continues our work with social commentary, and two of my brightest voices, Saydee and Lainie, asked to review The Hunger Games as a cautionary tale for the cult...

We’re back from Christmas break, back from a stack of snow days, and ready to start broadcasting the rest of season 2. And these episodes are produced by us, for us — genuine human content, but sometimes assisted by generative AI tools. Some might dash us for using Chat to generate the cover art for our Substack pieces, or for using Async to enhance the audio. But those are only assistive tools, n...

The end of the year is a time for reflection. And this year, the novel Project Hail Mary has been a HUGE feature of our honors classroom. It spawned so many conversations and questions. While some kids were distracted by all the science and experimentation that went into the book (one even criticized that it felt like the science sometimes got in the way of the story), most people couldn’t stop ta...