With Honors

In this special bonus episode for Veterans Day, I wanted to extend those same questions about Odysseus in America and the challenges of the veteran coming home again. Who better to ask than the actual veterans here at school? Today you hear real talk from Brian Everett, Douglas Romero, and Jason Moore.

With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find it and our new show Second Stage on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Also, throw some love at our brotherly podcast with Coach Haston, A Deadman’s Books. He’s on Spotify at

This episode features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and royalty-free music, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

This November, as Veterans' Day approaches, we sit with TTU professor Dr. Brian Williams to discuss the book Odysseus in America, written by Dr. Jonathan Shay. It uses The Odyssey as a metaphor for the difficulty faced by Vietnam vets when they returned home to a country that no longer seemed to recognize them.

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 find him on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

This episode features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and excerpts of music from Civilization VI by Stephen Foster and Geoff Knorr, used for educational purposes with respective Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licenses when available. We claim no ownership of their music. All rights remain with the original artists and copyright holders.

My seniors have spent what feels like forever in our unit study of Macbeth. My country girls wanted to finish the month by making sure we talked about the feature of Macbeth that always draws the crowd in. Witches.

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 find him on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

This episode features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and “Halloween Appalachian Style” by Harley Poe, used under their respective Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licenses. It also features a clip from the YouTube short by the TryHard Guys and their conversation with Mister Robi about voodoo dolls. All rights remain with the original artists and copyright holders.

It’s Halloween week, my favorite time of year. And it’s probably the season in which my classroom comes into its prime. But the groundwork for this started all the way back in Week 1 with these sophomores.

This is the week I teach students how to analyze the techniques of suspense in movies and literature. And this week’s episode is a walkthrough of my lesson for teaching suspense. I call it: The Art of the Scare.

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. (He’s still alive, I promise! He’s working on his doctorate and will be back soon.) You can find him on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

This episode features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and “Eerie Scary Ambience”, used under a respective Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. It also features brief narrated clips from Jaws, No Country for Old Men, and Insidious. These clips are used for educational purposes in teaching this angle of suspense, and we claim no ownership of them. All rights remain with the original artists and copyright holders.

It’s Homecoming Week at our rural high school. And this week, we wanted to open the doors and let you listen in too.

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 find him on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

This week, a dialogue with my students and co-teachers about an epiphany they caused me to have about Banquo in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

For years, I taught Banquo as a noble, selfless father figure who intended to get his son to safety away from the tyrant. But this week, my AP Lit seniors caused me to realize how selfish (and foolish) his actions are. If that's true of Banquo, what about us? What are we willing to tolerate if it means our candidate wins an election? What are we willing to stomach or turn a blind eye to when it seems we may profit from it as well and, ultimately, could prove to be our own undoing?

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 find him on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

This episode features “Groove Delight” by Musinova, used under a respective Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licenses. It also features audio clips from two productions of Macbeth: the 2010 PBS Great Performances version with Patrick Stewart as Macbeth, Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth, and Martin Turner as Banquo, as well as a soliloquy from the 2021 A24 version featuring Denzel Washington as Macbeth, Francis McDormand as Lady Macbeth, and Bertie Carvel as Banquo. All rights remain with the original artists and copyright holders.

This week I got a chance to sit down with Lily, one of my afternoon seniors, to talk about her essay. Lily’s topic explored why Beowulf still matters in 2026, especially here in rural America. My girl Lily is a proud redneck, a backroads girl through and through, with a clear voice and a firm idea of what she wants to say.

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 find him on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

This episode features “Groove Delight” by Musinova, used under a respective Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licenses. All rights remain with the original artists and copyright holders.

A crew of my sophomore ladies undertook their own mini-odyssey this week, to travel around school and discover their own answers. Isn’t The Odyssey more than just a man’s adventure -- isn’t it a woman’s tale too? And what about the representation of women in The Odyssey?

Alice, Mikayla, Adelaide, and Ella voyaged out from the kingdom shores of Room 117. And with mics in hand, they ventured out on an odyssey of their own.

With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find this show alongside our other podcast, Second Stage, and our partner show, Courtney Reads It All, 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 find him on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

This episode features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and cinematic soundtrack music by Alex Productions, used under their respective Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licenses. All rights remain with the original artists and copyright holders. It also features a clip of Geoffrey Nutter’s lecture on the significance of Odysseus’s homecoming, uploaded to his Instagram wallsonglass.

In this episode, I take you all into my classroom to explore how I teach characterization and one of the earliest projects we do. So, before you listen, try the exercise yourself. What do you already know—or think you know—about a guy named Coach Brad?

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 find him on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

This episode features “Groove Delight” by Musinova, “Crunch” by Beat Mekanik, “Chas” by MrSmith, and “Free Jazzy” by Pulsebox used under their respective Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licenses. It also features a clip of Netflix’s House of cards, episode 1 season 1, aired in February 2013. You can find the clip on YouTube, uploaded in 2021. All rights remain with the original artists and copyright holders.

In this installment, our book reviewer Courtney Reads It All takes a holiday with Death, who also takes a holiday. She’s reading Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurts by Ben Reeves, a novel that takes its title from a Kurt Vonnegut book.

Courtney Reads It All is presented by Free Zone Radio. You can find it every Friday this season. Be sure to check out our other shows With Honors and Second Stage, as well as our brother podcast A Deadman’s Books. You can find them here, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and YouTube.

This episode features “Red Pen After Dark” by Free Zone Radio and “Dark Skies” by DJ Spooky used under their respective Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licenses. All rights remain with the original artists and copyright holders.