With Honors

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://erinhooverpoet.com/

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, A Deadman’s Books, with Drew Haston. You can find him on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

This episode also features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 YouTube.

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

This episode also features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 teams are headed to the playoffs. And before we know it, it’ll be March Madness again.

Man, I love this time of 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, and YouTube.

Also, throw some love at our brotherly podcast with Coach Haston, A Deadman’s Books, on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, as well as his show Haston Curation.

This episode also features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 to evaluate the weaknesses in their own US-centric assumptions.

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 Book and Haston Curation.

This episode features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and “Sipping on Jazz” by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 culture they’re living in right now. The Hunger Games is a warning, and it’s a question, and it’s a test of who we are when power grows louder and opposition grows quiet.

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 brotherly podcast with Coach Haston, A Deadman’s Books. He’s on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

This episode also features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and “Still” by Soularflair, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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, not technology doing the creative work for us.

Can AI tools create “creative” works? Are they creative expressions in this human sense? Or are we surrendering too much, too fast to the tide of generative AI trends?

This week, class is moving from out of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and into Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone, but the conversation remains the same: social commentary. How is our art, our music, our theater, our podcasting still a voice for legitimate social commentary? What are we bothered by, and what are we going to do about it? To frame that social commentary, we’re discussing the question of generative AI and art. Instead of lecturing for 60 minutes, Drew and I decided to model the content creation experience again, bringing the kids into the show and sharing the conversation, not simply forcing it.

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: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCweufFHJbylu4tR598SDj5w

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

and Apple Podcasts

as well as Haston Curation, on Spotify at

This episode also features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 talking about the book. Here for one final conversation are Maylee and my co-teacher Drew, with our final end-of-the-year thoughts about Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary.

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

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCweufFHJbylu4tR598SDj5w

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

Apple Podcasts

as well as Haston Curation, on Spotify at

This episode also features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and “Last Hero” by Alex Productions, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 and I model a podcast-style Socratic circle with the class again, using conversation itself as a real-world writing skill, where curiosity, clarity, and collaboration take center stage.

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

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCweufFHJbylu4tR598SDj5w

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

Apple Podcasts

as well as Haston Curation, on Spotify at

This episode also features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and “Last Hero” by Alex Productions, available here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar or Carl Sagan’s Contact. I knew that I wanted to use it in class this year, but I needed to use it before the movie came out (because so many students will just watch the movie instead of read the book).

It was a huge success! Kids immediately started telling me how much they loved the book.

In this episode, Summer and Trever spin loose on discussing their first reactions to the novel and our approach in class.

With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find it and our other show Second Stage on platforms like Spotify:

Apple Podcasts

on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCweufFHJbylu4tR598SDj5w

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

Apple Podcasts

as well as Haston Curation, on Spotify at

This episode’s music features Epic Inspirational music by BloDeasons, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 Honors and our new show, Second Stage, on platforms like

Spotify:

as well as Apple Podcasts and on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCweufFHJbylu4tR598SDj5w

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

This episode features “Groove Delight” by Musinova and “Christmas” by Denys Kyschuk, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.