With Honors

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 Radio production. This episode features excerpts of music from “Perpetuum Mobile” by Penguin Cafe Orchestra and “Groove Delight” by Musinova, used here for educational non-profit purposes under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 this first episode of the school year, I’m reviewing the book with a co-host who recommended it to me: Hannah Randolph, a former student in Honors 10, a former student teacher, and now a peer of mine in the department.

Consider buying Zevin’s fantastic novel (and help convince her to be on our show and talk to the class).

Also, this season we are launching a second podcast: Second Stage. It’s a show inspired by my college profs who taught amazing lessons through theatre and plays. Each episode considers a drama that ELA teachers may know of but which rarely gets enough play in the classroom. Why not? What merit does the play truly offer? And what are some cool things we could do to teach these plays?

With Honors is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find With Honors

on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0881bUWWdgkBdGzHlPNToi?si=1HS8tQGXRyOgn1h5bs2pTg

on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/with-honors/id1797115480

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 https://open.spotify.com/show/4HtulwbO10pOjV5hbdWOty?si=I5Tt07unQJWVhaFVsInP8A and Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-deadmans-books/id1795582942

as well as Haston Curation, on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/show/3O8GDUtqshbxFF7gU2FMwM?si=b38ac16d08374671

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

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 break. It may be an anachronism from an agrarian age of America, but the school year is far too packed with stresses for kids and adults both. Summer break is a vital must.). One way to combat any learning loss is to stay with the habit. You want to stay in shape? Keep doing your fitness. You want to stop gaining weight? Keep active and quit eating the slouchy foods. You want to stay in the top-tier brackets of your online competitive games, or among the top players of your sport? Keep playing, keep training, stay with it.

I say this as a recitivist. I picked up jogging in high school, then quit when I began college and promptly gained weight. I picked up weightlifting in late college, then quit when I became a dad and teacher and gained even more weight. I know what it’s like to backslide, what it’s like to feel super sore from those first workouts returning to the gym. I also know what it’s like to have been a constant reader in high school and college, only to wane with the increasing activity of my phone. Putting the phone away, getting some reading glasses (now that I’m mid-40s), and hanging daily with my reader friends has brought me back from the edge. I know what it is to slip. And I know what it means to stay in shape.

This summer my sophs were assigned a new book, one I’d never taught before. I considered going back to an old faithful like Life of Pi or The Alchemist, but I needed something new for this summer too. The mind and the heart and the life experience needed the stretch. So I picked Zevin’s novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

I anticipated a possible parent or student unhappy with the book. I did not anticipate so many parents or students unhappy with the novel. It really drove home the direction society has taken. But of course, parents should be concerned with what their students are learning in school these days. (And how wonderful that these parents aren’t blind to that!) As the teacher, my biggest concern is that I don’t want my students (or their families) flinching from a good read or good conversations. Zevin’s book has some cussers in it, and there is the scenario of the inappropriate teacher-student relationship. But Zevin doesn’t want us to applaud it. Zevin goes beyond it and gives us a book about relationships, videogames, childhood connections that drive our future adult selves, about grief, and innovation, and ambition.

Today, I’m spending the episode walking my upcoming students through my process: how does Crockett approach a task like the summer reading assignment? How would he go through the first 50 pages? What does he annotate, and where does his thinking lead him?

It’s still summer break (for at least a week or two, at any rate), but today I’m teaching again. Also: go watch the new Superman movie. You will feel really awesome about yourself and probably have the best afternoon ever after it.

You can find With Honors

on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0881bUWWdgkBdGzHlPNToi?si=1HS8tQGXRyOgn1h5bs2pTg

on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/with-honors/id1797115480

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 Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/show/4HtulwbO10pOjV5hbdWOty?si=I5Tt07unQJWVhaFVsInP8A and Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-deadmans-books/id1795582942

This episode features excerpts from the Superman theme by John Williams, retro arcade music, and inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 true crime reading stack that week. But sometimes you realize a conversation does belong on tape. Not because it’s polished or prepared, but because it’s genuine. A once-in-a-blue-moon conversation with people you haven’t seen in forever, who might be gone for a while again. Once upon a time, it was their voices in this classroom, as our students. Recording a sit-down with them captures the authentic love we have for our students and the work we do, and it tunes in the worn-out laughter from the end of the semester. It hit upon something real about why we teach, why we stay, and why we sometimes consider leaving.

Today’s episode is one of those.

We gathered around a table on a Friday after school: me, my co-teacher Drew Haston, and Bryce Fox, a former student turned young dad who wanted to talk shop. He had questions about careers in education, whether it was worth it, whether it still made sense to pursue a path toward high school English, or maybe library science, or maybe something else entirely. He trusted us because he knew us way back when I had Bryce in class and Haston coached him on the field. And we trusted him enough to answer with more than just our professionally prepared teacher-voice answers.

Also in the room: his wife Kelly, another former student with a smile that hasn't changed since sophomore year, and their baby boy.

We talked about what works and what doesn’t. What the job asks of you and what it gives back, often in ways that don’t show up on a paycheck. We laughed a lot. We got a little nostalgic. We asked each other the hard questions. And more than anything, we remembered why school feels like a second home when it works the way it should.

So, as summer break continues, grab a chair and settle in for part one of a rare kind of reunion: teachers, students, generations of voices, all still chasing the same thing. A better tomorrow.

This is With Honors.

You can find our show

on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0881bUWWdgkBdGzHlPNToi?si=1HS8tQGXRyOgn1h5bs2pTg

on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/with-honors/id1797115480

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 https://open.spotify.com/show/4HtulwbO10pOjV5hbdWOty?si=I5Tt07unQJWVhaFVsInP8A

and Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-deadmans-books/id1795582942

This episode features excerpts from W.G. Snuffy Walden's "Project Blue" from The Stand, nifty sound bites, and inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 overload. But like most things in our classroom, this small project was based upon a much bigger strategy.

When I teach literary analysis, I always start with a strategy I learned from Dr. Michael Degen at Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas. We talk about the difference between Level 1 and Level 2 thinking. L1s are the raw material, the evidence, the details, the metaphors, the tone, the syntax. But the good stuff happens in the L2s. The inferences. The connections. The moments when the student-reader sees something on the page and decides what it means beyond the page. That’s the real art of analysis.

In class, we start by teaching this strategy by looking at paintings and ads. "What is this really a story about, and why? What L2 assumptions are you getting? Because why? What L1 evidence leads you there?" In formal circumstances, we pivot this immediately into analytical writing.

In this episode, Kylie and Hayley didn’t just taste cookies. They unwittingly pulled from that strategy and analyzed them. They pointed to their L1s: the flavor notes, the sweet-to-salt ratios, the texture contrasts, the unnecessary sprinkles, the bite-by-bite breakdowns. But then they made their L2 connections. This cookie might have reminded them of Gatsby’s glittering chaos. The nuanced notes of this one might have tasted like the disappointment of dating Romeo. Another cookie bite might have been a total flop, all style and no substance. What connections they made were clever and funny, but the taste test was also an honest application of the skills we spent all year building in class. And hearing it all come together in a goofy cookie-tasting session felt like the right kind of full-circle moment.

It also felt like a chance to breathe. A little unpolished, a little messy, and all the better for it. This is our first episode to drop after the school year has officially ended, the beginning of what we’re calling our “summer school edition.” These are the recordings that didn’t quite make it out before the bell rang and the halls emptied, but they deserve a space here anyway. Because what the kids created, what they learned and said and laughed through, matters.

This episode also gave me a chance to spotlight our Big Summer Reads. This year Honors 10 is diving into Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a story about creativity, connection, and the way videogames mirror the lives we live. AP Lit is reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel rich with voice and longing, paired with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s tangled dream of love and illusion. And for the bold readers among us, we're tackling Stephen King's The Stand, an American epic that helped shape the adult reader I became. Coach Haston and I will be reading it in 300-page chunks and podcasting about it through the back-half of summer.

But first: cookies. Lots of cookies. This is With Honors. And this is what literary analysis tastes like after a long semester.

You can find With Honors

on Spotify:

on 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

and Apple Podcasts

This episode features excerpts from W.G. Snuffy Walden's "Project Blue" from The Stand, retro arcade music, and inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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. The colors of the scenes tickled my eyes. The hard plastic of the controller pressed itself against my thumb, branding me with the Nintendo arrow. And I was hooked. I played so much that I started inventing challenges for myself: playing upside down, playing backwards, testing the limits of what a controller and a kid’s imagination could do. I still get the sweats about nigh-unbeatable games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I still remember waking from a dream in fifth grade, stuck somewhere deep inside Bowser’s castle, my brain insisting on figuring out the solution to this level.

But even then, before I had the conceptual language for it, I knew this wasn’t just a toy. It wasn’t just sound and light and dopamine.

It was story. It was stakes. It was agency.

In today’s episode, Mary, Zoe, and Abi try to unravel that same mystery: why video games matter, why they aren’t just distractions, and how they might belong in a high school Honors English class. They wander sometimes. They gush over FNAF and Undertale and other favorites. But they also get somewhere honest. They reflect on empathy, on the upheaval of their childhood homes, on narrative choice, on the ways videogames let us step into a world and test ourselves, make mistakes, grow. Because being in the story changes the story. The videogame gives us a chance to claim power over a destiny that, in the real world, we are often denied.

Books take us on a path someone else has paved. Games let us choose. Fail. Reload. Respawn. Try again. A novel’s ending is already printed on the page, no matter what you do, inevitable. But in a videogame, the ending is yours to shape, or to sabotage, or to chase down again and again until you get it right. That’s more than entertainment. That’s training for life.

And for a lot of us (players, readers, thinkers), that’s a pretty good metaphor for growing up.

These three girls are too young to have played the games I grew up with. They’ve never blown the dust out of an NES cartridge or played upside down on a beanbag chair until way past bedtime. But they know. They know what it feels like to lose yourself in a world, to learn something from it, to come out changed. And as we draw toward wrapping up this school year (and this season of our podcast), I think it’s fitting to place this episode here. With stories that move, that shift, that let us try again. With students who see art where others might only see screens.

Give it a listen. And if you still think video games have no value to the developing human mind, you might just be playing the wrong ones.

You can find With Honors

on Spotify:

on Apple Podcasts:

and 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 online at

This episode features excerpts from W.G. Snuffy Walden's "Project Blue" from The Stand, retro arcade music, and inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 final descent. Books are put away. Room 117 is being packed up. The turbulence is behind us, and summer is straight ahead. Finally.

This episode of With Honors was recorded just before we began that final descent. The end-of-course exams were one day ahead of us, vacation not far beyond that, and in the middle of it all, this moment. A chance to stop and ask: What have you carried through this year? What are you holding onto now?

The answers weren’t rehearsed. They came in fragments, in passing thoughts, in sudden clarity. Some spoke of exhaustion, the kind that settles inside when you're holding up too much for too long. Some talked about the friction between school and home, between expectation and reality. A few surprised themselves, remembering how it felt to read as Mark Antony (or in Brian's case, how it felt to read as Caesar's wife Calpurnia). Some took the chance to throw their lazy group members under the bus, and some imagined what the testing season sounded like as a soundtrack. Quite a few are heading into summer with ambition: a job, a plan, a paycheck. Others just want quiet, to let the mind rest.

There’s something honest about this group. Something I’ve come to admire. They’ve learned how to ask better questions, how to sit with complexity, how to name what matters without rushing to solve it. They've learned how to write about it, talk about it, and now, how to record shows about it.

This episode doesn’t try to tie a bow on the year. Not just yet. It just listens. To where we’ve been. To where they are now. To what it means to come this far.

You can find With Honors

on Spotify:

on 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

and Apple Podcasts

This episode features inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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-times-over student Kyla. She was once a wide-eyed, ambitious honors 10th grader in my English class, quick-witted, thoughtful, a little unsure, but already burning with potential. Later, she became a senior in my AP Lit class, then my student assistant. Then she came back to visit during college. And came back again. And again. Eventually, she returned not just as a former student but as a peer when she was placed here as my student teacher. And now she’s launching into her own teaching career, guiding her own middle school students, who will undoubtedly return to her someday.

To close out Teacher Appreciation Week, Kyla sat down with me for a conversation that feels like the full-circle kind. We talk about what it meant to be her teacher, what it meant for her to come back as mine, what scared her and what made her proud, how she found her own voice, and what it means to move from being taught to becoming the teacher.

There’s laughter here, especially in the ending, when she tries her hand at impersonating me. There’s warmth and nervousness and reflection. There’s appreciation in both directions. Because this job, at its best, is never just about instruction. It’s about influence, and continuity, and the quiet power of showing up for each other across the years.

If you've ever been shaped by a teacher or had the honor of shaping someone else, you'll hear something familiar in this episode: the way teaching weaves us together, year after year, into something bigger than any single lesson plan.

You can find With Honors

on Spotify:

on 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

and Apple Podcasts

This episode features inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 weight room to life in general. And laughter. So much laughter. That good natural laughter that leaves your belly a little sore and your coffee cold.

This episode comes out as we launch into Teacher Appreciation Week, which feels especially fitting. Because this one’s a love letter, really: to the classrooms that shape us, the mentors who guide us, and the students who remind us why we do what we do. Alondra, now a sophomore, wanted to bring the two English teachers who’ve taught her—first Coach Haston in 9th grade, now me in 10th—onto the pod, not to spotlight herself but to shine some light on what it means to grow together. And man, what a gift that is.

There’s something brilliant about getting to teach a student and then seeing them again a year later. Older, a little wiser, more confident. There’s something equally brilliant about looking across the table at your colleague and realizing: we’ve grown too. We’re not the same teachers we were when we met these kids. We’ve gotten better, and maybe softer. We’ve learned from them as much as they’ve learned from us.

This isn’t just an episode; it’s a snapshot of gratitude. For the hard days (and there are plenty!) and the hilarious ones (which should be more plentiful!). For the ones who walk into our classrooms and surprise us, challenge us, teach us, and then somehow keep circling back. These conversations are a kind of time capsule now, one I can open whenever I need a reminder of what matters most.

So, whether you’re a teacher looking for a little affirmation, a student who’s had a mentor change their life, or just someone who wants to sip their coffee and smile along with us, this episode is for you.

You can find With Honors

on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0881bUWWdgkBdGzHlPNToi?si=1HS8tQGXRyOgn1h5bs2pTg

on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/with-honors/id1797115480

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 https://open.spotify.com/show/4HtulwbO10pOjV5hbdWOty?si=I5Tt07unQJWVhaFVsInP8A and Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-deadmans-books/id1795582942

This episode features inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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, critical thinkers, engaged readers, and more informed citizens.

The line is often thrown about these days that teachers are indoctrinating our children (except, we mostly joke, that if we could indoctrinate the kids, we would start by indoctrinating them to turn in their work and wear deodorant). But I truly believe that most teachers would reject that, instead envisioning ourselves not teaching the kids WHAT to think but rather teaching them HOW to think. I don't want kids to merely parrot what a teacher tells them any more than I want them to have ChatGPT write their essays for them. I want kids to ask questions. I want them to question everything. We as parents, teachers, preachers, lawmakers, bosses, influencers, corporate tycoons, etc. have engineered a society with a set of rules. And it's my job as a parent, as a teacher, to help maintain those rules for the young who aren't yet ready to move beyond them. Like the Jurassic Park keepers, we maintain the fences to maintain the park. But eventually, the raptors test the fences. Kids test those rulesets. It's natural. I think the normal process of growing into adulthood requires us not only to test these fences but also one day to break them down. Because then we must figure them out for ourselves. Rebuild those walls, those rulesets, in the way we believe they are meant to be. Sometimes you keep the same bricks that were handed down to you, and sometimes you keep these bricks but not those bricks, or maybe you place them back in a different order. Becoming an adult means figuring out the paradigms for yourself and rebuilding them to be better.

Which leads us back to the classroom. With Hunter and Solomon, talking Bradbury's classic, Fahrenheit 451.

Originally Hunter had designed this to be a discussion about "Communist indoctrination and Fahrenheit 451," which had me hesitant. I didn't know if he had an agenda to push about Bradbury peddling a Communist agenda, or if he aimed to argue that the novel is the fulfillment of Communist teachings. But it turned out to be another down-to-earth conversation about what we read, what we think, what we don't know enough about, and what we hope for the future. Even though I knew we would find ourselves to be reasonable, it still surprised me how much the boys and I ended up agreeing upon. It gives me hope that, even in as argumentative and polarized a society as we seem to live in today, most people probably inhabit the calm, reasonable middle. It leads me back to a maxim I have reasserted again and again this year: if we can't talk about everything, then we can't talk about anything. We should be able to talk about it all. Not yell at each other. Not be unreasonable. But talk, and listen.

Hopefully, you believe the world needs more real conversations, not just louder ones. In that case, this episode is for you.

You can find With Honors

on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0881bUWWdgkBdGzHlPNToi?si=1HS8tQGXRyOgn1h5bs2pTg

on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/with-honors/id1797115480

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 https://open.spotify.com/show/4HtulwbO10pOjV5hbdWOty?si=I5Tt07unQJWVhaFVsInP8A and Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-deadmans-books/id1795582942

This episode features inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.