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.
