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.
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