The job of teaching teenagers is no easy feat. It can be frustrating and exhausting for both new and well-seasoned educators. But for Brandon Woods and Jonathon Legendre, it’s all part of the process of helping develop young minds, with the empowering notion benefit of getting to see students begin developing and growing on their own. Woods and Legendre both teach at Latin High School, a college prep independent private school in Chicago that teaches a range from preschoolers to high schoolers. MenLiving’s Patrick McKenna got to sit down and talk with Woods and Legendre about their style of teaching and advising students, what they bring to the education table they didn’t get while students, what excites them most while seeing kids develop academically and more.
Patrick:
To start off, I’m wondering how you both ended up finding your way to Latin High School.
Jonathan:
I was a product of public-school education all the way. Public high school in Mississippi, Louisiana University, grad school at U of I, and I did my student teaching in public school. I had chased a partner up here, and she got a maternity position at Latin that turned into a full-time position. I interviewed at Latin because they were looking for someone. I didn’t know anything about independent schools. They actually only had one other person interview, and for her third interview, she missed her train. She was actually in my grad school program and never rescheduled it to come interview…so they hired me. I think I really lucked out and they really lucked out.
Patrick:
Yeah, definitely.
Jonathan:
It’s been great. At the time I actually accepted another position in public school in Buffalo Grove. They offered me the job, and I said, “Thank you so much. My wife’s out of town right now. Can I call you tomorrow?” And the department chair said, “Are you thinking of taking a Latin job?” I said, “Well, this is just a big decision.” I called back the next day to accept because the difference in pay was so much, and she said, “You didn’t sound like you really wanted it, so we filled the position in house.” So, I called up Latin and accepted. For me, when I was young, it certainly seemed like money was the most important. That’s how you care for your family. But working in the same community with my wife, the same community that our kids are a part of and having the same holidays…definitely worth the loss in pay.
Patrick:
That’s pretty serendipitous. To think what would have happened if you ended up at Buffalo Grove. You never know. How long have you been at Latin for?
Jonathan:
My first year was 2003, so this is my 19th year.
Patrick:
Awesome. What about you, Brandon?
Brandon:
I was familiar with the independent school system from where I went to lab, but I had no intention of becoming a teacher at all. I was going to become a lawyer, but life happened. I went to grad school, and it actually started off as me running out of funding. I needed to pay as I was finishing my degree, so I was like, “Oh, let me teach at an independent school because they don’t require a license.”
It’s the only teaching gig you can get without a license. I was in Philly, so I got a job at a school in Wilmington, Delaware because the commute is really short. Eventually I was like, I can’t live in Wilmington anymore. I finished my program and I just wanted to go back home. So, I applied to a number of independent schools, but Latin was my top choice because I wanted to be back in Chicago. That was 10 years ago. This is only my seventh at Latin, because I left for three years to go out to Portland and then I came back.
Patrick:
I know you both are very involved at Latin and have multiple positions. Is there a favorite role you have that you find most impactful?
Jonathan:
For me, first and foremost I think of myself as a chemistry teacher. I would say during the teaching with COVID, coaching ultimate Frisbee has been a real buoy. But if you were to say I can only wear one hat for the rest of your career, it would be classroom teacher.
Brandon:
I would agree, but in addition to that, I would say advising. I love being an advisor and that relationship. The way our advising system works is you start with them in ninth grade, and you go with them throughout their four years. You create quite a bond with them and their families. You’re going to their sporting events, their plays, right? So, it’s just a deep dive that’s not mediated by grades at all. That’s one of the things I love about advising — you don’t have to worry about deadlines, due dates, grades.
Patrick:
Or staying on them about whatever work is missing and things like that.
Brandon:
Right. I think it’s a vital role because as a teacher, sometimes I’m so caught up in content. I sometimes forget the socio-emotional aspect, but I never forget that as an advisor. So, I agree with Johnathan that I consider myself a teacher first and foremost. I came back to Latin because I wanted to be a classroom teacher. But in addition to that, advising is very high on my list.
Patrick:
What are some of the special things you both get to witness as educators from students in terms of their growth socially and their educational development?
Brandon:
For me, I teach ninth graders, so I’m witnessing this now: the difference in their ability to work together – truly work together – and be committed to not only the work, but to one another. I love watching them be able to articulate, “This is what I need in order to work well in this group. These are my areas of growth, so I might need your help at these areas.” Going from the beginning of ninth grade, where it’s pretty much competitive and they’re all trying to figure out where they are in the hierarchy, to the end of the year where they’re genuinely excited for one another in terms of their success and wanting to contribute to that growth…it’s tremendous to see.
Patrick:
That’s great. What about you, Jonathan?
Jonathan:
This can take many forms, but I think when you see students really embrace the idea that mistakes are a chance to learn is big for me. I think that spans in the classroom, but then also with the ethical and integrity piece. I have a student this year who loves to be right but is not afraid to be wrong as she tries to become more right.
I love being surprised. If we go back to the advisory thing, sometimes you have a student who will be like, “Can I go to this room during advisory instead of being here?” And then they surprise you one day if you give them the option to either do one thing as an advisory or they can have this other opportunity. They’re like, “Oh, let’s stay in together or let’s go to the park and throw the Frisbee as an advisory.” I’m not cool, and yet sometimes students choose to hang out with each other in my presence. And that feels really good. You’re thinking that the students don’t seem like they need community in this way, but they do like it. And I love it. I thrive on it. It’s those growth pieces and community pieces. I mean, I’m not doing groundbreaking chemistry in my classroom. So even though I love chemistry content and I love helping kids see the world through chemistry eyes, it’s not surprising me. That human piece of teaching is.
Patrick:
That human piece is huge. What are some of the things you as educators try to instill in your students that you may not have gotten necessarily in your own high school education experience?
Jonathan:
I think for me, a continual area of growth for me is trying to see my blind spots. I am not one of those teachers who is like, “I was not good at school.” I really wanted to show kids like me that they could have a place too. I was good at school. I was made for school and pretty much no matter what my teachers did, it was working for me. I think that is a huge blind spot for me. I don’t know in what ways I’m providing things, except that I do think the closeness without being friends is something that I think I provide for my students, I hope. That balance was maybe not always there with my teachers.
Brandon:
Specifically in high school, we were just treated like disembodied minds. We were just these vessels to be filled with knowledge from these venerable teachers, and there was very little emotional connection. There were very few check-ins on just how you are doing. So, that’s definitely something I have tried to offer the students. And more on ethical training, it was like, if you’re smart enough, you’re good enough I guess as far as a human being.
One of the things I try to do is say that there’s an ethical reason for why we’re doing everything, right? I don’t believe that studying literature in and of itself is going to save the world. But I do think the skills that you gain could be used to save the world, and that you have to decide again what that means for you. That involves you interrogating things like what are your values? What type of world you want to see? How can you use these skills to achieve that world? I wish I had that.
Patrick:
Yeah, definitely. What were some of the more impactful things that happened to you as a student you remember that you carry into your teaching?
Jonathan:
I was part of a pretty competitive CORAL program in high school. Southern Mississippi I’m sure is famed for its CORAL programs. But my choir director up through my junior year had really built a program. The thing that I remember about her is that she was understanding about mistakes, but she had high expectations for us and communicated those expectations. Having this conversation now, I think that I am getting better at communicating my expectations.
Brandon:
I will never forget my teacher Mr. Janice as long as I live. I was really into politics. It’s all I talked about or debated about at school. One time I was talking to him, and he was like, “Fine. If you want to have these conversations, you need to be educated.” He gave me this list of 50 books. He’s like, “I will not talk to you about politics until you’ve read half these books.” That was the summer before entering my 11th grade year. And it was all the kind of basics of Western political thought. When I got back, I had only read like four of them. But throughout that year, Mr. Janice would just meet with me during lunch or when we had a free period of time just to talk about politics. And I did make it through those books by the end of high school.
Patrick:
Wow.
Brandon:
And it wasn’t even the books because I didn’t understand 90% of what was said. It was the time he took. And sometimes it would just be 10 minutes of him asking, “What do you think about this idea?” And I will never forget him for taking that time to do that and taking me seriously.
Patrick:
Totally. What you said about being taken seriously really resonates with me. I can say my experience with my newspaper advisor was similar. She pushed me. I was going to be the editor-in-chief, and she actually pushed me to do a journalism workshop, almost camp-like thing, at the University of Missouri. She was like, “If you want to do this, you need to go learn how to do this at the higher level and push yourself to learn more and bring it back here.” I remember that being such an amazing experience for me at the time, and it solidified that I wanted to do journalism at Mizzou. I want to write and be a journalist. I want to be doing Rolling Stone cover stories, all of it. I didn’t end up that route, but I just remember her pushing me and showing me her favorite feature writers from New York Times to check them. I think it’s a really magical part about working with educators when you get that connection.
Brandon:
Absolutely.
Patrick:
I was curious about the “Beyond Toxic Masculinity” workshop you both led at Latin in February. I wanted to learn a little more about the inspiration behind it and if there are plans for more workshops at Latin in the near future.
Brandon:
I think for me, because I’m queer and mostly identify as gay and I have three older brothers who identify as cis heterosexual men…I guess when I was an early teenager, I envied them. there seemed to be such an easiness with the way in which they interacted with their male peers. It seemed natural in a way that it was very harried or somehow frustrating for me. But then as I started to get older and saw not only my brothers, but their friends interacting – I couldn’t really articulate this at the time, but retrospectively – I was like, “Wow, you have a very narrow window with which to express yourself.” I was very fortunate to grow up in a family and an area in which they were fairly accepting. Because I was seen as slightly feminine or gay, I could hug people. I could talk about my emotions. And they would laugh at me, but it was accepted. It was part of who I was.
But my brothers and their friends, it just seems if they did even the smallest thing, they would be called gay or some type of…that the policing of their gender, I was like, “Oh my goodness, I’m so glad to be gay.” I remember saying that to myself. I’m like, that seems so hard, to have to constantly walk that line and never deviate at all.
Later on, when I went to graduate school, I studied gender and sexuality. So, that just became part of it. But then in teaching, one of the things I realized is I really like working with just teenagers in general, no matter what their gender identity. And I don’t want people who identify as somewhere on the male masculine spectrum to feel bad about that in and of itself. There’s nothing wrong with these. Even if they’re stereotyped gender traits or again, where you fall on the spectrum, but there are ways of expressing it that can be toxic. I think it’s really important for people to hear that message. There’s nothing wrong inherently with being cisgender or trans male or again, falling anywhere on that spectrum. It’s what do you do with the privilege that comes along with that in this society that we need to talk about. And that’s a distinction that’s often… It’s very nuanced and it took me many decades to learn. But it’s an important message.
Patrick:
Yeah. Like you said, it’s nuanced. I think sometimes if it’s a nuanced, complex thing, some people don’t think teenagers are going to take to it, or it’ll go over their head, so let’s not even try. I commend you both for leading the charge with that. Going off that, what are some of the displays of healthy masculinity from some of the male identifying students that you see that is encouraging to you?
Jonathan:
There was one thing I wanted to echo. Brandon, I heard you sort of talk about two pieces there: the privilege that comes with that identity, but also the potential oppressiveness to self.
Brandon:
Oh, absolutely.
Jonathan:
I think we may be easily stumbling into another one of my blind spots as just a cis, het white man. Reality, it is my lived experience. I certainly identify with some of those aspects of the oppressiveness of some of the stereotypes that go with masculine identity, but I feel like I had lots of opportunities to display many aspects of my identity growing up, and I didn’t notice it as overly oppressive.
I do think one positive that comes from a negative, the negative being just how much in need of just mental health help we all are after the isolation. We’re continuing isolation in some instances of the pandemic and just other community factors. I do find that across the board, including males, it is more okay to talk about talking to my therapist or those sorts of things. Though I just recently talked to a parent who expressed that they can’t get him to talk because boys typically just don’t open up in the same way and don’t seek help. I think that continues to be true, but it does seem to be a trend in the right direction.
Brandon:
I agree with you, wholeheartedly. I think for me, the hard part is my day-to-day life is very privileged and mostly filled with people with a certain economic security that other people don’t have. If I were in a different neighborhood in Chicago, if I were in Appalachia, I am very sure what I see on a day-to-day basis would be just different.
Jonathan:
Yeah.
Brandon:
No value judgment on that. It would just be different. I say that to say that I do think in a lot of ways, at least economically, these kids are secure enough not to have to necessarily worry about whether or not they’re going to be able to take care of a family someday. Just putting that bluntly. And I do think that changes things, right? Or expands the ways in which you can act with your masculinity. You don’t have that worry, right?
Jonathan:
Yeah, and strictness.
Brandon:
And strictness, right? Or that expectation that if you can’t necessarily go to college, you better get a job soon, right? I do think it’s a privilege to be able to enact their masculinity different. For example, I think they are physically more affectionate without the homophobic “no homo” that usually follows that up. I don’t hear that. They’re just physically affectionate in a way that I couldn’t imagine when I was growing up. And I think their interactions with their female peers, it’s just different. The respect there for them intellectually, I think is just different.
Patrick:
Yeah, its very interesting how factors collide like you are saying. Are there any last insights that you’ve gained through your career you could share to for helping students grow and flourish?
Brandon:
One thing I’d remember and would love to hear is that they’re kids. I think in independent schools, we tend to treat them as adults because many of us again are not licensed teachers with that understanding of development, right? We sometimes forget that they just need to be silly. They need to play, right? That the amount of work and pressure we put on them is probably not ideal. The other thing I’ve learned that was a revelation is that they will answer you if you ask them, meaning if you ask them how they’re doing and you genuinely mean it, they will tell you. And that should dictate what you’re doing in class almost as much as the content that you need to get through.
Jonathan:
I would share one piece of advice for longevity. I think I’m in this for the long haul because when things are going well, I go, “Wow, this is great. The students really dig me and I dig them.” And when things go poorly, I go, “Man, it must suck being an adolescent.” Right? I think I have colleagues that experience the highs higher than I do. But when they crash, they crash. And they take it personally and it can be personal, right? But it gets back to what you said: they’re kids. I make mistakes, but the mistakes I make tend to have been weathered over time, whereas they’re still in the jagged, un-eroded, raw id mistakes.
Brandon:
I would say one last thing. Going back to what we were talking about in terms of our workshop, sometimes when you’re immersed in this work and you’re immersed in exploring your whiteness or your gender or race, and you come to this new understanding, you may think, “Everyone should understand this at the same level I do.” Then when you’re talking to young people who have been socialized very differently and haven’t had the opportunity to think through these things, you’re like, “Why don’t they understand what took me 30 years to understand that I told them in five minutes.
In that way, I sometimes think we forget their kids, and that they’re not only learning intellectually, but morally and ethically. It’s going to take them some time to understand the insane world we live in terms of gender, race, and class. To expect them somehow to be further along than where we were at their age is so unfair to them, so it’s important to remember that.
