He has taught over 400 fitness classes, and coached 74 different girls and boys teams among a multitude of vastly different sports. And that’s just his career at Bard. Jon Leizman is often seen in his office or the hallway discussing various philosophical, sports, and fitness related topics. He is a master of blending the abstract and the practical. He wrote Let’s Kill’ Em: Understanding and Controlling Violence in Sports, a philosophical understanding of sports violence. Everyone knows Jon Leizman’s infamous yoga tests, and his springtime sprints with his class around the school, but his Bob Dylan obsession is lesser known. He knows Dylan’s life story better than some people know their own. When he’s not enlightening students or explaining how Dylan brilliantly left his songs open to interpretation, he’s obsessively keeping his office in order while navigating around it like it’s an Olympic-level acrobatic sport, dodging three duffle bags stuffed with deflated basketballs along the way. Nevertheless, Jon keeps his students on their toes, mentally, physically, and occasionally trying not to trip over gym equipment.
Ask him what he enjoys most about teaching philosophy and you won’t get an answer loaded with various texts and ideas. “It’s very gratifying to learn from your students. When we do our best teaching, when we are generous, optimistic, open-minded, and creative, we learn to become ourselves,” he says, flipping the script on who’s teaching who. “Philosophy is such a broad subject that there’s always something to learn. It’s really a history of ideas, new and old. It’s about what is possible. Aesthetics explores the nature of art, but really it is about what is possible, what a beautiful life might look like.” Jon believes that the most effective classrooms aren’t those where teachers simply lecture, but those where learning happens through conversation, honest questioning, and true listening.
But Jon’s classroom doesn’t end with a chalkboard and a funky philosophy movie. Out on the field, he applies the same energy to coaching sports. While it may seem like a sharp pivot from philosophical debates to sprints and strategy, Jon finds them surprisingly similar in passion and effort. “Mind and body. Everything is connected. The intensity aspect of an athletic contest is almost like a year packed into one two-hour game,” he explains. “The heightened emotions, the inevitable struggles that arise, the relationships and bonds formed…Every game takes on a life of its own,” To him, the field is a mirror of life, where pressure reveals character, emotions run deep, and every moment holds a lesson. “Learning to compete the right way, winning with honor and losing with grace is really important. Competition says a lot about a person, and it is a good thing to compete honestly and fairly whether in sports, or most importantly in business and politics. Competition and collaboration may coexist.” he says.
When asked what motivates him each day—philosophically and otherwise—Jon, again, doesn’t go the expected route. Instead, he turns the question around asking the interviewer: “Have you seen the movie Scarface?” he asks, laughing. Before you can figure out whether that’s a yes or no, he offers a quote from the movie: “Every day above ground is a good day.” He leans into the line as if it’s been stitched into the lining of his worldview. “So every time we get out of bed, there is an opportunity to learn something new and to do better. But it all starts with involving yourself in life, which can’t happen when you’re isolated.” It’s the kind of outlook that sounds simple, yet carries weight; the belief that being alive is enough to begin with, and nearly everything after that is clay you get to shape. For Jon, the day doesn’t have to be extraordinary to matter. It just has to be yours—claimed, felt, and fully lived.
When it comes to life’s smaller wins, he values honesty and effort, even if things don’t work out. For him, putting in the work always leads to “something positive, and often it’s not the outcome you expected.” It’s less about flashy gold stars and more about the kind of growth that quietly takes roots over time. Jon also appreciates the often overlooked skill of listening. “It makes you look for the best in yourself when you know that you are getting someone’s full, sympathetic, critical attention. Often we listen to speak, not understand. We bide our time, thinking about what we want to say, waiting to speak” instead of actually hearing what’s being said. It takes focus and work, and he laughs saying his wife is a lot better at it than he is.
In his free time, Jon surprisingly isn’t only binging his beloved romantic K-Dramas and dreaming up a club at Bard to celebrate them; he’s a deep diver, both literally and intellectually. He spends his days swimming, (of course) practicing yoga, often of the hot variety, and exploring what he calls his three big interests at Bard: sports and fitness, philosophy, and nutrition. That last one isn’t just a passing phase, but a long-standing passion. He even had “a nutrition tutorial at BHSEC many years ago that was a lot of fun.” He’s got a thing for vitamins and minerals, and while he’s not exactly shouting it from the rooftops, it’s clearly something he enjoys and is very knowledgeable about.
Our conversation eventually circles back to a familiar topic: the ability to read people. So I ask him—can someone this reflective really read others like open books? Jon says he cheats a little. Early in the semester, he has his philosophy students take the Jung typology test. He admits it’s “a fun test” and “not something to take too seriously, but it can be a valuable test to realize one’s personality tendencies and how that might affect one’s interaction with others. For instance, introverts and extroverts may have a difficult time understanding one another.” Jon says that for what is worth, he scored very high as an introvert and in intuition.
When I asked Jon about some of the philosophical questions that come up in his classes, the conversation eventually drifted into deeper waters—one of philosophy’s big, lingering questions: is ignorance EVER bliss? Jon doesn’t hesitate, stating, “it’s a common theme in class, you know, The Matrix, should I take the red pill or the blue pill?” In his opinion, if “the fates smile on you or you’re in a state of power that lets you avoid thinking about how the world affects you and you affect the world, things might turn out okay for you possibly at the expense of others,” but for most people, that kind of detachment “doesn’t lead to anywhere good.” He acknowledges that facing reality can be difficult, even painful, but mentions a classic saying, “you can forget about your past, but your past won’t forget about you.” That kind of self-awareness, a mix of moral clarity and the realization that your choices, privileges, and past are tied to bigger systems, isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s unavoidable. Additionally, he brings up a quote from Cornel West: “It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.” It’s a reminder that the hardest battles are often the ones we fight within. It’s these tough questions that demand introspection and honesty that shape our path of understanding.
When it comes to the mistakes teenagers tend to make, Jon doesn’t bite his tongue.“Giving up too soon” is at the top of the list. He believes that setting goals, failing at them, and then labeling yourself a failure is where many young people go wrong. He pulls out another quote, this one from Goethe: “Ever tried, failed, no matter. Fail, fail, again, fail better.” As a coach, he says he has learned so much more from defeat than victory. Instead, he encourages students to “keep overcoming yourself, to put it into Nietzschean language.” It’s not about perfection or defining yourself, it’s about persistence. Growing, little by little. The key to growth lies in the willingness to get back up.
This mindset, he believes, is crucial when grappling with the rise in existential thinking among students. He approaches it with compassion, admitting that it makes him “a little sad,” especially considering the weight today’s teens carry, from social media to global crises to the lasting impact of COVID. Still, he points out that true existentialism isn’t about giving in to despair, but about choosing to act in spite of it. While there’s no script telling us how to live, he sees that uncertainty as freedom: “The fact that there is no prescribed way to act given to us by an outside entity or book, that is what creates our freedom to act. That is why we have artists and poets.” For Jon, this freedom isn’t a burden, but rather a chance to carve out our own path, even when the world feels like it’s throwing curveballs. It’s a challenge, but one that could really knock us into something transformative.
If he could assign one text to the entire Bard community to wrestle with and understand at its core, he admits there’s no way to choose just one, so, he’ll “give you the first three that come to mind”. First, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and “what it means to say ‘I don’t know,’ as a means of overcoming one’s natural instincts for certainty, arrogance, and prejudice.” Then Plato’s Meno, which for Jon is more than just a lesson, it’s a blueprint for teaching. “It’s about trusting students and guiding them through questions. To me, that is better real education rather than a teacher standing up there and professing and lecturing. Even if you get to the same place in the end, it’ll be much stronger and more meaningful if the student gets there on their own.” Finally, This Is Water by David Foster Wallace: “great for understanding what he calls ‘default settings,’ and things that are so ingrained in us that it’s difficult to see beyond them and beyond our prejudice.” Three texts, one mission: to get us all thinking a little deeper, become comfortable with getting a little uncomfortable, and maybe listening a little better.
And after unloading a full dose of philosophical perspective, Jon wraps it up with a shrug and a smile: “And I think that’s all I have to say about that.”