A job that changed me: I was teaching in a juvenile detention centre when a repeat offender’s poetry moved me to tears

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“Those who can’t, teach,” is the most unjust professional putdown. Unfortunately, it was true in my case. I’d lived a childhood dream for 25 years, as a sports reporter and producer in Australia, London and New York. When I moved back to Melbourne from the United States with my family in 2017, I started a media production company with an old friend. Had it been successful, I never would have entered a classroom again.

But our company went belly up after 18 months. I was 51. With two young kids and a hefty mortgage, my wife suggested it might be time to revisit the idea of teaching.

I’d thought about teaching for decades. When we lived in New York I volunteered at a school called Harlem Village Academies. I helped high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds write their college entrance essays. On the back of this experience and my wife’s advice, I went back to university for two years to retrain as a high school teacher.

I anticipated a job teaching history in a mainstream Melbourne school. But my first interview was with the school in the maximum-security Parkville Youth Justice Precinct. My interviewers spoke with passion about the school and its mission and something clicked. I left wanting to be part of the team.

On my first day, I was terrified. The first thing a young person said to me was: “I’m gonna stab ya, ya white cunt.” Fortunately, the threat came from a locked cell. The sizeable knot in my stomach grew even larger when we were addressed by the precinct’s general manager later that morning: “Unfortunately things have been very unsettled in the precinct. We’ve got a number of staff and young people recovering from serious facial fractures.”

Things didn’t improve in my first class. “I thought we’d start with poetry,” I said to half a dozen 15-year-old boys. They responded with a chorus of “dead happs” and “fuck that!” Class over.

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One boy came to my afternoon class. Jimmy (not his real name) was 15. My supervisor told me Jimmy struggled with basic literacy. She suggested he may enjoy being read to. When Jimmy arrived for class he paced from one end of the room to the other, kicking the door and yelling out the window to passersby. He eventually sat down and I pulled up a chair opposite him.

I offered to read to him, showing him a book called Horrid Henry, and told him I’d been reading it with my daughter.

For the first time Jimmy sat dead still and looked me in the eye.

“You read – with your daughter?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I got halfway through the first sentence when Jimmy stopped me.

“You read with your daughter?” The concept seemed beyond his comprehension. “How old’s your daughter?” Jimmy asked.

“Eight.”

“Can she read?”

“Yes, she can.”

“I really want to learn to read,” Jimmy said.

Keep it together, I told myself. How could a 15-year-old be adept at stealing cars, yet not be able to read the words “Education State” on its number plate? This moment was day-one confirmation that I’d made the right decision in switching to teaching. I worked with Jimmy on his reading in the weeks that followed. Then he suddenly left Parkville and I didn’t see him again.

During my second year at the school, we received an email from Jimmy’s social worker. “Jimmy is doing really well in the community,” it read. “He’s also continuing to make great progress with his reading.”

When I started at Parkville I expected upturned desks, thrown chairs, verbal abuse and violent threats. There would be a bit of all of that. But they weren’t the moments that made the biggest impression.

The class with Jimmy was the first of many. There was the student who took his campaign for a precinct library all the way to the Victorian education minister and the repeat offender whose poetry nearly moved me to tears. These young people, I quickly realised, weren’t irredeemably bad. They were like other teenagers, the main difference being that many of them had childhoods few of us could imagine.

I had two incredible years at Parkville before resigning due to ill health. I’m now a teacher at the North Melbourne campus of Saints College, a flexi school which caters to young people seeking an alternative to mainstream schooling. I love my job.

Back when I was interviewing my cricketing heroes or walking the fairways of the home of golf, St Andrews, alongside Tiger Woods, I had to pinch myself. But the satisfactions of teaching go deeper. Making a late career change reignited my passion for work. I wish I’d done it sooner.