Absolutely.

So you never argue with them.

You never say, oh, look, boys, you're here for all 90 minutes.

If they've had enough, they say radio back to the unit, to the staff who are with them in the classroom.

And so long as things are clear for them, operations check that the coast is clear, they then go back to the classroom.

So you never argue with them.

Um, so after that first lesson, yeah, I went to my supervisor and I started talking and I think it was just the emotion of the first day, the fear and all the buildup to it.

Yes.

How did that leave you feeling?

Yeah, so I think...

I went back and, um, into the staff office, and my supervisor said, "Oh, how did the lesson go?" And I don't think I got any words out.

I just started weeping.

And I think it was all the, the pent-up emotion of the day.

It wasn't so much that they'd told me where to go.

Um, but I started weeping.

What did you see? What sort of impact?

How did that transpire? How did that happen?

Yeah, so when I graduated, I thought I was going to end up as a history teacher in a mainstream high school in Melbourne.

But a job came up at Parkville.

So Parkville is the maximum security youth justice precinct in Melbourne.

And they'd only had a school there for 10 years, but this job came up and I started reading about the school and I was just kind of won over by their kind of passionate belief that all kids deserve a great education, even those behind bars.

So I, I went along to the interview and I just got on very well with the interviewers and I could hear their passion, their mission to provide this education for some of Victoria's most marginalized kids.

And they offered me the job and I grabbed it.

Is it important when you're working with teenagers to remember what it was like to be a teenager, even if your experience of teenagehood was very different to a lot of these kids?

What was that experience?

So we had two classes a day there, and in the afternoon there was only one student who agreed to come up.

I called him Jimmy in the book.

The other students all declined my invitation.

I won't say on this program what words they used.

But Jimmy was 15.

His family had been ripped apart by drugs.

You requested and got a sit-down meeting with the general manager of the Parkfield Justice Precinct and you laid it all out for her, talked about human rights breaches, but she wasn't having it, was she?