If ever a book was set to break your heart, this one is it.

There is no romance, no idealised relationship, quite like that of teaching. Romance? Yep, the idea you have that when you teach, you can transform everyone. But there is no heartbreak like the one of knowing that no matter how much work you put into a particular student, your efforts will never be the entire solution. Especially if those students are in jail.

Ralph Jackman’s Detention is the story of a career change, something about half of us consider each year. Jackman, brother of the more famous Hugh yet not cashing in on that connection, left his job as a sports journalist – pretty much all fun and not all that much responsibility – for a job that hits you in the feels in a real and permanent way every single day. Jackman wasn’t some idealistic kid. Well, plenty of idealism, but no kid. He’d worked for years, had a family, but kept thinking he wanted to be a teacher because of a volunteer experience he’d had years back. And as one of his pupils in Detention asked him: “You used to get paid for watching sport? And you gave it up to come here?”

It wasn’t to be a hero. Jackman has resisted, beautifully, the urge to paint himself a saviour. He shares his embarrassments, his mistakes, his vulnerabilities, his successes. But he also explains clearly why the system for kids in detention needs hero politicians. It already has a truckload of hero teachers, but that’s not enough to make change. I also love that Jackman resisted the exploitation of the young people he met in prison. We know enough about their backstories for them to feel real but not enough for it to be creepy. We also know how crudely these kids are disciplined – locked up for 22 hours at a time. Sure, these kids broke laws but how on earth do they endure enough to be able to ask the teacher: “Hey Ralph, if we’re locked down can we still do some long division?”

Jackman’s open about how hard teaching is, how tough it can be to connect with students, how much work is involved. And how much more work is involved when you are trying to teach kids already in the school-to-prison pipeline, kids who are teenagers and who can’t read, kids who want a library in prison but whose needs the “authorities” reject.

Jackman is also frank with both the reader and his students about his privilege and his hardship. Yes, he’s had a good life, but Ralph’s mum had postnatal depression when Australia barely knew anything about it. His mum left the family home.

Occasionally, the writing is a little flat. Jackman’s use of cricket anecdotes to talk about his experiences with students is slight and unnecessarily glib. Sport is not a metaphor for everything. Yet when he described his “inner 14-year-old”, I knew exactly what he meant. That rushing return to our teen years, when everything small seems big and everything big seems insurmountable. Beautiful.

I talk to lots of folks who tell me they want to retrain as teachers. Sometimes because they think they can do better than the teachers already in the system (unlikely) and sometimes because they think they can save kids. Now, whenever anyone tells me they want to give up their careers to become a teacher of one kind or another, I usually explain how hard it is (and I taught first-year university students who could usually read). Now, I’m no longer going to tell them. Instead, I’m going to give them this book: Jackman’s experience as a teacher of kids in juvenile detention in Victoria will make everyone cry by page 17. And that may put them off. Or convince them.

Detention by Ralph Jackman is published by Allen & Unwin ($35).

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