Fifty years on I can still see my chemical engineering lecturer standing in the middle of the dining room of the Tower Hotel in Burwood Road, Hawthorn, where the chemical engineering graduates gathered for an informal farewell over lunch. In addition to the usual rhetoric that is spoken at such gatherings, the lecturer uttered the phrase: "Don't be surprised if some of you will end up teaching."

Not me, I thought to myself. I studied chemical engineering so that I could make things. I wanted a job where I could design, make and test things.

Just a bit more than 14 years from the time that I came to Australia, I found myself in a technical school classroom teaching mathematics to a group of girls.

Ten of those fourteen years were taken up by me studying, which left four years for me to design, make and test interesting things. I did design interesting things, made and tested various things such as weapon systems at the Defence Standards Laboratories in Maryborough. Later on, I worked at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) where I designed and set up experiments for the chemical engineering students to run and to write reports on. I also worked on a project for the Environmental Protection Authority where I designed and made a small cyclone for separating dust particles found in chimneys of polluting factories.

I enjoyed the work at both establishments, but I decided to take up secondary teaching for a few years whilst my own children were growing up. And then, I thought, I will return to my favourite vocation of engineering. There were other reasons for this career change, which are not relevant to the theme of this book, so I won't discuss the other reasons for the career change right now. The theme of this book is about me getting to grips with multiculturalism, about fitting into what at first appeared to me an entirely different country.

The teaching profession of this different country availed itself as another area for observation and analysis. Teaching the subject matter is standard throughout most schools, but the social aspects vary from school to school and from suburb to suburb. So now I will describe some relevant social interactions between students and staff at the various schools that I taught at.

Schools are places of personal interactions foremost and the teaching of concepts and skills is a secondary outcome and it seems to be a byproduct of those interactions. Before I go any further with personal interactions during my teaching years, particularly at technical schools, I will describe the situation that the Victorian Department of Education was facing during the mid-1960s and 1970s.

The children of the post-war generation, the baby-boomers, reached schooling age and presented a wave of students who would pass through the educational system in the course of the next 30 years. The Victorian Government began recruiting and training teachers to fill the shortage of traditionally trained teachers. The high schools absorbed the traditionally trained teachers, but the technical schools needed teacher-trained tertiary educated professionals for the academic subjects and teacher-trained tradespeople for the trade subjects. The teacher training was hastily conducted at the Hawthorn Teachers' College over a period of one year; two days per week of theory at the college with the other three days taken up by the trainee teachers actually teaching in the classrooms of allocated schools.

In some cases, trainee teachers were put in front of a blackboard before their theoretical teacher training began. Additionally, in a desperate attempt to fill the teacher shortage, the Victorian Government recruited teachers from America, which added another layer of confusion to the teaching profession.

I started classroom teaching at Ringwood Technical School in mid-March 1974, shortly after the White Australia policy was abolished by the Labor Government (this is significant). I was in front of a blackboard before my theoretical lectures at Hawthorn Teachers College started. This was not the ideal introduction into teaching, especially teaching mathematics to a class of form 3 girls who normally don't like studying maths.

Fortunately for me, the girls were well behaved and appeared to be interested in what I was teaching them, because as with many girls of that age group they wanted to gain my attention; the attention of a young male teacher. So they actually attempted the maths problems that I set out for them. This was a great start into teaching for me.

They also liked to play practical jokes on me. One such prank they used to do was to move my desk at the edge of the rostrum. So if I leaned on the desk with my full weight, the desk would topple over and they would have a good laugh.

I was always careful not to lean on my desk.

I got on very well with my obedient maths class. I established a good rapport with them. The rapport was further strengthened after an unfortunate incident that had taken place with my teaching supervisor and the girls. My supervisor from Hawthorn Teachers College arranged to observe my teaching method one day. The lecturer, whose name was Olivia May, had to change the date of the prearranged observation date for some reason and she left a note on my desk informing me of the change and that she would see me next Thursday. The note read: "Olie, I will see you on Thursday at 10.00am … Olivia."

The girls read the note before I saw it, because they were in the classroom before me to rearrange the position of my desk. Well, the following Thursday at 10.00am they were waiting for Olivia to walk into my classroom. A middle-age lady, who looked worn out and overwhelmed by her stressful job, walked into my classroom. And then, all of sudden, she hears a chorus-like loud voice: "Gee, Mr Germantsis, we thought you had better taste than that."

Olivia, the professional and experienced person that she was, said nothing. She walked backwards out of the classroom, she shut the door behind her, and never came back to observe my teaching method. A different lecturer assessed my practical teaching method.

The teacher training lectures started after I started teaching at Ringwood Technical School, as I mentioned before. And they were more interesting and entertaining than they were useful in terms of preparing mature, work-experienced professionals from many different backgrounds.

The lecturers at the Teachers' College were preparing us to engage classes of non-interested school children. But they themselves were struggling to engage us into their specialist subjects.

For example, the lecturer who was presenting a unit on psychology and was younger than all of us "trainee teachers", and her name was Wednesday (an unusual name to older traditionalists like us), had me in awe with her knowledge of medical and psychological terminologies. But the trainee teacher seated next to me, who was running a milk bar during the day, didn't show any interest in her subject. He found her lectures on psychology the ideal place and time to catch up with some much-needed sleep. He snored away as young Wednesday continued to impress me and the rest of the class with her knowledge of psychology. She was too polite to wake the rude milk-bar owner.

The psychology unit was optional and I completed it with an acceptable level of success and it rekindled memories of the tall psychologist whom I met in the fruit shop back in East Melbourne.

But the next optional subject that I enrolled in was new to me, I had not heard of it before, it was on existentialism. I was looking forward to learning about existentialism and I even read the prescribed book, written by Jean-Paul Sartre, before the lectures on existentialism started.

The lecturer presenting the unit on existentialism wanted to make the lessons as authentic as possible. So he held the first lecture at his unit in Hawthorn, and asked us to bring our favourite drink. I brought my home-made red wine, and others brought various other drinks.

The lecturer began the lesson by opening the window of his unit. And whilst doing that he turned around and told someone in the class to be quiet, even though nobody was speaking. He continued with the lesson by saying: "That's what an existentialist would say. Existentialists do what they want to do and they say what they want to say." This was a charade; he wasn't convincing enough for me, I didn't think he was a genuine existentialist.

Later on, he spoke to each person in turn. When he came to me, he asked to taste my wine and stated a predictable cliché. "This wine needs to be buried in the ground for a couple of years," as he was holding a glass of gin and tonic in his left hand. For me this was further evidence that he wasn't a genuine existentialist because I didn't think he knew much about wine, the gin and tonic betrayed him. I was more of an existentialist than he was because I did what I wanted to do.

And that is that when it came to writing an essay on Sartre's book as part of my assessment for this elective unit I painted a water colour scene to describe my feelings about the subject instead of writing an essay of several pages about my understanding of existentialism. The charade continued. The lecturer now incorporated my painting into his lesson by presenting my painting to his class via a formal unveiling.

The Teachers' College lecturers were not prepared nor knew what to expect when they were tasked with training us, mostly older, well-educated and experienced professionals, during that teacher recruitment period. Some trainee teachers had law degrees, others had partially completed medicine courses. There was a horde of engineers, and I personally knew of two trainees who had PhDs in science. Training these professionals was very different to training young and eager teacher cadets straight from university without any practical workplace experience.

An example that illustrates my point was when a lecturer asked me to present a lesson in a foreign language to her English as a Second Language class. The lecturer was the wife of a state politician whose constituency comprised a substantial percentage of ethnic Greeks and she had a rudimentary knowledge of the Greek language. And that is why she asked me to present the lesson in Greek. I sensed that she wanted to sit-in on my class presentation and to bask in her superiority over her students.

I prepared a lesson on the complete alphabet, but on the Macedonian alphabet. The students would learn how to pronounce each letter of the alphabet, they would write simple words that started with each letter of the alphabet, and they would attempt to read the words aloud. The students paid attention, they wrote thirty-one words, each one of them starting with a different letter of the Macedonian alphabet.

When it came to reading the words aloud, one of the students lost her cool and lashed out at me. "I don't want to learn this stupid language."

I questioned her by saying: "Ne te rasbraak, sho reche?" (I didn't understand you, what did you say?)

The lecturer was impressed with my one hour "foreign language presentation" and thanked me warmly, but in a language that I didn't understand, so I replied to her: "Pro stee meh, ne te rasbraak?" ("Forgive, I didn't understand you.")

The politician's wife fell off her high horse and I think it was then that she realised how difficult it is for a student from a foreign country to learn a new language. She was expecting a lesson based on the Greek language where she thought that she might understand part of the lesson.

Most importantly, the Teachers' College did not prepare us for the most important aspect of teaching, and that was classroom management. Without classroom control one could not teach subjects that students didn't want to study and certainly not in a room that they felt imprisoned in. Shepherding sheep in my village was a better preparation for controlling a herd of unruly and energetic children.

My next school, Macleod Technical School, my first school after the completion of my training year, presented me with an unforeseen classroom management situation. A misbehaviour by a class of school kids required an on-the-job solution. I was teaching a year 7 science class; the lesson was centred around the use of a microscope. To give my students an authentic experience with the use of the microscope, I arranged to take the class of 22 pupils out of the school grounds, walk them across the main road and then across an unfenced railway line to a nearby reserve. The reserve had a pond where each student would take a sample of pond water for observation and hopefully they would see living microorganisms under the microscope.

On the return trip, a train was approaching our crossing point. I instructed the class to line up away from the railway and to wait for the train to pass. All 22 students grouped together and waited for the train as instructed. I felt flushed with my successful control of my class, until something unbelievable happened. When the train came within about five metres of them, they then executed a dare-devil crossing of the railway line in front of the approaching train. I was furious with them, but I didn't show it.

I walked back with them and told them to line up outside the classroom. I then chose a crime-fitting punishment that required the use of the leather strap.

"Hold your hand straight out. You know why you are getting the strap!" I told the whole class.

I regretfully strapped each student in turn. Not one child refused or complained about being strapped, confirming that they knew that they deserved the punishment. That day was the first and last day that I used the strap in that way.

The leather strap was an anomaly in the schools. Many teachers including myself had one, but nobody admitted to possessing one. It certainly wasn't issued as a standard teaching aide; the Teacher's College did not endorse it. But everyone was told that they needed one.

I remember the strap as a common teacher's accessory from my student years at Richmond Technical School. Corporal punishment was accepted as part of a student's education and students accepted "getting the strap" as a legitimate form of discipline, and perhaps they saw it as character building. Back in the mid-sixties the strap was used liberally. I remember being strapped six times on one hand, the maximum recommended, not for talking in class but for listening to the student adjacent to me.

Before the strap was abolished sometime between 1983 and 1985, quite a few teachers used it as a class-control tool, especially in the year 9 classes, the toughest class in the toughest schools.

In 1976 I was sent to teach in what was known as a tough school, the infamous Northcote Technical School, a school where the use of the strap was almost obligatory. I too used the strap whilst I was teaching at Northcote Tech, but not in a way that you might think.

My next revelation about the education system cannot be proven in a court of law, nor in a teacher's tribunal, but on the balance of probability many teachers of ethnic backgrounds were gradually weeded out of the outer suburban schools and sent to inner suburban schools which had a greater percentage of ethnic students.

The administrators organising the relocation were raised and educated under the guidance of the White Australia policy. It was they, in their superior wisdom, who decided that teachers of ethnic background would better serve the needs of students from ethnic backgrounds. So me, being of ethnic background, was wisely sent to a tough school that had a greater proportion of ethnic students and surprise, surprise, a greater percentage of ethnic teachers as well. Northcote Tech harboured an amazing collection of multicultural teachers. Being sent to Northcote Tech was a blessing in disguise for me, as you will see later.

It is now February 1976. I was led by the ethnic principal of Northcote Technical School to the third floor where the maths teachers' office was located. As soon as the door opened I could literally feel the warm welcoming glow of the maths teachers. They all stood up, looked at me with glowing faces and said "Welcome". All of them were of an ethnic background. And three of them were recent arrivals to Australia, going by their strong Spanish accent, but they were not Spanish.

My first remark to my new colleagues was: "Is this the maths teachers' office or is it the United Nations office?"

It may as well have been the United Nations office as each person was introduced by name and by nationality. Antonio - Cuban, Oska - Cuban, Mercedes - Cuban, Eleny - Greek, Mahmoud - Egyptian, Felicity - Jewish, Lee - Singaporean, Nat - Polish and myself from Macedonia. And to complete the "ethnic decade", a trainee student by the name of Nick from a Dutch background was assigned to me for his classroom teaching practice at Northcote Tech.

The whole group of us worked and got on very well with one another. The teaching was very good, as all of us were well qualified in maths and science, especially two of the Cubans who had PhDs in chemistry.

The out-of-curriculum activities were even better, and since I am writing about multiculturalism rather than about teaching subject matter, I will describe some of those activities, starting with my experiences with Antonio.

Shortly after meeting Antonio, he asked me if I knew where he could buy a head. I asked him in return: "Why do you want to buy a head, you already have one?"

"No, no, I want to buy a heeaad," he told me again.

After several repetitions of the word in various pronunciations and a description of the item I realised that he wanted to buy a shed, a tool shed. We both had a good laugh and from then on our friendship began to blossom. Eventually we became lifelong friends.

That was my blessing in disguise.

Now, one would think how could Antonio teach if he couldn't pronounce the word "shed", and above all how could he maintain classroom control with that strong Cuban-Spanish accent?

Well, his classes were as quiet as the State Library. He could freeze a student on the spot with his piercing eyes. And if a student dared to move or to object, Antonio would come up with "AEEE. BEGGG. YOURRR. PARDONNN". And the student would just about soil his pants.

Antonio established himself as the king of classroom control and it wasn't long before a humanities teacher who was recruited from America heard about Antonio's class control. She came over for some hints about class discipline from Antonio. I was there when Antonio told Fay, the American teacher, to give the students a "warning" when they misbehaved. Fay went away happy and confident, now that she was armed with a new class control tactic.

But she came back to Antonio again and asked him: "What do I do after the fifth warning?"

Antonio replied: "I don't know Fay, I have never been past the first warning."

What he didn't tell Fay, but he told me, was that you must never smile in the classroom. But unlike Antonio, I couldn't hold a straight face in front of a student for long and I certainly couldn't freeze a student with my piercing eyes like Antonio could. So I had to use the strap in order to maintain discipline in my classes. But I used the strap in a different way to the way other teachers did. By the way Antonio had no need for a strap.

Nick, the teacher whom I was mentoring during his teacher training, came and visited me at my home recently, about 47 years later. We reminisced about the days at Northcote Tech. By now, Nick has progressed with his teaching career since the Northcote Tech days. He is still teaching, but robotics at Swinburne University, not maths at a secondary school (there are no technical schools any more, only secondary colleges).

Nick appreciated my advice about not smiling in the classroom. He also liked my questioning of the student's when they were late to class. The questioning went something like this: "Why are you late to class?"
"I missed the bus."

"Why did you miss the bus?"

"I got up late."

"Why did you get up late?"

"I went to bed late?"

"Why did you go to bed late?"

By now, the student would realise that he/she was responsible for coming late to school and he/she had no one else to blame but himself/herself. Nick relayed this method of questioning to his lecturer at the Teachers' College and he told me that the college incorporated it into their curriculum.

Then Nick told me how impressed he was with my use of the strap as a discipline tool.

I purchased a custom-made leather strap from a saddlery in Blackburn. The leather strap was smooth on one side and it had the suede finish on the other side. On the smooth side I wrote the quadratic equation formula on it.

As part of his teacher training, Nick was invited to observe my method of disciplining students. This was a very rare occasion. One day one of my student's misbehaved beyond my acceptable boundary of behaviour and thus needed to be put back in line, as it were.

I took him to my office. I told the student that he had a choice of writing one hundred lines with a single pen, not four pens strapped together, "I must not do..." whatever he did, or the option of taking the strap.

The culprit was hesitant, so I took out the strap. I showed him the quadratic formula that was written on the strap and told him that: "This will teach you a lesson."

I laid the strap on the bench and I began pouring water onto the suede side of the strap. I heard a quiet voice asking: "Why are you pouring water on the strap, sir?

"To make it heavy so it will hurt more," I replied.

This was torture, a slow form of punishment for the unruly student. I continued with my act, I took out a piece of chalk and placed it on the corner of my desk.

"Let me practise my strapping on the chalk," I said.

And swoosh, the chalk turned into dust as the full weight of the strap came down on it. I turned around and I asked the victim: "The strap or the lines?"

A quivering voice said "Lines".

And that was a relief for both of us.

That was the last time I used the strap and the last time I saw it. I don't know what happened to it, but I wished I had kept it as a relic of torture from the past.

Antonio was the master of discipline, but he couldn't match my observational skills when it came to finding out what mischief the students were up to. One of my observational skills was demonstrated one day when an ABC TV crew came to the school to film a documentary on a typical day at a disadvantaged (tough) school (Northcote Tech). The camera crew left their equipment unattended as a gesture of trust and in no time at all a small camera went missing. The principal was notified and he ordered the school's exits closed and directed the teachers to search for the missing camera.

Antonio, who had experience with concentration camps in Cuba, said to me: "It's time for a coffee, this will take ages."

We went to our office on the third floor where we saw a student walking towards us with his arms crossed in front of him.

"Okay, I know you got it, just hand it over," I instructed him.

He handed me the camera without any hesitation. I told the kid to go back to the school yard. I didn't reprimand the student, as I felt the TV crew were negligent or too trusting. We had our coffee break first and then I returned the camera to the ABC TV crew without an explanation to them or to the principal.

Antonio was impressed with my sleuthing skill and he never found out that it was by pure chance that I asked that student for the camera.

Northcote Tech was a disadvantaged school, the children attending that school were from disadvantaged families. There was so much that I wanted to do for those poor students who were victims of their poverty-stricken families.

There were families that couldn't afford the cost of a school excursion. I could see the sadness in those poor kids' eyes as they looked at the excursion note that was posted on the notice board. I wanted to do something about those disadvantaged children who were yearning for an excursion, for a short and pleasant change from their sad lives.

I also wanted to open an after school social room within the school building for those and other children who loitered around the school waiting for their parents to come home late from work. I tried to set up an after school social area with a fridge and a pool table with the blessing of the school's principal. But there were so many obstacles in the way, an approval by the school council was required, health and safety requirements, the local council had to be notified, etc. I finally gave up and did what an existentialist would have done. I asked the principal for a list of students' names from extremely poor families. He dutifully provided a list of names and allowed Nick and myself to take them on an excursion.

Nick the trainee teacher and myself chose seven poor but willing students to come with us for a three-day adventure trip to north east Victoria with all expenses paid. They would go hiking and sightseeing at Mt Buffalo and at Falls Creek.

We set off in our private cars equipped with citizen's band radios for communication and drove to Benalla for lunch and a visit at the local gliding club. Next stop was at Brown Brothers Winery for a tour of their vineyard and where we bought a bottle of wine for each of the student's parents as a gift for them (a bottle of Lexia at $1.00 each). We reached Mt Beauty where we stayed in my basic and not quite finished holiday house and where we cooked lamb chops and veggies for them.

One boy remarked: "This is the first time I've had steak."

Next day we went hiking around Lake Guy near the Bogong Village, where the lucky students were free to walk in and splash around in the crystal clear waters of the creeks feeding the lake. Unfortunately, one student jammed his foot between two large rocks and when he tried to free it he lost one of his runners, the fast-running water dragged the shoe into the lake. The poor kid started to cry. I told him: "It's okay, it's just a runner. That's nothing to cry about."

He told me that he borrowed the pair of runners from his brother and his brother will be very upset with him. On the way back to the house I bought him a pair of runners from the Op shop in Mt Beauty.

Most of the next day was taken up by driving along the twisty road to Mt Buffalo, which I enjoyed. The students enjoyed using the CB radio in turns, while they were urging Nick, who was driving his Holden Kingswood, to keep up with Mr Germantsis' Fiat 124 sports coupe.

The students enjoyed their first countryside trip. And at least one student enjoyed eating "steak" and Nick had an out-of-classroom student management experience.

I was pleased that I was able and allowed to give seven students a special holiday treat. I was also relieved that we were fortunate enough to come back to school without a mishap, especially when I was driving my Fiat 124 sports along those twisty dirt roads on Mt Buffalo. I was 30 years old then, Nick was probably 24 years old. And we were responsible for the health and safety of seven teenagers. We didn't even take a first-aid kit with us; what was the principal thinking?

I guess he had faith in me or the technical school system was in turmoil. By 1977, the Education Department was still grappling with duty of care, its risk management, its working with children requirements and other issues dealing with equal opportunities (something labeled "affirmative action"). And the forthcoming changes to the curriculum, something labeled VCE, the Victorian Certificate of Education.

By now dark clouds were forming on the horizon and the tech schools were about to take the full brunt of the brewing storm. The first sign of the looming change to the educational system in Victoria appeared when some teachers were declared "in excess" of requirements.

The next chapter will continue with multiculturalism in schools as the traditional technical schools were laid to rest, but not before an amazing extracurricular activity had taken place at the last remaining proper technical school.

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