When teacher Carlo Sorrentino first started working at St Edmund’s College in 1983, petrol was 34 cents a litre, bus fares were 20 cents, the average home cost $76,400 and the only computer was on TV’s Lost in Space.
Carlo is about to retire after 43 years at St Edmund’s – the very same school he attended from 1971 to 1979 – and the teaching landscape has changed dramatically (smoking used to be allowed on the premises and seniors had their own smoking room at school).
As a fresh-faced 21-year-old, when Carlo first began teaching, he was often told to go to the end of the tuck-shop queue because volunteer mums thought he was a student.
“After a big night celebrating my 21st birthday, I received a phone call the next day, Sunday morning,” Carlo said. “It was Brother Wallace asking if I could come to Eddie’s that morning for a chat. He announced that he had a position for me starting tomorrow morning.”
Carlo fronted up to his first class, Year 8 History, even though he was formally qualified as a primary school teacher (he originally wanted to be an architect).
“I was well and truly thrown into the deep end,” Carlo said. “The average class size was 36 students but, on many occasions, especially my Year 9 commerce classes, that would blow out to 41. Trolls only existed in Middle Earth and you could never ever leave your music cassettes in the sun. What a great time it was.”
Back then, teachers were instructed to “be friendly with the students but don’t be friends”. That went out the window for Carlo.
More than half of that same Year 8 history class from 1983 are still friends with Carlo, and some students even volunteered as waiters at his wedding.
“They even stayed back into the early hours of the morning to clean up,” Carlo said. “Those students refused to take any money from me… I cannot begin to count how many 18th, 21st, 30th, 40th and 50th birthday parties that I have attended of ex-Eddie’s students as well as weddings, baptisms, confirmations.”
For the past 43 years, every lesson of every day Carlo has begun with a prayer with his students.
“Each lesson was made up of defined parts – read, discuss, write and present,” he said. “This was set on repeat for 43 years.”
Carlo found the first 20 years of teaching “relatively easy” but with the arrival of technology and associated emails and online admin, the past 23 years were “challenging”.
He also found it strange to be on the same footing as other teachers who had taught him in the ‘70s.
“I had to earn my stripes big time,” he said.
Over the years Carlo has taken on leadership positions, but his true passion was in the classroom, with a particular focus on helping students for whom English was a second language.
As an Italian immigrant in the ‘70s, Carlo remembers well the challenges of adjusting.
“In 1971, I started at St Edmund’s College as an overweight European boy back in the beginning of Year 5, topping the scales at 10.5 stone [66kgs],” he said. “This, combined with the challenges of being new to a big high school and coming from a different ethnic background where English was a second language, made my primary school experiences very challenging.
“This later became my number one thing that I focused upon when I started teaching: always looking after those students that struggled with language and general school life.”
When Carlo retires at the end of this year, he said he’d “miss the camaraderie of the staff and the banter with the students”.
“Especially the Monday mornings where I was provided with up-to-date fishing reports over the weekend,” he said. “Extremely valuable information to one who fishes.”
After retirement, Carlo isn’t venturing far from the school yard. He plans on volunteering every few weeks to touch base with students whose fathers were ‘Old Boys’, “just to make sure they are settling into the rhythm of school”.
