"When I was at the beginning of my teaching career I found myself measuring for the first time in a school with a high rate dropout.

The reality of those who attend a sub-urban high school of that kind is mostly made of social marginalization, distrust, hopelessness.

Whatever I had learnt and experienced before became suddenly useless there. I had to change approach - and that would have been the first of many changes - to adapt, create new motivations to get in tune with those students, do something that would have given meaning to their presence at school - if and when they came - but above all, they should have felt it rewarding.

After many failures my sporting past came to my aid : one day I decided to divide my youngest - and most turbulent - classes into teams.

Once selected the captains among the most motivated students, I set the rules for the game of what I called "English Competition" : all the didactic activities, class assignments, games, questions, would have been transformed into points, which, once added at the end of the year, would have determined the winning team, whose participants, after reaching the minimum didactic objectives, would have passed in English.

I had set a clear goal, which was apparently attainable. So this is how they started to get involved. Studying had become fun, light. Everyone wanted to be the hero for a day, contributing to the victory of their team.

Pretty soon school attendance increased significantly, especially during classwork. Even the less willing had understood that even their two, could be an aid for the "fate" of the team they belonged to and then, why not trying to turn it into a three, a four or more?

So they also began to get involved, to team up with their mates, proud to participate. All their efforts were rewarded in a grand ceremony at the end of the school year."

Since then, I have no longer abandoned this approach and over time I have adapted the objectives and diversified the teaching activities in light of what the new technological devices offered me.

I, then, created this site that, apart from providing material to support educational activities, is the "container" of several didactic projects:

• "YouTeach" : a video-making workshop, where my students produce creative videos on topics ranging from the explanation of grammatical rules, to the staging of literary works, historical events and ballads
• "Make It Easy Challenge" : a video-making competition, where all students produce creative videos on science topics, like Physics, Mathematics or Life Sciences
• "Story Wall" : a creative writing workshop, where the students write the incipit of some stories, and others complete them, adding episodes
• "Teacher Wall" : a container of recent articles and posts from my blog etinkerbell

This is my English Teaching global approach, which I called F.A.I.R : Fun, Artistic, Inclusive and Rewarding . This is how I've managed to get the most out of my students so far.

But, I haven't introduced myself properly yet, my name is Mrs Tink, a FAIR (Y), could it be otherwise?