To better understand the role carried out by the Mentoring Project, which represents one of the many processes of the general role of our school in the neighborhood, it is necessary to present a short preamble about the neighborhood itself and school students.The school where I work as Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics teacher is a comprehensive school located in Catania at the borders of the historical market of the Fishmonger's, exactly at halfway through between theeighteenth century Piazza Duomo (where there are the Cathedral and Municipal Building), the middle-age Ursino Castle, and the courtyard of the school which is near Roman Spas. Therefore, we are in the heart of the historic center, in a neighborhood full of royal buildings and churches of late baroque age, together with very few antique monuments survived to the devastating earthquake of 1693. Despite the central collocation and its architectural and artistic beauty, the neighborhood is unfortunately run down, still affected by the abandonment started in the Sixties and Seventies, when urban expansion started and lasted until ten years ago with the result that is at the moment populated with families of different social classes, many of them in precarious socio economic conditions, among which there are groups of Non-E.U. citizens, in particular from Bangladesh, Mauritius, Senegal and Nigeria, and a significant Rumanian community.From this it comes the fact that a good amount of school population is in general formed by students who find in school a solid and steady point of reference for developing their educational process, not only a teaching one.I felt the need to write this preamble to better describe what I liked more in the last two years of the Mentoring Project (which I had the chance of coordinating in my school), namely the opportunity to give to these kids a point of reference by providing them a weekly meeting with someone who fully cared about each of them by playing, listening, talking and drawing with a particular attention. The whole experience changed me into a reference point for all these kids in the school, so once in a while, even outside the project hours, they told me about what happened to them or asked me for help. One of the best thing was seeing their eyes glinting and their faces smiling during the day of the meeting with their mentors, even though not all of them reacted in the same of way for shyness or because they were basically distrustful with other people.Regarding my relationship with mentors, being the majority of them graduate trainees or young graduates in psycho-social subjects, it gave me the opportunity to transfer into them one of the most important things in our work, which is that our subject of work is person with his or her own sensibility that we must handle with care because every action causes an immediate or future reaction for the good or bad, and, even though sometimes it seems we do not see answers in our work, our expectations must not be disappointed since our behavior will leave a mark in the life of our students, a mark which is bigger when they need to fill emotional gaps.In the end, I would like to say something about the coordinator of the organization with whom I think I have established a good work relations and harmony. Her role is central in the project. Thanks to her professional skills and trust in the project I acquired new useful instruments for my work. She was always ready to find solutions to fix the so many problematic situations which presented during the project. In sum, the two years balance of the Mentoring Project is positive since it has allowed to create a wider and steady network of relations, thus favoring human and professional growing paths for all participants. It has been an additional opportunity which has widen the educational offer that our school present to our students.

Professor Giuseppe Vinci