Textbooks for my Saturday Maths and Girls Do Algebra students
Help me fund textbooks for students in my Wellington Saturday Maths and Girls Do Algebra classes.
Wellington
I teach maths at Wellington College. In my spare time I teach three maths classes to students from other Wellington schools. These are Scholarship Calculus (Saturdays 4-6), Level 2 (Saturdays 1.30-3.30) and Girls Do Algebra (Friday 4.30-6.30). The classes are free to students in public and state-integrated schools.
The classes are a joy to teach because of the kids who come along every week to do maths. This year students attended from 23 schools. Numbers vary from week to week but by the end of the year, GDA had around 50 regular students, Level 2 60, and Scholarship around 40. Based on 2025, I am expecting about 100 to sign up for each class at the start of 2026.
My friend Kasper Black (the incoming HoD Maths at Hutt Valley High) has recently finished writing a set of fantastic maths textbooks. In 2026 I want to use these with Saturday Maths and GDA. I am raising money to pay for the printing costs. We can print each one (at cost) for $25. The Level 2 and Level 3 textbooks are 300 pages each, and full of notes, examples, graphs, and many pages of problems. The Girls Do Algebra textbook covers Year 9-11 Algebra.
As always, huge thanks to lots of people for supporting this programme! Victoria University gives me free access to their Pipitea Campus teaching spaces. I have several lovely teacher friends and student volunteers who help, and Wellington College gives me 2 hours of time for the Scholarship class.
Use of funds
Each textbook costs approximately $25 to print. I am aiming for a set of 80 books for Girls Do Algebra, 120 for Level 2, and 100 for Scholarship Calculus. I will prioritise them in this order if I don't raise enough for all three sets of books.
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Latest update
Update on goal increase to $9500 31 December 2025
Kia ora koutou,
I have been stunned by the generosity shown in the last 2 days and am only $250 from meeting the target (10 textbooks!)
There are two other much smaller things that would really make a difference to the programme and my workload. As I mentioned on the main page, I would love to pay a student $25 per week (one hour to help me with a lot of the emails, Google forms, IT issues, uploads to Google Classroom and other random things that happen, and some of the maths - the young man I am thinking of can do both very well!). And I have two senior girls who are lovely and very good at teaching junior maths. This year I'd like to have them help work with a couple of small groups in the Year 9 - 10 Girls Do Algebra class when we do independent work. I'd love to pay them a little bit for their efforts ($25 per week, one student per week) even though I think they are probably going to turn up every time if I don't pay them because that's what they are like. The total for these 3 students would be around another $2000.
So - if you're here and you want to support this project even though the textbooks are sorted out, that would be amazing. I know this is a much less tangible thing than the books though!
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