Every afternoon Carmen Galea converts her two-bedroom condominium into a homework club.

The teenagers conjugate French verbs under her dining room chandelier. Two brothers complete math equations in her small solarium. And a gaggle of 5-year-olds go over numbers and letters around her coffee table.

There are 15 of them here today, and Galea flits between them offering bananas, roast beef sandwiches, homework assignments and corrections.

She is 69. And she has advanced Parkinson’s disease.

“Count in twos, let’s go: Two. Four. Six. Eight,” she says to the 5-year-olds, her body jerking involuntarily in time with the numbers.

“Don’t be shy because it’s all wrong,” she says, leaning over one of the teens’ shoulders to survey his attempts at passé compose. “Next time you’ll ace it. Today you can stay late and we’ll do it again.”

How Galea came to tutor 15 kids most weekday afternoons is a story of kindness and drive. How she came to do it while in the late stages of Parkinson’s is one of courage and hope.

Galea was on track to becoming a school principal when she was diagnosed with the degenerative neurological disease.

By then, she’d rebuilt her teaching career after moving to Canada from Malta at age 40. She taught special education for seven years before being promoted to develop the Toronto Catholic School Board’s gifted program.

She was finishing her master’s degree (by correspondence) and principal course (on weekends).

She lasted another four years on the job, before the disease’s exhaustion and tremors forced early retirement.

But there is something you should know about “Mrs. G.” She has that rare combination of drive and empathy. She finished high school at 16 and started teaching elementary school that very year. During her career in Toronto, she didn’t just take her students to conferences in the convention centre — she took them to New York to participate in a mock United Nations session.

As she puts it: “I don’t like sitting down.”

So she didn’t retire. She just worked for free, arriving at nearby Catholic schools in Etobicoke to coach gifted children four to five times a week.

Soon enough, Parkinson’s stole that from her too.

It locked her neck, so she could no longer shoulder-check while driving. She turned in her licence, which meant she was stuck in her condominium.

By then, she had already started tutoring the children of some acquaintances. Her personal support worker, who helped her get dressed and take a shower three times a week, began to drop off her three grandchildren too.

Word got out, and soon enough, there were 20 kids from the neighbourhood two afternoons a week.

If she couldn’t go to school, she’d bring the school to her.

“Some of them didn’t need help with their homework. So I thought to myself, these kids need a bigger challenge. So I taught them Sudoku and Scrabble. Word puzzles. Then, when I saw they were progressing. I said ‘Let’s try Destination Imagination.’ ”

Destination Imagination is like the problem-solving Olympics for kids. Teams from around the world are given a challenge in seven categories at the beginning of the school year. In May, they present their results at the world championship in Knoxville, Tenn.

Last year, Galea’s team designed a nine-gram wooden frame that could hold 150 pounds (68 kilograms) without cracking.

They raised $5,000 to go to Tennessee for the championships. Galea rode with them on the bus.

“She is the most amazing person I have ever met. We are all so lucky to have her here,” says Elena Seredinia, whose daughter Elizabeth is one of Galea’s regulars.

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I should note: Galea is not wealthy. She lives off a very modest pension. She does all this for free out of love.

“They offer to pay, but I say no,” she says. “I am not a saint. I just like to see people succeed.”

She doesn’t see her own four grandchildren often. They all live in the United States. The kids she tutors have become her surrogates, she says.

And then there is her debilitating disease, which has taught her “it will only kill your spirit if you allow it to.”

She recently started to see double.

To say the kids here adore her would be an understatement. Two teenage girls tell me how they drop by on weekends to study and help Galea clean.

Five of them formed this year’s Destination Imagination team. The social service challenge given: Find a community need and solve the problem the best way you can.

They chose Parkinson’s.

They’ve spent the year researching the disease. They’ve made an information video and a play about it. They’ve raised $1,700 for Parkinson Society Canada, towards researching a cure.

“We knew she had Parkinson’s, but we didn’t really know what it did to her,” says Sofiya Yuzva, 13. “She’s like a puppet and someone is controlling her movements. It’s a struggle for her to get out of bed in the morning.”

“She’s our role model,” Jorda Gega, 14. “She’s shown us what one person’s passion can do.”

They won gold in the Ontario finals last month.

On Monday, they board a bus for Tennessee for the world championships.

Wish them luck!