About 5280 Math

If you visit Denver, you may notice a sign upon entering town that proclaims the elevation to be 5280 feet. 5280 Math is “mile-high” math—challenging math for adventurous learners! Adventurous learners have three important qualities.

• They are curious.

• They take risks.

• They are flexible thinkers.

Some students are naturally talented and/or adventurous. Others can develop these qualities. 5280 Math is for both types of learners and their teachers and families. The focus is on developing deep understanding of challenging math concepts, which enhances the ability to retain, transfer, apply, and appreciate mathematical knowledge. It builds a foundation for long-term success and nurtures a passion for math.

The paragraph at the top of this page expresses how it feels to me to do mathematics. Unfortunately, traditional school math provides a very different experience. I offer the resources on this site in the hope of helping students, teachers, and parents become adventurous mathematicians who appreciate the power and beauty of mathematics—even while they meet goals outlined in school math standards.

The 5280 Math website contains an ever-expanding collection of classroom activities along with tools and strategies to support teachers' work. There are sample questions from activities in my Advanced Common Core Math Explorations (ACCME) books for middle school as well as some complete projects for students in elementary, middle, and early high school. Apart from the ACCME books, all resources from 5280 Math are completely free. In addition, you will find suggestions for books and links to websites that support the mathematical growth of adventurous learners.

Finally, you will find information here about professional development, consulting, and speaking services that I offer. See the Consulting page on this site to learn more!

I welcome your input on this site and would love to hear about resources you know of that support these goals. 

About Me

My early teaching career was spent working with college students who had struggled in high school math. I learned from this experience that when students struggle with mathematics, it is usually due a lack of confidence and unrealistic beliefs about what math is and how we learn it. I discovered that virtually any student with the proper support, sufficient time, and some determination is able to achieve meaningful mathematical understanding.

For twenty years or so, my professional life centered around teaching math to talented elementary and middle school students in my local school district. I learned that in order to teach math well, I needed first to understand how students were thinking and then to help them learn to think for themselves.  

During my years in the classroom, I gradually developed a large collection of challenging math activities for talented and adventurous elementary and middle school students. I shared these materials with teachers and parents and wrote a series of six books, Advanced Common Core Math Explorations for Prufrock Press containing some of the middle school projects. I also began speaking at conferences around the country and providing training in schools and districts to help teachers use the activities and more generally to build depth and challenge into programming and instruction for talented math students.

A couple of presentations that I gave at a National Association for Gifted Children conference led to a collaboration with educators from two organizations in India, Educational Initiatives and GenWise. I traveled to India in 2016 and 2018 to develop and teach courses in mathematical thinking to gifted middle school students at residential summer camps. Around the time that the pandemic arrived, this collaboration evolved into developing online asynchronous learning content for Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development as well as online synchronous courses for GenWise, including Math Circles in which students collaborated in choosing topics and carrying out and presenting mathematical research. For the past couple of years, most of my work has centered on designing and teaching online math classes and working individually with profoundly gifted math students.

As I near ‘retirement’ age, I plan to continue this work (though perhaps at a somewhat reduced pace!) and to further develop the materials on this website.

Jerry Burkhart