By Victoria Mairal-Cruz ’12, Lens Editor
When Upper School Mathematics teacher Robert Plummer was a seventh grader, he struggled to understand arithmetic. Mr. Plummer’s worried mother went to see his math teacher, who assured her that he would either be “a brilliant mathematician, crazy, or both.”
As it has turned out, the teacher’s prediction was right. Known by many students simply as the man in the fishing hat and Birkenstock sandals, Mr. Plummer has graced the halls of Country Day for 38 years, longer than any current faculty member, sharing his original personality with the community and teaching every level of high school math, from Pre-Algebra to Linear Algebra. Mr. Plummer is a man of many talents—“I still haven’t decided what I want to do when I grow up,” he said—but his career turned towards mathematics by “inertia”: he simply enjoyed it.
“He is a brilliant teacher, and we are very lucky to have somebody that can teach through Linear Algebra,” Upper School Head Stephanie Luebbers said of Mr. Plummer.
“He is one of the most thought provoking and passionate teachers I’ve ever had,” said Brad Hammoor ’12, who, along with Yichen Dong ’12 and Henry Pease ’12, has worked with Mr. Plummer for the past two years in AP Calculus BC and Linear Algebra. “Every moment in class he pushes you to a higher level of understanding and capability.”
“He thinks that it’s more fun when we make mistakes than when we get the right answer, because we learn more,” Dong said. “He says the right answer is boring. I think he’s so interesting, and an amazing teacher.”
Mr. Plummer was born in 1941 in the “lobster capital of the world,” Rockland, Maine. He was actually born in the same hospital as the wife of Upper School history teacher Dr. Jeremiah McCall, although, he said, he was “one of the first babies born there, and she was one of the last.”
Throughout his life, but especially growing up in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Mr. Plummer loved to spend time outdoors. During the year, his family lived in Rockland, but in the summertime, Mr. Plummer lived with his parents, brother and sister in a small cabin on the shore of Damariscotta Lake, in the woods of Maine. He spent his summers swimming, canoeing and climbing trees at Camp Kieve, where his father was a guide, and where Timmy Macrae ’12, has been a camper.
The cabin had no electricity, not even a radio. His mother cooked over an open fire, and from the time he was about nine or ten, Mr. Plummer was tasked with splitting firewood (because wood burns better when it’s split into pieces). He remembers picking berries for his mother’s jam: “There were islands offshore that had great masses of blueberries, and we picked… blueberries and raspberries and blackberries, and my mother made them into jam over an open fire.”
Mr. Plummer had a passion for baseball. “I had a radio, and I listened to the Red Sox games under the covers [at night], although [they] didn’t play many night games.” Every afternoon, he would run home from school to catch the end of the Red Socks games on the radio.
The world was a different place when Mr. Plummer was growing up. “I am older than turning signals, I am older than seat belts,” he said. His father taught history at the local high school, and his mother stayed at home. In those times, women had access to select types of jobs, and didn’t have the rights or liberties that they do today. “None of us kids realized that a man could prepare food inside the house,” Mr. Plummer said. “None of us had seen a man do it. It was like you flapping your wings and flying. It was impossible… like something biological.”
In high school, Mr. Plummer took the SATs and was a National Merit Finalist. He attended Bowdoin College on a merit scholarship, where he majored in mathematics and wrote his college thesis on differential geometry. He graduated from Bowdoin in 1963 and then attended the University of Kansas where he met his first wife, worked as a graduate assistant, and got his master’s degree. They married that summer, and moved to Philadelphia, PA.
In Philadelphia, Mr. Plummer taught high school math at Germantown Academy for two years, and then at St. Joseph’s College for another eight. While teaching at St. Joseph’s, he took graduate courses at the University of Pennsylvania, and was a PhD candidate for four years at Bryn Mawr’s graduate school, where he was one of four graduate students working with five professors. During this time, his sons Craig and Eric were born in 1970 and 1972, respectively. Plummer said he felt
that it is probably the most difficult to earn a Doctorate in mathematics, because “Once you find an answer, that raises all kinds of new ideas in your mind… You’ve resolved one idea, and all of a sudden you have access to new questions, new things to ask,” so it becomes a never-ending cycle.
In 1974, Mr. Plummer saw an advertisement for a teaching position at Cincinnati County Day School in the local newspaper. He applied, and that fall, he began teaching here. Mr. Samuel Tumolo, former math department chair and teacher, had started teaching at Country Day the year before, in 1973. Mr. Plummer started out teaching AP Calculus BC, and has taught the course for 37 of the 38 years since. Four years ago, he reduced his course load to part-time, and he now thoroughly enjoys being partially retired.
Mr. Plummer taught current math teacher Mary Zimmerman ’92, math and physics teacher James Gardner ’05, and history teacher Peter Fossett ‘80. “I thought he was great. He was eccentric, he was brilliant,” Mr. Fossett said of Mr. Plummer. “I’d say he was one of my favorite teachers ever, and one of the best teachers we ever had.”
Only Mr. Plummer could compare Calculus to a seventh grade English class. “Some few of us find the real world so utterly bewildering and confusing that we very much prefer to live in the abstract,” he said. “A really good advanced math course doesn’t have all that many numbers… That’s what I mean by abstraction. We occasionally come down to earth and do some calculations, but that’s not what it’s about.” Mr. Plummer said that Calculus is where this type of abstract mathematics really begins to take shape, and students move away from what he called “arithmetic”; students must learn the basics of mathematics before entering that mystifying realm beyond numbers and calculations. Mr. Plummer said that “Calculus is the seventh grade English class of mathematics. When you take seventh grade English… you’ve got a foundation [for the language]. You understand how the English language works, and you can start …writing your own stuff, reading real literature and understanding it… you’re out of the baby class, and you really can work with the language independently.” Once students get into BC Calculus and Linear Algebra, mathematics becomes more abstract, and, Mr. Plummer said, “You can become immersed in it… all of a sudden you find yourself talking to other people in mathematics.”
Mr. Plummer is also well known for his unique sense of style, which, according to Mr. Fossett, was “much less conservative 34 years ago. He wore more purple and green, gold and patterns.” Since then, he has toned his color choices down, and now sticks to three staples: his hat, his sandals, and his fanny pack. “The hat is interesting,” he said. He used to wear baseball hats all the time, and has 20 or 30 of them, but, he said, “My wife decided she wanted to buy me a real hat, and… people stopped me on the street to say how nice I looked in that hat. I adjusted to it pretty quickly and it’s sort of become a part of my personality… it seems to work.”
He started wearing his sandals in the Sixties, because, he said, “There’s really no point in encasing your feet…” For a while, he wore them year round, but “Your feet tend to get cold in the winter time.” Another part of his look is his fanny pack, in which he stores his cell phone, “to keep me from ‘butt dialing’” people, and his iPod. Mr. Plummer said he listens to Sixties folk music, like the Kingston Trio, as well as Bach and Beethoven, among others.
From reading the newspaper by sunlight at two in the morning at the Arctic Circle, to picking thorny raspberries and blackberries as a child, Mr. Plummer has had many adventures so far, however, he seems to have found a home in Country Day. “The nice thing about Country Day,” he said, is that “I like almost all the people here, and they seem to like me pretty well.”
“I still haven’t decided what I want to do when I grow up,” Mr. Plummer said, but for now, “I like doing what I’m doing.”
