Take a look at these two data sets. The yellow line represents confirmed cases of COVID-19 outside of Mainland China. What do you notice?

Astute readers of graphs will notice that both of these graphs represent the exact same data. The top graph uses a linear, uniform scale on the Y (vertical) axis. The bottom one uses a logarithmic scale. Notice the Y axis labels. In the top graph, the yellow line shows a steep and troubling upward trend, accelerating toward the top of the scale. The bottom graph? A casual climb.

The teacher-nerd in me has really had to hold back using COVID-19 and the pandemic as a topic for instruction. I don’t teach math, but I do teach a course called Logic and Argumentation, and in our most recent unit on rhetoric, we broached the topic of statistics, data, charts and graphs, and how these can be used to persuade, confuse, and manipulate (alas, I only got as far as introducing the concept).

This was pre-shutdown, and anxieties were already high among my students, so I deliberately avoided COVID-19 topics, articles, or headlines for real-world examples, despite the current events being rife with all fifteen of the rhetorical devices we were studying, from downplayers to innuendo and from hyperbole to horse laugh. However, this evening I was reading an article on some news website, and it led with a graph of confirmed COVID-19 cases that looked like the bottom one above. The increase in cases was smooth and gradual. Not alarming, really. It was on my third look at the graph that I realized the scaling… the logarithmic scaling meant that the distance between 10 and 1,000 cases was the exact same distance on the graph as that between 1,000 and 100,000 cases. I am an educated person who understands math, but that visual had me leaning toward the “is this really such a big deal?” camp, if just for a moment. And as a reminder, it wasn’t until my third look that I realized what the graph was actually showing.

It makes me wonder how many other people likewise formed incorrect assumptions from a similar graph. This is the kind of find that makes teacher-nerd-me super excited.

There is so much in the media and politics about COVID-19 that I’d love to sit alongside my students and discuss, all of it perfectly matching the elements of rhetoric that we’re studying. On one hand, there are new examples posting minute by minute that we could use to examine specific rhetorical strategies, some of them unintentionally misleading (like a graph with a logarithmic scale) and others of them a bit more heinous.

On the other hand…

There a lot on the other hand. This is where I have to slow myself down a little.

My generation shared 9/11 as the defining event around which each life moment was eventually categorized as either before or after. My students have COVID-19 as the line of demarcation dividing their lives. It is a big deal, to them… regardless of what gets plotted next on the graphs above.

Perhaps this isn’t the time for a lesson on rhetoric. Teacher-me is hoarding and tagging examples as they publish, excited to share these with kids. But I think there will need to be a little distance before I do so.

Right now, my students are awaiting the new normal that adults around them are fumbling to construct. That is a lot for any kid to deal with. Anything that was routine, predictable, and stable for students has been upended. Several students have shared with me via phone or email that each morning they expect to wake and find the world reassembling itself back into familiar form. That simply isn’t happening. And whatever form the world does eventually assemble itself into, it will be forever different, as the after of something of such magnitude always is.

That is important for us to remember.

As a staff, my building made phone or face to face (social distancing factored in) contact with almost every kid to ensure they are doing okay. As of this afternoon, I think there were barely a handful no one had heard back from, and of course, we worry.

Connection, not lesson planning, is really where my energy needs to go. Are they safe? Do they have food? What is their state of mind? So many kids just wanted to chat when I called them this past week. I expected phone calls to last a few minutes, but many extended to fifteen, even twenty minutes. They wanted to update me on their artwork and their guinea pig and the little parts of their lives they can so easily share when we see each other face to face for a hundred minutes every day. I have zero doubt that those phone conversations were more important to them than any remote lesson I could contrive. They don’t need worksheets or Google forms from me. They need the other part of me.

Are you taking care of yourself? Do you know where to get the grab-and-go food the district is handing out? Are you doing okay?

For now, connection not lessons.

Because they are living through the bold line dividing before from after.