POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

In all sorts of ways and on all sorts of levels, the coronavirus crisis is making the case for the value of a liberal arts education and of general-education courses. As a professor of English, I could make the case for the value of communication skills and, in particular, of writing skills as our information and communication economy has been abruptly pushed up against both its possibilities and its limits.

But I will, instead, use this post to make the case for math literacy.

But, as a brief prelude, let me say that I just killed several minutes doing a Buzzfeed quiz that presented me with a map of the 50 states, with the boundaries among them provided, and asked me to identify them, one state after another, until I had identified all 50. At the finish, the computer screen proclaimed in large, bright red letters and multiple exclamation points that I am in the 8% of Americans who can correctly identify the geographical locations of all 50 states!!! (Actually, a series of upside-down exclamation point would seem more appropriate here.)

In this context, I suspect that many of the statistical variables and much of the statistical modeling related to the Coronavirus is going right over about 99.8% of Americans’ heads. Smug in my sense that I understood the math at least as much as the president, who seemed very determined to keep the number of confirmed cases to something that he could count on his fingers and toes, I did not realize how little I was actually grasping about the modeling until I saw the following three graphs in an article published by Mother Jones:

The graphs are included in an article by Kevin Drum titled “Three Charts Show How important COVID-19 Countermeasures Are” [URL: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/04/three-charts-show-how-important-covid-19-countermeasures-are/].

At a time in which those determined to accelerate degree completions are questioning the value of requirements such as algebra, I think that one should take the opportunity to make the case that being able to understand what these charts are collectively conveying is not just helpful in terms of one’s personal peace of mind but also in terms of the broader acceptance of and execution of public policy.

But, since we live in a nation in which I can proudly count myself among the 8% of adults who can identify the locations of all 50 states, and since we are not going to be able to improve math literacy overnight, at least we have very creative people who are able to promote the value of social distancing in videos such as the following, which was produced in Dayton, Ohio, for the Ohio Department of Health and which has, as they say, “gone viral”: