This post is for teachers, paraprofessionals and others who have recently started new positions in education. Readers, please forward this to anyone you know who might be questioning whether or not to add union dues to their paycheck.

I have been seeing social media posts from new hires asking whether they ought to join the union. Yes, union dues cost more than mere pocket change. However, paying your dues is exactly like purchasing homeowners insurance. You may never use that insurance once in your life. But if the house burns down, your homeowners policy will be invaluable. Insurance can save your retirement funds and, in a larger sense, your future.

Not all educational administrators are trustworthy.

Not all evaluation systems provide an honest reflection of an employee’s performance. I have seen numerous people whose entire year’s performance was assessed based on less than a half day of actual in-person observation. Not all evaluators know what they are seeing in those scant hours of observation. And teaching has its own unique hazards. Students and others have been known to lie about teacher performance, for example. Early on, adults are usually warned not to be alone with students in closed rooms. I know one woman who essentially had a group of girls gang up on her to deliberately sabotage her evaluation, too.

Added to the above, every so often, the wrong administrator or teacher simply takes a dislike to someone. The wrong teacher can make a parapro miserable all year, acting as a stream of negativity and a source of unfair evaluations. The wrong principal may try to push a teacher out through harsh evaluations and other dubious tricks like assigning his or her target the too-hot room over the noisy boiler. Education is not free from nepotism and favoritism either. Sometimes when Ed just doesn’t like Harry, Ed may decide to get Harry replaced with someone more to his own taste, such as his golf buddy’s newly graduated son.

Reader, maybe you will never encounter any seriously unjust treatment in the your workplace. Ever. You may be lucky enough to work for “Mike” or “Carly,” who are trying to build their best team possible and who only want to provide a school where you can learn and grow to become the best “your-position-here” possible.

But I believe fiercely in the old proverb, “Trust to God and row for the shore.” Sometimes I’ve heard, “Trust to God and keep your powder dry.” You have to take care of yourself. Your union is part of that self-care. If ever that kid does lie, or Ed decides he needs to open up a social studies position for his golf buddy’s son, or any of the many, many reasons why good teachers have found themselves fighting to hold onto their positions, having a union rep in the room can help you keep your position. Union reps remind districts of their promises and ensure due process does not get ignored.

The alternative to the union is trusting your administrators to be wise, honest and fair, even when under heavy pressure from outside forces such as angry parents, angry or frightened* students, other teachers, social media campaigns, and inadequate budgets.

Hugs! I wish everyone a great day. Jocelyn Turner

* Those lying students may have absolutely nothing against their teacher. But let’s say “Marigold” has a “D” or “F” to explain to her scary parents. The blame has to be placed somewhere away from Marigold. Once a lie has started, too, a child may not know how to walk away from the lie due to fears of embarrassment or punishment.

I felt sorry for that principal. One assistant principal down. Five teachers down. How do you even begin to hire all those replacements in October? I felt sorry for the principal who had three teachers quit together midday last week, a fact proudly proclaimed in one of my social media feeds. I feel sorry for the teachers who do not have enough paraprofessional help and for the paraprofessionals are are NOT happy to serve as substitute teachers — sometimes in violation of the law — because there has to be an adult body in the front of that classroom; the number of qualified bodies in too many places now sometimes totals less than the number of classrooms. I feel profoundly sorry for the kids who are being impacted by this educational game of musical chairs, the game where some classrooms end up being “out” — out of luck, out of teachers and out of learning time for that day or longer.

Can I make a suggestion? Let’s go Back to a Better Future. In that future, evaluations will not be long streams of demonstrated inadequacies (Yes, Charlotte Danielson and others meant well, but what they produced with their lengthy rubrics on pedagogical effectiveness has been senselessly demoralizing. I remember going upstairs to comfort the woman on the floor above me, who after the students left was simply wailing in despair after reading her evaluation — and she was one of the best teachers in my school in my personal view. Other teachers and I kept reassuring her that, yes, she did her job well even as she talked about the fact that maybe teaching had been a mistake and maybe the evaluation was proof that she ought to move on.

She was a great teacher. The whole scene was surreal. But it happened and I was there to watch the equivalent of handing a straight “A” student a straight “C” report card.

Eduhonesty: We would never do to students what we do to teachers. We point out all the areas where teachers should work to improve, but once the rubric got long enough those evaluations proved toxic. In the year before I retired, Danielson’s rubric contained “4 domains, 22 components, and 76 elements. In one class period, no one can observe all of that and a regrettable number of evaluators will likely infer or even make up numbers to fill out the requirements.” (Danielson’s axe with details | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com))

Teachers understand that criticism must be handled with care. A laundry list of comments on mistakes frequently ends up in a trash, those comments unread. Too much criticism and students stop listening. I always picked my most important corrections and put the big ones on a paper or test, and then left the nit-picking alone. “Remember to capitalize the names of cities! :-)” I would write, before deciding to worry about commas later. Then I would bundle compliments into the mix of observations.

Too much criticism makes students feel … sad, angry, hopeless, demoralized, tired, anxious, agitated, and many other words for feelings that hurt. That criticism makes those students understandably want to avoid school, or at least the parts of school associated with all the put-downs. Why should teachers be different?

Eduhonesty: I am reminded of Shylock: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”. – (Act III, scene I).” ― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

I repeat: We would never do to students what we do to teachers. We are years past due at looking at coaching and evaluation systems that hack away at teacher’s independence, pride, happiness and self-esteem. Yes, we must evaluate and coach teachers, but I believe we should look backward in time.

Job satisfaction in teaching was vastly higher 25 years ago than it is today. The reasons are multifold and changing, but part of that change comes from evaluation systems. Most teachers take grades pretty seriously and year after year of getting a “C+” report card wears them down, especially when they are working nonstop to produce “A” quality instruction — and especially when they sense that they have frequently succeeded but somehow they can never get the high grade they sense they deserve.

The rubrics have become too long, the micromanaging too ever-present. When an evaluation system demands that a person do 60 impossible things before breakfast, then penalizes that person for only doing 48, that rubric is killing enthusiasm, not improving pedagogy. When the work becomes too hard, people give up. That throwing-up-the-hands response is actually healthy, a natural form of psychological self-defense.

Positive reinforcement: Not just for students and children. Adults can use kind words, praise and extra credit points too.

Resigning can be a form of revenge. Those autumn job fairs? Revenge has fueled the resignations and retirements that created those job fairs. COVID is getting much of the blame for teacher flight, and COVID is unquestionably in the picture, but I thought I’d write this post today because I strongly suspect COVID is becoming an excuse. “It’s COVID” can’t be allowed to become a justification for ignoring the sprawling rubrics and punitive messages sucking the joy out of teaching.

Wishing you all a great week, Jocelyn Turner

My Twitter feed is filled with exhausted, exasperated nurses who are getting hammered by long shifts and lost patients. Sometimes those patients ask for vaccinations, not understanding that they are asking too late. Vaccinations are preventative measures that help prepare a body to fight off a future microbe. Amazingly enough, many people remain unclear on the current research to protect themselves.

That doesn’t keep these sick people or members of their families from getting angry at healthcare providers. Aside from the sheer workload recently, nurses get blowback or worse from frightened and/or angry patients. Nurses are even being warned to change out of their scrubs before leaving work because of unprovoked attacks at gas stations and other public venues.

“Now’s the time,” Dr. Jeffery Elder, Medical Director for Emergency Management at LCMC Health in New Orleans said (Emergency care becoming a ‘balancing act’ with hospitals overwhelmed by COVID-19 (msn.com). “Masking and getting vaccinated, that’s what’s going to get us past this.” 

But many people don’t seem to believe Dr. Elder. The ivermectin bandwagon still has people jumping on and off. Reader, if anyone you know is an ivermectin proponent, ask them to look up side effects/dangers of antiparasitic drugs. A drug designed to kill worms in your body isn’t going to slide through like Metamucil. That drug is meant to create a killing field of dead little critters.

In any case, we are not past “this” yet. In some areas, the light at the end of the tunnel still signals an oncoming train. And our nurses keep stepping in front of this train, day after day, night after night.

Eduhonesty: This is a great day to thank a nurse friend. Maybe even send a card? If he or she is good friend, why not send some chocolate to express appreciation? Or drop by with a bouquet of flowers. Nurses are the bedrock in America’s healthcare system. They could use more than a few kind words right now.

Hugs to my readers, Jocelyn Turner

Teachers and others working in schools — do you feel safe? Or safe enough? Do you have enough support, both literal and figurative? Are there subs? Paraprofessionals? Do you have the supplies necessary to make classes work, including personal protective equipment? When COVID cases are identified, does your district policy protect you? Does it protect the children in your care? Is your administration listening to your concerns?

If no one seems to be listening to you, fellow teacher, if your situation genuinely feels hazardous, especially if you live in a rural area with limited healthcare options, consider quitting. Consider retiring. Consider seeking alternative employment. You won’t be the first person to quit in October. I am getting emails telling me about job fairs, job fairs for teachers in early autumn.

We are guaranteed a wild year of quarantines and closures. That wild year has become inevitable. We can’t put COVID back in the box because too many humans are now serving as disease vectors.

Eduhonesty: The short window when we might have extinguished COVID closed a long time ago. Only you, reader, can determine your risk profile and your risk tolerance. Only you can assess whether or not the stress of your daily work is causing you to crumble around the edges. Are you still having fun? Are you just holding together? How much glue, spit and bailing wire is it taking to keep you together? How much do you dread your morning drive? I am going to suggest you read the following article as you consider your personal emotional state:

Nine Ways Stress is More Dangerous Than You Think (healthline.com)

The decision to quit should factor in your retirement posture, available family and friends who might be asked for help, and any strategies which might get you through the school year. Walking away from your students should be a last resort.

But you CAN walk away. You don’t have to die on this hill. If your stomach lurches as you drive to work, if you are having panic attacks or just going on occasional drinking binges to forget the day — if you cry regularly, if you dread your email, if everything coming out of the front office feels like another five pounds added to a 75 pound backpack you are already carrying, if staff meetings are never fun now, if angry parents make you want to hide in your basement in your pajamas, watching Netflix while the world goes on without you…

The world will go on without you. That’s the big truth we teachers sometimes avoid while looking at all the good we are doing in our classrooms. Yes, if you quit, you will inconvenience and hurt people, but your administrators will replace you as quickly as possible and they may never even look back. Your students will be forced to process one more change in a stew of recent changes, but students regularly change teachers throughout their academic lives. Showing them they don’t have to put up with piles of crazy because it’s expected of them — that may be doing them a favor that will help them enormously down the line.

Despite today’s difficult conditions, I hope many readers are thinking, “Why would I ever leave teaching?” But reader, if you are taking Xanax just to get through the day or simply breaking into random tears, this post is probably for you. And happy or at least reconciled teachers? Please send a link to this post to colleagues who keep crying in the breakroom or who otherwise just don’t seem to be… making it.

Is it time to leave, reader? Why not go online and start planning an exit strategy? Stress makes people physically and mentally ill. PTSD is not only for soldiers who served in Afghanistan or other bloody global conflicts. See PTSD in Teachers: Yes, It’s Real! – The Educators Room.

How much stress is too much stress? Here’s the thing: You don’t want to find out by making yourself sick. This post is written in memory of a colleague who died on the table despite the best efforts of her surgeon. It’s written for all those teachers and ex-teachers who are discovering that PTSD is a chronic and fluctuating disorder. Every teacher who is struggling, struggling and struggling while trying to hit all the targets and simultaneously pacify all the stakeholders concerned with the classroom happy should actively read PTSD is a chronic, fluctuating disorder affecting the mental quality of life in older adults – PubMed (nih.gov).

You only have one heart. You only have one mind. Your inner child deserves your protection, as much as any other child anywhere. And if your inner child is hurting too badly, you need to carry that child to safety.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers”, anyone? The original “Halloween” follows. AMC is running Halloween movies all day until about midnight when it segues into “Fear the Walking Dead.” SyFy is cranking through various Nightmares on Elm Street. until “Chucky” at 10:00 PM which is followed by “Zombie Tidal Wave.” I have the option to watch “Zombie Tidal Wave” right now if I wish.

Channels that are not in full Hallowfest yet are saving their offerings for evening. Freeform has Hocus Pocus, a lighter offering with Bette Midler at her cult classic best. I confess I haven’t seen “Boo! A Madea Halloween.”

I love zombie movies. Dawn of the Dead captured the fundamental element of a plague perfectly: “Every Dead Body That Is Not Exterminated Becomes One Of Them. It Gets Up And Kills! The People It Kills Get Up And Kill!” Zombie movies and TV shows often capture the best and worse of humans, and may raise critical thinking questions that appeal to our kids. Are we always obliged to try to rescue innocent victims? What if fifty zombies surround Fred? At what point do we walk away from Fred, who has become trapped in his Subaru in the traffic jam on the bridge?

Eduhonesty: No one could call me unusually squeamish. I binge-watched the series “Hannibal” right before it left Netflix. I used to watch Criminal Minds with my adolescent daughters, all of us under warm blankets together on the couch until we decided the series had gotten too fond of trying to top last week’s gore and body count. I watched “Saw” movies with one kid, the same kid who also bought the DVD for “Killer Klowns from Outer Space.”

Why the details on my viewing habits? Because maybe when I push the guide button on the remote and think, “Damn, this is not good for kids,” I am right. The tradition of scary movie month was established years back, and I am all for carving pumpkins, eating candy and taking in a scary movie or two. Or three. I’m just not sure exactly where to draw the line on the October frightfest. I am sure a line is needed, however.

I want to throw out a few thoughts on today’s gore fest as we count down to Halloween: 1) Both 2020 and 2021 have been rough years. Film zombies today might seem more realistic to our kids than they did in 2019, even zombies in grainy black and white. It’s much less threatening to watch scary movies when you personally feel safe and secure. 2) The fight, flight, or freeze hormones we metabolize quickly in peaceful times can take much longer to process and eliminate when stress levels are already high. If a kid starts the movie stressed, that kid may have no chance to wind down before bedtime. 3) Year by year, phone saturation increases. Many phones are functional televisions, so it’s easy for some kids to sneak in a couple of extra hours of TV. 4) New content providers keep popping up and there’s always YouTube. 5) Seasonal films are competing with shows designed to inspire fear. Multiple flavors of “The Walking Dead” are only a start. Midnight Mass anyone?

I’ve written before about my belief that many of today’s ADHD diagnoses are misdiagnosed anxiety disorders. ADHD and anxiety disorders also often coexist as well, and ADHD may be flagged before anxiety, behaviors being more apparent than emotional states. Regardless, the percentage of anxious children has been rising rapidly in the recent past. “According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly 1 in 3  of all adolescents ages 13 to 18 will experience an anxiety disorder. These numbers have been rising steadily; between 2007 and 2012, anxiety disorders in children and teens went up 20%.” (Anxiety in Teens is Rising: What’s Going On? – HealthyChildren.org) Anxious children in particular may struggle more during the annual scary movie marathon.

As someone who spent years of her elementary school childhood waiting for lightening to begin flashing in the corner of her room before somehow making her disappear, I’d like to post this caution: Imaginative kids believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for years. For that matter, some adults today believe government boogeymen are chipping and tracking them for unknown, experimental purposes. Anxiety pervades US society.

While I hate to make more concessions to COVID times, I’d like to make a few recommendations for readers:

1. I’d suggest capping the time spent on scary movies and shows in the next few weeks. I’d also suggest vetting films ahead of time. Here’s a site that may help: Search Page | Reel Scary
2. Search Page | Reel Scary takes input from readers. Your older kids might like this site and could add to its content. Teaching our kids to study the dangers posed by the light socket before jamming their fingers inside helps everyone.

Teachers, the scary movie topic is brimming over with social/emotional lesson content that’s useful in the classroom and life. Those teachers lucky enough to have the flexibility can teach students to step outside movies to look at social context in films, at characters and their backgrounds. Teachers can help students to recognize and discuss the the social values that allow us to predict film events. Younger students might watch Halloweentown or Paranorman.

If possible, I ‘d work this movie unit into my October lesson plans. Movies are perfect for reinforcing the elements of a plot and can be used for a variety of social science topics. But I’d also be putting together this unit with an alternative agenda that dovetails with many curricular targets: Our kids should be given time to reflect on the effect of fright night after fright night. The excitement of The Sandman followed by Chucky and Scream 4 — what exactly does that do? The answer will vary from one child to another. Our kids will benefit from separating themselves from the crowd and recognizing exactly how horror, gore, and suspense affect them personally.

Thank you for reading. Hugs, Jocelyn Turner

We could have used a clear playing field, a large expanse of green grasses for long passes and quick hand-off plays. Equity deserved to take the field openly, with discussions about racial awareness and fairness, neurodiversity, and disability access unobstructed, if fiercely debated as to their particulars. Somehow equity issues finally had shot toward the top of the educational agenda.

But here is what we came up against: Teachers, administrators and students trying to hang on while under daily assault, fighting a plague that is upending education as it sweeps like a tsunami over the pillars of daily life. That plague is in the forefront of today’s events, so much so that we are losing momentum in other areas. Remember when young people were gathered together from countries all across the globe to stage a climate strike back in 2019? (‘It’s our time to rise up’: youth climate strikes held in 100 countries | Climate crisis | The Guardian) They resumed the fight in September of 2020 and 2021 with more protests, but those protests have been muted and have fallen off many front pages. From a 2020 article Young people resume global climate strikes calling for urgent action | School climate strikes | The Guardian: “Greta Thunberg led a strike in Sweden, which was limited to 50 people by the country’s lockdown laws – “so we adapt”, she tweeted, with a picture showing strikers more than 2 metres apart.”

We adapt. The calls to limit testing become muted in response to articles that trumpet a learning catastrophe resulting from classroom closures. Educational leaders demand numbers to measure learning loss, and the loss of instructional time those tests will create gets lost despite the irony of incurring lost learning time to measure the effects of lost learning time.

Other issues have fallen off the table or been shoved to the side as well. Inequitable property-tax based funding that favors those lucky enough to live in moneyed zip codes still pops up, but toward the bottom of pages that begin with stories on how districts are offering cash to families to take their children to school because of bus driver shortages. (Why Would Anyone Drive a School Bus Right Now? | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com))

Issues of tech equity are an exception to what I have written. Remote learning threw a spotlight on that issue. Suddenly the fact that District A had been 1:1, with all their students possessing a laptop, while District B was still signing up for the computer lab twice a week became seen for the educational inequity that it had always been.

Eduhonesty: When you have 15 impossible things to do before breakfast, but only time to complete 6 of those things, part of your list must be dropped. That’s fine. That’s triage and we fell down the rabbit hole long before anyone outside the medical field had even heard of a coronavirus. We were triaging before the field filled with COVID-19 flotsam.

Still, we have to keep our voices high and loud. Hey! Over here! Where are the laptops! But also: Why were there so few laptops?

Issue 1: Given that zip codes are stratified both by income and race — and that predominantly black or Hispanic zip codes overall are taking in less $$ in property taxes, sometimes far less — how can we fix school funding? I believe property-tax based funding is inherently unfair, disenfranchising the poor. (Why were there so few laptops? I blogged the following slightly meandering post in 2015 that describes the Land of Few Laptops: Internet notes and classrooms | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com)) I was definitely working in the land of have-nots.

Charters and vouchers are part of this funding discussion. I’d like to say that I regard both of these “solutions” as attempts to make an end run around the problem of inequitable funding — attempts to avoid spending extra money on our most disadvantaged students.

Issue 2: Testing time went over the top years ago. The time wasted confirming what we already know is stolen directly from children. The time we spend to find out what we don’t know is poorly conceived and implemented, wasting absurd numbers of minutes.

Issue 3: We are past due at unpeeling the onion of biases, both hidden and overt, that affect our students, especially students of color and students who diverge from the neurotypical. We must not bypass this issue because the playing field has become too crowded. Too many men on field? Let’s take the penalty and return to playing our best game. Social/emotional learning has never been more important than now.

My M.D. friend’s anger spilled over as we drove back home from Chicago. Her bout of COVID left her with longer-term struggles, months of off tastes, strange and missing smells, less air and energy, and other spooky challenges. She joins many of the vaccinated in thinking that the unvaccinated are hurting us all. She’ll extend a little sympathy to young men who might weigh a possible link between rare cases of heart inflammation after vaccination against the effects of COVID-19 itself. It’s a tough choice when you feel young and healthy, given that the young often have a false sense of invulnerability. With the possible exception of young men, though, she believes anyone who has examined the evidence should have gotten that shot yesterday.

It’s October of 2021. The parade should be over. The shots should mostly all be done. My take after evaluating the evidence is that the shot is vastly less dangerous than COVID itself, so much so that I don’t even regard vaccination as a choice.

That said, though, the current Facebook scandal has me planning to take the blog sideways today, away from testing, curriculum and teaching itself. How did Facebook enter this vaccine post? Vaccination has become a social media and internet search issue at its core. Too often we don’t listen to the vaccine hesitant carefully enough. Instead, we share facts that they “know” are not true. How do they know? Friends on Facebook told them. Or an internet search took them to places that many vaccine proponents don’t even know exist.

We know about Tucker Carlson. Like the round-faced chipmunk(s) who keep uprooting the mums and pansies in my porch flowerbox, the fact of his existence is hard to deny. He’s out there and he is saying whatever will pull in ratings. If he thought it would boost his numbers enough, I’m sure he’d cover the Martian takeover of the U.S. government in 1964. Carlson himself refuses to tell people whether or not he is vaccinated.

That’s our problem at the moment. And we don’t always help ourselves when we confidently lecture to the worried well who are afraid of that needle. It’s too easy to sound as if we are talking down to anti-vaxxers or the vaccine hesitant* when we offer glib statements that don’t match the Facebook exchanges or internet searches of our listeners. Statements like “Almost nobody ever has a serious reaction” is an example.

The fact that a next door neighbor had a fever and aches for a day or two may seem serious to someone who has never experienced a monster illness. Maybe a cousin has complained of pain in a vaccination site and told the story over and over again of how she couldn’t “lift her arm for a week.” And whether we like it or not, people have definitely died from vaccinations. Millions of people have had their vaccinations now, and trying to nail down that incredibly tiny percentage of persons who passed away shortly after being vaccinated reveals the outline of our credibility problem.

A search on “how many people have died from covid vaccinations” reveals a terrifying schism in the available information out there. A hard number doesn’t truly exist, because people who die after vaccinations may die from a wide variety of causes. Sudden death events were common before COVID and will continue to be common in our lifetimes.

Tucker Carlson used his show in May to suggest that 3,362 people had died from the vaccine by that time, using numbers from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System database, or VAERS. The VAERS system is open to anyone who perceives they had a reaction to the vaccine, and inputs are not verified. I could go in now and report my tongue had turned mysteriously green, although the site does warn users that federal consequences are possible if the site is misused. It also wants to know where a user sought medical help.

Data also slips away all the time in any voluntary reporting system. I had a slight fever after my booster shot. I won’t get around to reporting that. They don’t need my tiny blip of data to know the vaccine can cause a fever of 100.6 for part of one day. That report would take a chunk of my valuable time with no benefit to me. A more excitable person might have sought help and made a report. I made tea and went to bed with a good book. VAERS — as the site itself emphasizes — is not a reliable source of information. And as far as deaths go, if Joe has a heart attack the night he got his vaccination, is the vaccination the cause? What if Joe slips and falls in the bathtub? What if the vaccine itself is fine for almost everyone but Joe is allergic to the polyethylene glycol in his shot? VAERS data provides information, but not causation.

Tucker said 3,362, a number he knew to be fuzzy and essentially fictional. He knows no verifiable number exists. Other sources give much bigger numbers. Other sites claim almost 45,000 people who got the COVID-19 vaccinations died in 72 hours. Many of these links lead to “page not found.” But somebody found those pages once. Sifting through the amount of (dis)information on this topic is not merely difficult. I think it’s undoable.

Eduhonesty: Yes, reader, I am guessing you believe in getting vaccinated. I believe that injection is clearly the lesser of my evils too. But I would like to ask readers to be polite to the vaccine hesitant. Listen to them.

We need to persuade the hesitant to get on the bandwagon, because herd immunity is a real thing, and if we ever get there, we won’t have to worry so much. Teachers will be able to decide whether to retire, resign or plan for their next year without factoring in likely COVID-19 exposures. Administrators will have more confidence that staff members they hired will not vanish mid-year. Parents will be able to stop wavering on possible home schooling. When dad has back pain and has to go the emergency room, with luck, he will only have to wait two hours instead of twelve. We will all be able to stop buying masks regularly.

Please, reader, prepare the relevant facts for your arguments, starting with the fact that 700,000 people in this country have died from the actual COVID-19 disease. Pictures help to make this trend clear at a glance. And herd immunity is our only chance of getting back to “normal.”

A natural question should arise here: In this scenario, why are people hesitant to go online to sign up for a shot at their local pharmacy? It’s so easy to do. Much of the world envies us our ready access to help right now.

We are dealing with something larger than fear a needles (most of the time anyway) when we talk to the vaccine hesitant. That vaccine hesitancy springs from a number of sources — one of which is lack of faith in our leaders. To persuade the hesitant, we must be ready to confront the “mask” argument because that argument has its roots in facts that deserve attention and recognition: At one point, early in the pandemic, our leaders did lie to us. (In my opinion, they did anyway.) When the CDC went on television and told people masks were not helpful because we might be more inclined to touch our faces when wearing them, I believe they knew they were sharing a falsehood. I also understand they were backed into a corner and probably thought they had no choice.

The toilet paper had flown off the shelves and cleaning product aisles were empty.

Those leaders knew the truth: If they told people to buy masks, healthcare providers would almost immediately end up without essential personal protective equipment. Even without a government mask endorsement, in many areas, the mask supply dried up within weeks. People were donating the masks they used when cleaning their cat boxes to friends who were nurses. Our utter lack of pandemic preparedness backed leaders into a corner and I forgive them.

But as we deal with the vaccine hesitant, I’d say we must remember that lie. It’s part of the current mistrust. Changes in policy that came as data was analyzed are also part of the hesitancy. Recommendations changed. Maybe they changed because scientists realized that almost all the transmission was airborne and a bleach bath after work was unnecessary. But recommendations changed, which confused people. They continue to change, too. The mask issue remains in play.

We have to listen if we are going to sway the hesitant. We have to be able to answer their concerns. My feed is not your feed is not Mark or Esme’s feed. This is a time for persuasion. Persuasion requires that we acknowledge the facts and factoids being fed into Esme’s phone and start from there.

I hear too much bashing of the unvaccinated. No one can be expected to respond positively when under verbal assault. No one listens when an argument turns ugly. “Factoids” or so-called facts are convincing people to sit on the fence. True facts have the potential to get them off the fence.

But first we have to listen, so we can figure out what we ought to say.

* The vaccine hesitant and anti-vaxxers often differ radically in their positions and views. I honestly don’t think there’s anything I can say that will persuade the 5-G crowd who fear being magnetized and tracked. They are Tucker’s audience for the Martian takeover story. But the hesitant often have worries that can be addressed with solid information and numerical comparisons, if we just take long enough to identify the exact nature of their concerns.