I put up a rather long entry last night for Sunday, along with a photo of “dirty laundry.” Actually, the photo showed clean laundry on the ground, lying around a rolling rack. It felt like a fitting metaphor. I had “aired” some of the concerns we’ve encountered while trying to pull the dojo community together. That’s an unconscious brain at work for you: making connections.
The photo was also interesting because the larger, rolling rack, full of clothes, neatly enclosed both a smaller rack and a little kumquat tree. The larger rack had fallen over both without damaging either. A white gi, IFK symbol visible, along with my ichi kyu belt, were right on top of that pile, unsoiled. So odd, how neatly the picture encapsulated a metaphor for me. Poetic, too, given its backstory: the wind knocked down the rack. Looking at it, my eyes go straight to the gi and the tree.
But I’m supposed to be logging my daily exercise in preparation for my test through this blog. I did exercises this morning and this evening. Today got up to 97 degrees, so my evening exercises were tough. We are not running the air, since we’re expecting the heat to pass in a day. I also ran for twenty minutes on the treadmill and, once again, called a close friend.
We discussed strategies for getting through a mound of reading for graduate school. She’s taking her second graduate course. The timeline is compressed, since it’s a summer course. She’s also taking the course on-line. I told her how I’d learned to skim and scan large amounts of text in a short period of time.
As a literature student in graduate school, I had the advantage of discussing strategy with both professors and Phd candidates in person. I could ask, how the heck do you get through such a huge volume of secondary sources, along with your primary ones? I’d faithfully read everything as an undergraduate. While doing graduate work, you see there’s often simply too much information out there. You learn to skim and scan, in order to figure out what you actually need to read in depth for your particular topic. Often, I explained to my friend, you just need to know how and where to find important information. So surveying the available literature is primarily about understanding what’s already out there, and how to find it when you need it. I had my mentors, older graduate students and professors, to thank for that strategy.