How to Improve Search Fu?

When I think about the struggles that people my age had in finding information, when we were students, I shudder… but I’m also partially relieved.  I had to read a lot of books and write a lot of essays; and both skills greatly improved as a result.  But I didn’t really get a visual education until I took art history classes in college, and discovered that cartoons, engravings, drawings, photographs and art told you as much – or more – about the past than secondary sources did.

In class over the last few days, I’ve watched kids make Keynote (PowerPoint, for you PC users) slide shows to their classes which consist mostly of words and notes — text gleaned directly from the textbook, usually — with some early photographs and engravings.  But let’s face it — those slideshows are boring.

Here’s the advice I plan to give to my own students in the feedback I write down over the weekend.

When presenting in class:

• Use Google or another search engine to try to:
  1. find a picture of every person mentioned in the text.
  2. find a picture of that person’s invention or device
  3. find maps to locate appropriate towns and states
  4. find photographs of the landscapes or skylines of those states
  5. find a political cartoon related to the era you’re explaining
  6. find graphs and pie charts of relevant economic or census information

Lots of people have done the hard work of creating these images for you.  It’s not to say you can’t make your own, but look smartly, and find images of all kinds.  Humans are more often visual learners than anything else — Get comfortable with helping others learn through images: you’ll do yourself a favor and you’ll get practice with finding imagery and ideas that explain and support your presentation.

Taiji Day 12: Hard and Soft

I’ve had this sore throat and cough for a couple of weeks that won’t quit.  Reiki, antibiotics, energy work, even taiji and qi gong haven’t really touched it much.  Hot tea, coffee, water, and so on have soothed it but not broken it. Direct and indirect assaults have failed.

It’s rather like the difference between hard and soft form in taiji.  If I need an energetic workout, I can tighten my muscles as I move through the form, and lock up my joints as I flow through the postures.  The result is a jerky, tight, choppy series of motions that leaves me vibrating and sweaty at the end.  I also tend to finish in only a few minutes.  That’s hard style.

Soft style, on the other hand, is simply to remember to breathe while slipping easily and gracefully from one posture to another. It’s better if the muscles aren’t tight; it’s better if the body isn’t jerking around or overly tight.  It’s better if the motions are fluid rather than fierce.  It takes longer.  I did mostly soft style today, and it took close to 45 minutes to complete five golden coins and the form.

Each form energizes one in a different way. But one leaves me tired and sweaty, and while I’m energized afterwards I have little ability to project energy.  The soft way is slower, and yet counterintuitively — leaves me more energized to face the day.

The cough and the sore throat, furthermore, both improve after the soft way, and worsen after the hard way. Hmm.