Wednesday Hodgepodge: Thinks to think

Answer the questions on your own blog, then hop back to From This Side of the Pond (click the graphic)  to add your link to the party. See you there.

1. Tell us about your favorite moment or share one of the bright spots from the year we're leaving behind. 

Outdoor picture-taking walks with my husband.

2. What do you wish you'd known at the start of 2020? Elaborate.

That's a hard question, because it could go from the very big and serious to the more flippant (I might have bought more thin elastic before it became a unicorn item...)

I'll put it a different way: there are things I've learned about the world that I do not think I saw as clearly this time last year. But I'm not sure that being handed that awareness a year earlier would have made much difference to anything specific we did.

3. Best book you read this year? If you did not read any books this year, what's the best thing you ate all year? We've all eaten, right? 

Here's my list of books read this year, including some listed near the top as ones I found most interesting or useful. One of the more obscure but perhaps aptly titled ones was a book for teachers, Intentional Interruption: Breaking Down Learning Barriers to Transform Professional Practice (Steven Katz). One of its central points was that adults, especially teachers (of any sort) need, often, to take time out from teaching to work on learning, especially recognizing their their own barriers and hangups about learning: because real learning, for everyone, means change, and change, even in small amounts, can be difficult. We would often rather settle for a quick fix, or copy what seems to be working for others without really thinking the problem through. But when we do allow for "intentional interruption," adding perhaps a large gulp of humility to wash it down, our own boundaries can be enlarged...and we realize that it was our own pride or fear that created the limits in the first place.

 4. The Pantone Colors of the year for 2021 are ultimate gray and illuminating yellow (a bright shade)...are you a fan? Would we find either of these colors in your home or wardrobe?

Lots of grey this winter. Not into yellow so much, although I agree the photographs of daisies and lemons are cheering.

5. If you were/are making a list of 21 things to do/accomplish in 2021 what is one thing that would be on it?

Still working on that.

On my next year's reading list: I'm waiting for a copy of Alan Jacobs' book How to Think to be delivered (Christmas gift card). From the book blurb: it's "a contrarian treatise on why we're not as good at thinking as we assume - but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life." Which sounds quite a lot like Intentional Interruption.

6. Random Things

Oops P.S.: I just realized that the book I ordered is You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, by James K.A. Smith. But I still want to read How to Think.

Linked from The Wednesday Hodgepodge at From This Side of the Pond.