This book is a lively and engaging guide to vital habits of mind that can help you think more deeply, write more effectively, and learn more joyfully. It offers an enlightening and entertaining discussion of the craft of thought-one that demonstrates what we've lost in education today, and how we might begin to recover it. In fourteen brief, lively chapters that draw from Shakespeare's world and works, and from other writers past and present, the author distills vital habits of mind that can help you think more deeply, write more effectively, and learn more joyfully, in school or beyond. Challenging a host of today's questionable notions about education, he shows how mental play emerges through work, creativity through imitation, autonomy through tradition, innovation through constraint, and freedom through discipline. It was these practices, and a conversation with the past-not a fruitless obsession with assessment-that nurtured a mind like Shakespeare's. And while few of us can hope to approach the genius of the Bard, we can all learn from the exercises that shaped him. Written in a friendly, conversational tone and brimming with insights, the volume enacts the thrill of thinking on every page, reviving timeless-and timely-ways to stretch your mind and hone your words.