On your heart, I’m a vow; in your mind, how thoughts flowed;
How a star moves on stage; or a chicken, the road;
I am Red; I am Blue; I’m an Hourglass Toad;
And a term for your mood when you’re fit to explode.

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Sara. See comments for answer.

Well, it looks like Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) will keep his Senate seat after all:

Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss beat back a prolonged challenge from Democrat Jim Martin on Tuesday to win a second term in office after a bruising four-week runoff between the one-time University of Georgia fraternity brothers.

Chambliss’s double-digit victory dashed Democrats’ dreams of securing a filibuster-proof, 60-vote “super majority” in the Senate and buoyed a Republican Party battered by staggering losses in the Nov. 4 general election.

ElectoralVote.com (yep, still reading it) is a little more creative in their hope for Democratic hegemony:

The only way for the Democrats to get to 60 seats in the Senate now is for Franken to win and for Obama to appoint to his cabinet a Republican senator from a state with a Democratic governor, such as Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME). However, if Franken wins, the Democrats will have 59 seats, so every single Republican senator will be able to threaten Mitch McConnell with defecting on cloture votes unless McConnell does the senator’s bidding. If Coleman wins, McConnell will have a bit more breathing room. Nevertheless, cloture votes rarely go entirely along party lines and majority leader Harry Reid will be able to offer Republican senators various goodies to defect whereas McConnell has little to offer.

Still, with a 255-175 majority in the House, at least 58 Senators, and Obama in the White House, I think the Democrats will still have some sway over the direction the country takes over the next couple of years. If not, there’s always the so-called nuclear option, changing the rules of the Senate to prevent the filibuster. Republicans were throwing around the idea pretty freely when they were in charge. The difference is… we know how to pronounce it.

Regular readers of the blog will be familiar with my friend DeLisa, whether she’s posting a spirited comment, solving the toughest riddles, or even providing material, she’s been an indispensable member of the Shakespeare Teacher community since the very beginning.

But those of us who know her can attest that her contributions here only scratch the surface of what she could be offering to the hungry Internet. We have begged her to start her own blog. Finally, she has answered our wishes.

You can find the wit and wisdom of DeLisa on her new blog, appropriately titled DeLisa Online. Memorize it. Bookmark it. Subscribe to the feed.

It may very well become the second most intriguing blog on the Internet.

I attended my 20-year high school reunion on Saturday. It was a lot of fun to see what everyone’s up to now. It was also a bit strange, because we were only 18 when we graduated, so it really was half a lifetime ago that we all knew each other. We’re all different people now, almost strangers, yet we have a knowledge of each other that in some ways is far more intimate than the friends we make today.

I also saw my 9th-grade English teacher, the first teacher ever to assign me to read Shakespeare. Of course, I very much enjoyed letting him know what I’m up to now, and he seemed very pleased as well. It made me think of my first Shakespeare experience, reading The Tempest in his class. I didn’t really understand it, but I was determined that I was going to, and eventually I did.

The Tempest seems like kind of an odd choice to use to introduce students to Shakespeare for the first time, though I can’t really see anything wrong with it. He also had taught us the Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It, which might also have been a good first play. Usually when I’m working with 5th-graders, I’m introducing them to Shakespeare for the first time, and I generally go with Macbeth or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I recently did Cymbeline with an 8th-grade class, but they had already read Romeo and Juliet, another good choice.

Then there are other plays, like King Lear or Troilus and Cressida, that I don’t think are good choices for young children. I was once asked to teach Antony and Cleopatra to 6th-grade students, and it went well, but I think Julius Caesar might have been a more appropriate choice. I also worked with a teacher who, against my advice, wanted to teach Othello to his 8th-grade class. I was so wrong; that went really well. I thought the play was too mature for them, but those kids taught me a thing or two.

So the Question of the Week, if it’s not obvious by now, is this:

What play would you choose to introduce Shakespeare to a group of students for the first time?

Does your answer change with the grade level? What if an adult friend of yours who had never read Shakespeare asked for a recommendation? Do you go with one of the masterpieces, or a fun easy read? Is one genre better than another for a first-timer? Or do you go with something you’re passionate about, so your enthusiasm can be infectious?