We need a better plan.

Calculus is going quite well: today the full class did its first presentations (small groups: draw an arbitrary curve, and choose 5 points, equally spaced along the independent axis. Estimate the slope at each point, and explain your methods. 2 groups used tangent lines, and 3 used nearby points on the curve. I could definitely have gotten more out of the discussion of how similar the results are, in either case, and might even have used this as the time to discuss precision-- but there'll be plenty more opportunities for a discussion of precision-- I just have to decide when to do it, and why...)
Awesomely, yesterday's discussion of infinity ran over an hour, and was incredibly good. I made a good choice about 10 minutes in: there was a lot of chatter, talking over the designated speaker, and I tried to quiet it down a couple of times-- but then I realized that most if not all of that chatter was ABOUT the topic at hand. So, I gave them some time to talk internally, within their tables, about the concept (with the focus question: "What is the opposite of infinity?") Then we called everyone back together, and got the whole-class conversation started again. Good modification, I thought. I also took a couple of minutes at the end of class to talk to the students who didn't participate as fully, to warn some that I was going to be drawing them in next time, and to apologize to others for not getting to them. Note to self: follow up on this in the next discussion.
It was also a first attempt at video taping. Sound quality may be okay-- I'll need to rip it into my Mac, and see from there. I wasn't able to get the whole room at once, though I might be able to do so by mounting the camera above the TV. Most likely, I'll need a videographer, though.
As I'm looking over the video, it occurs to me that I still want to be more careful about my questioning strategy, and particularly about how I communicate where I'm going with things. There was an example where I wanted to use photons as an example of quantized (not divisible to infinitely small units), but nobody seemed confident in recalling what that word meant-- it was appropriate to abandon that one, but I should probably have said, "Okay, since you guys don't know that one, I'll scrap that example-- let me go with this, instead..."

My junior level classes, though, are starting to really, really suck. Quadratic equations, I think, turns out to be one of those subjects that just isn't useful, and doesn't belong in my curriculum. So, I really need to develop a better plan for getting to the big ideas (graphing non-linear functions and manipulating polynomials). I'd love to get into some project-oriented stuff (which Fireworks doesn't really do much of)-- maybe tracing strings on chart paper, and finding the equation to fit them-- or at least using it to create points. Possibly an application: stringing wires over a road, so that they hang at a certain height. We could build a physical model, and measure heights, and apply them to equations. Done in Lego?

Alternatively, it may be time to dump quadratics, and focus instead on polynomials in general (how to add, subtract, multiply and divide...)

Perhaps tomorrow I'll do that: some Key to Algebra stuff, focusing on basic operations with polynomials, and then next week get into the project.