I just wrapped up a fairly intensive week of calculus training. AP calculus training, to be more specific. (I'm teaching one section of AP calc at my new school this year, in addition to my usual 9th grade physics.) And it was really, really fun. I think I need to find more content-based PD or courses to take, because it is crazy fun to do actual problems among other people who also like math.
The best part of calculus for me, of course, is the part that connects with physics. There are a fair number of problems about position, velocity, and acceleration, or sometimes Newton's law of cooling, or other physics-related ideas like average rate of change. I am feeling a lot more confident about teaching calc this year for a lot of reasons - partly because my memory has been refreshed on a lot of the basics, but also because I am totally digging the connections between calc and physics. And I can't wait to tell my freshmen that they are doing AP calculus problems, when we do graph matching with position and velocity.
Also, I would like to officially state that I love related rate problems.
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