How about spending some time on jigs and creative problem solving on the table saw?

That is a good idea

I will add something in that vein

Thank you

Some suggestions:

- different commonly used glues (and the "next-day surprise" you get with polyurethane glues) ;)

- maybe cover common mistakes for each piece of equipment and their consequences, like wrong blade choice/tear-out... sanding against the grain... router burn....

some places you might find some ideas:

http://www.toolcrib.com/blog/2008/09/10/25-fixes-for-common-woodworking-...

http://www.canadianhomeworkshop.com/index.php?ci_id=2524&la_id=1

- talk about dimensional stability of various woods (and designing pieces relative to certain grain patterns)

BTW, Matt, I'm working on a blade guide for the bandsaw. I just got a good selection of some additional blades. The guide includes a wall chart and a diagram that should help someone choose a blade based on their project. You could easily incorporate that into a class.

I'm the kind of person who would be the market for this class. Here are some things I think people at my level would be interested in.

1.) On top of discussing properties of woods, it would be great if you could cover sources, too. For instance, locally which lumberyards are friendly toward selling you 20 board feet and which ones really don't easily handle sales that small. Might be good to cover how to calculate board feet, too.

2.) It would be good to hear some about how you'd go about breaking projects into sub projects: if you're going to build a dining table, say, and know you're really only going to be able to work on it on Saturday afternoons between now and Thanksgiving, how would you do it? Would you build the table top some warm dry weekend or leave it until you had the legs ready to hold it up? Would you build one leg a weekend or make forward progress on all four legs over several weekends? (That's a random example, I'm not thinking about building a dining table.)

3.) How to read plans, and how to modify plans, how to draw plans yourself.

4.) What are each of the saws capable of? After the SBU and Jon's box class I've got a good sense of the obvious uses of the table saw, chop saw, and band saw, but I also know if you're clever and thoughtful about it, the table saw and band saw are really versatile. It would be good to take a project with some complex cutting problems in it and ask "how can you do this just on the band saw?" and then "how can you do this just on the table saw?"

That all seems like it goes together. I'd also like to learn something about mortice and tenon construction, but I think that'd be a whole project-based class of it's own
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Separately from all that, it would be cool to have an ongoing scheduled workshop that did something like making simple wooden toys for Toys for Tots like the Triangle Woodworkers Association does. If I spent a few supervised weekends cutting out, chamfering, and drilling wheeled ducks or whatever, I'd get more comfortable and confident with the saws, drill press, and router table pretty quick.
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Thanks for asking. Having a new early-level course is going to be terrific.