I don’t want to take attention away from Any high school teachers out there? Especially math teachers. - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board , which so far has been an extremely interesting thread, but I was hoping to ask language teachers about their experiences in K-12. I’ve taught several languages at the university level, both undergraduate courses and several graduate seminars, but we’re allowed to be mean, demanding, and unreasonable. (Heck, when my advisor helped me design the curriculum for my graduate seminar, he all but encouraged me to make things as demanding as possible.)
Anyway, I’ve been considering taking a job teaching Japanese at a local high school, but I’d love to hear if language teachers that teach any grade have interesting or relevant (to a beginner) anecdotes.
Thus far, I’ve gathered that repetition is extremely important. This probably means that I should plan on scheduling a lot of practice time in-class, since I have to assume that between some and all of the students won’t practice or review things outside of class.
Other than that, though, I’m kind of stuck-- I know high school language courses are an entirely different beast from university language courses, but I can’t figure out what the distinctions are.