Teaching Blahbityblah Post

I like to check out teacher blogs and resources for EFL teachers. So much of what I do is completely unrelated to the resources that I read. I've come to the conclusion that I'm reading them for personal development, but I need to spend a limited time on EFL specific blogs and sites. I'll benefit more from keeping up with interesting topics in general. Lately I've been looking at research information for entomophagy, which is eating insects. I'm getting disappointed with what's available on the web, and it looks like I'll need to buy a real book which aren't easy to come by here in the Phils, but I digress.

The teacher blogs that I see are geared toward large groups and mostly small children. My classes are a completely different dynamic, so discussions I see online pertaining to EFL just aren't interesting and relevant to what I do. I saw one interesting post today about the English Only Rule in the classroom. As I read it, I mentally cheered the author for his points, but realized once again as I often do, that I'm in no position to spout a theory and viewpoints to the blogosphere because my job is different. I'm sure there are some teachers out there somewhere who do exactly what I do, but they're not on eslcafe, or the zillions of EFL ESL resources I've been looking through.

As far as English Only in the classroom, that's nuts. Those little dictionaries they use are 'magic boxes' to me. If they don't know a word I'm using, they plug it into the magic box and wallah. Discussion continues. They've learned a new word in an interesting meaningful context, which is exactly how new words are supposed to be learned. I'm supposed to feel torn or ambiguous about this? Bite me.

Now I gather from the net that in most of the real world, teachers aren't having discussions about food production as it relates to insect eating, or fair trade coffee and Starbucks prices in Korea, or Japanese comic books with 8 students or less.