Brain Dump

Brain dump. We all do it in one form or another, whether reciting a telephone number someone has given us until we can write it down, or talking to a classmate about the last test he took and what was on it. In our English classes we try to do it almost everyday. The definition of brain dump from Wikipedia is "the transfer of a large quantity of information from one person to another or to a piece of paper". What we do in English classes is get students to talk about words they have come across in their other lessons in order to understand the meaning. Most of the time it's as simple as a student giving the teacher a word which is written on the board, followed by a brief explanation, but sometimes when we are all in a creative mood, it can lead to further things, like a brief skit or presentation or even a show and tell....or if we're all lucky an entire class period spent on understanding, talking, discussing, arguing over the meaning of ONE word! The point is to get students active in exploring vocabulary, especially those words they come in contact with during their classes.

The new laptops students have come with a handy application, a dictionary, which makes it really easy to look up the meaning of words. No more thumbing through the pages of the dictionaries we had in class, although, I'm happy to say I still see some students using them. Sometimes the meanings in the dictionaries are as confusing as the words themselves so whenever you run across a word you don't know that you want to know, write it down and bring it to class so we can talk about it. We will discuss it until you understand it and when we finish, hopefully our white board won't look as messy as the one pictured above. See you in class!