I believe the posh word for it is “plenary”
Our history teacher, Mr Roberts, was a young gun who came into the school with the idea that we would learn better if we talked a subject through rather than him just standing at the front and telling us what happened so that we could just regurgitate it in the exam. At the end of the lesson he’d stand at the front and ask us to call out what we’d learnt which then went up on the blackboard. At the end of a fortnight on the Hundred Years War he was only able to get four things out of the class:

• Did not last one hundred years
• Was not one war but really several periods of fighting
• Has a very stupid name
• Was between England and France (this does NOT mean it was in the Channel Islands)

Knowing that we were taking the mick and insistent that we wouldn’t get the better of him, he decided to brainstorm the stupid name thing. As a class we came up with the following suggestions:

• Done to make history harder to learn
• “The war between England and France” not specific enough
• Started off as One Year War, then Two Year War, and so on, then they lost count
• Was given the name Hundred Years War when it started, name just kind of stuck
• Tactic used by the English to damage French morale
• Sounds catchy

It is a credit to the teaching profession that all these years later I cannot remember anything more about the two weeks we spent on the Hundred Years War than that final five minute session.
( GarbageFan didn't know what to have as a board sig on, Tue 3 Feb 2009, 22:43, Reply)