Entry #5: Card Strategy Lesson

 Before reading, "Counterpart strategies: Fine tuning language with language" by Kucer and Rhodes and using the Card Strategy Lesson in class, I had never heard of or experienced this type of brainstorming before. When I was younger in elementary school, one of the brainstorming strategies that we used was to create a tree or branch diagram. For example, we would think about a few topics that were of interest to us and put those in the center of the diagram. Then from there, we would write down on the branches different ways or directions that we could talk about our topic in. When I was in the second grade, we created a zoo in our classroom and each of us were told to choose an animal to research and to give that animal a background story for our zoo exhibit. I had a few animals in mind, so I put each of those in the middle of my tree diagram and started to branch off different directions I could take for each of these animals. From this brainstorming, I collected enough information about Lemurs and centered my whole project around that animal. From this type of brainstorming that we did all throughout second grade and had it carried out throughout the rest of my elementary schooling career, it differed from the Card Strategy Lesson because it was only cognitively thought from my thoughts other than gathering thoughts from my classmates. 

What I like about reading the card strategy and then using it in class is that I was able to brainstorm a handful of topics, write those down and come up with characteristics, in whatever order about that topic. In class, one of the categories that I chose to go with was tap dancing. I wrote down a lot of characteristics/ideas or pathways I could follow, in whichever order they came to mind. Then, having someone else look at my ideas and rearrange them in an order that made sense to them, made me think about how I thought about the topic in the first place. I thought to myself, why did I write down individual tap steps and why could my partner connect that to an individual dancer; instead of looking at those two as separate pieces, could I connect them in some way that I had not thought of before? I think this genuinely did help me by thinking about my own thinking and how I thought of those ideas previously and by having a fresh set of eyes look at my ideas, how I could morph my old thinking and possibly change it to a new idea. This then helped to generate more ideas for my first draft for my genre pieces project.