Away from home away from home

Get my title??

It's all right if you don't, haha, it's semi-nonsense anyways.

I'm sitting in the nice Gatton library blogging because I have the excuse of not bringing more work to complete. Actually, that's a complete shitty excuse, I've yet to actually complete what I've set out to do, it's just that I'm experiencing that bout of un-drivenness, or, being in Neutral. (Or in my case, I might just be going in reverse).

I feel like the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, just that I'm half as verbally fluent and not quite 1/20th as madly ingenius as he is in the literary sense. Don't you think Lewis Carroll is amazing? If you think about it, the stuff that's in Through the Looking Glass, Alice in Wonderland and whatever other stuff written is so linguistically aware and smart that it makes me, as an undergraduate, feel like a kindergarten kid knowing what wonders the mind is able to work (If you were ever so blessed to have one)

I've been workign with Dyslexic children in clinic this semester, and boy has it been eye-opening. Well, not as eye-opening as I would like it to be (considering that this is only my second week working with them), but I was rather surprised with the emphasis placed here in Australia how much the responsibility is placed on the Speech Therapist to get these children working to their maximum potential. Whereas back home, these children are either

1) Called stupid and left to lag and be punished all their lives
2) Politically-correctly called 'Normal' and placed in either EM3, and then Normal Technical or Academic
3) Shoved into Learning Support Programs which ironically, fail to support but instead condemn the children further as they lag even more,
4) Thrown to special education classes which might actually prove to help (sometimes)
5) If they're lucky/rich enough, mummy and daddy can send them to Australia where they can receive the support/encouragement they need.

I'm not saying that it's a haven here, nor am I saying that Singapore completely slaughters children with dysexia, it is the unawareness that kills the opportunity and potential that resides in these children. (LKY should know) I have no idea how he mad eit through school, my guess is that he was mildly dyslexic.

Even in Australia, they can't emphasize how much the education system still fails to recognise the problems faced by the children, and they too have shoved teacher aide after teacher aide to help but to no avail.

And that's not even the tip of the iceberg! What about indigenous children who have a much much higher probability of experiencing literacy problems solely based on cultural differences or because of where they stay? We might say that in Singapore you see educational gaps between certain racial groups, but here, it's even worse.

But.. if you look at it in a 'WHO' kind of way, where they look at things like dyslexia or disabilities not from the point of an impairment, but from the view of how these things affect their actual functioning in life, then it might be a different story all together. If someone can't read, but is a successful dairy farmer or whatnot and is earnign shit loads, what is to say that that dyslexia was a problem?

Ok this is a boring post.

I'm just getting os overhelmed with organising and filing what I've been studying, that when I went to sleep a couple of nights back, I was having dreams about travelling up the neural pathways and reaching the different orders of neurons in the cerebral cortex, hypothalamus and midbrain (or something like that), which is freaking twisted!! Garh I woke up feeling such a hatred for Neuroanatomy for invading my dream land where I was supposed to be playing with cotton candy, ponies, fairy wings, giant jello, chocolate cake with mega sludgy icing and Hugh Jackman. uhh.. oops maybe not the last one, heh heh

I WANT TO DREAM LIKE A CHILD AGAIN.

POny pony poNY!! :D:D