Non-clinical Observation Skils

As I made a stilly decision to eat very sour greek yoghurt for lunch yesterday afternoon, I ended up with a very sore tummy and a headache and fever. (The greek yoghurt was so sour, I couldn't really tell if it was all right)

And thus, here I am at home when I was supposed to go to work, with the feeling of having been punched in the stomach, browsing youtube videos before I get to some study.

This morning, I came across this fairly interesting video from a friend off youtube: ( I'm a web idiot and don't know how to do a proper embedded video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSGGLKx9w0

Have a quick watch so that you'll get whatever I say later on.

Having spent 2.5 years in uni doing Speech has taught me more about silent observations and picking out things from people as they speak (or behave). Well, I used to do it anyways even before I actually came to do speech, but now I can actually form more concrete conclusions about behaviours I observe rather than just say: oh... that guy talks like he has SPS (small-penis-syndrome) [Something my sister and I use to describe guys who talk big to make up for something else that lacks.]

Anyways, back to this little boy Brian, from watching a couple of his videos, I picked out a few things that I thought were interesting/stood out:

1) He glides consistantly on all his 'l's. Which, in layman's terms, basically means that all the 'l's in his words become 'y', i.e. 'like' becomes 'yike', 'election' becomes 'eyections' and so on, which actually should be a process that would've resolved at 6 years of age. It's not a huge problem with him, but it does affect his intelligibility quite a bit sometimes and you need to take a doubletake on what he's saying. Seeing that he really has the potential to become a public speaker in the future, I really suggest that he gets s Speech Therapist to help him resolve that!

2) He seems to have slight Aussie accent on a few of the words 'beans' and 'no', but it's a very transient and subtle thing (perhaps his parents or himself have had some formal education down under?)

3) Well to do family/ very educated parents: His dad bought him FIVE Moleskin notebooks. BIG A4 Moleskin notebooks. I think that says enough. And the fact that he's actually following the elections at this age says something about what his parents educate him about, which is excellent. I wish I had such awareness when I was 12, actually, I wish I had such awareness at this age.

Conclusion: I think he's a GEPer. For those of you who don't know, GEP stands for the Gifted Education Programme in Singapore where kids are picked out at the age of 10 or so to form special classes where they cover extensive grounds of content and have much more stumulating ways of teaching and are thus, labelled as being 'Gifted'.

(The irony of this is that, we actually have places in Singapore that run tuition classes that promise to get your kid into the 'Gifted Programme'. How can you teach a child to be gifted? Isn't being gifted a gift? (Now the word gift just looks and sounds weird)