Ok I have to go back today so am not feeling in the best of moods but I read this in the Educational Guardian yesterday and wondered whether you could spot the logical flaw?

Let's adopt the teaching methods of legendary language guru Michael Thomas, a new book pleads. There's a belief that languages either come naturally to a person or they don't. But to the late Michel Thomas, the "World's greatest language master", there was no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher.
It's a view that grates with prevailing educational opinion. These days, children's ability to learn is often blamed on a variety of learning disabilities. If teachers are bought into the equation it is usually by ministers claiming the workforce is the best trained it has ever been, or declaring that inadequate teachers must be fired.

Well Michel may be legendary, though in 24 years of teaching (Oh My God is it really that long?) I have never heard of him and he may have something relevant to say from beyond the grave but surely his view that "there are no such thing as a bad student only a bad teacher" chimes rather neatly with "inadequate teachers should be fired"?
Current educational orthodoxy does blame the teacher you just have to be sad enough to have read several recent OFSTED reports to know that, in my own school some challenging behaviour was explained quite neatly by stating directly that it was caused by the teaching being boring.
Strange though, because in the last few years there has been more top down led change in education than there ever has been and yet the opinion of most teachers is that discipline has got worse and worse. Could some of the 'good practises' imposed on us including the 'discipline strategy' have actually contributed to making things worse?
Now of course poor bad behaviours (oops Challenging behaviour - need to make sure I use the correct euphemism) is usually explained by those in charge by explaining that it is a society wide problem implying that somehow that means we can wash our hands of being involved in solving it or that you might think it's bad here but you should try elsewhere and then count your blessings an attitude I once described in a meeting as equivalent to having been burgled, rung the police only to have someone tell you " That's a shame sir but of Course this problem is far worse in Liverpool!"

Well anyway Michel may have some good ideas but perhaps it was just him, perhaps he was just an exceptional individual and that by copying him things may improve a bit but that would not mean that we could revolutionise teaching. It would be like me trying to copy the running action of the great 200m runner Michael Johnson - wonderfully effective for him - totally useless for the rest of us.

So wish me luck today, I have to find some way of building myself up for the year ahead and do not know how to.