Dr J's Emporium of Musical Education

Last weekend I attempted to make ice cream for a book club meet I was hosting. The recipe I was following was from Nigella Lawson and was one that I have successfully made countless times before. For some reason this time it didn’t work with the cream splitting, leaving me with home-made butter and whey that had a distinctly minty orange flavour. Staring failure in the face I made a decision just see what would happen if I froze the whey and use the butter in some other recipes.  This led me to make some orange and mint flavoured scones , orange and mint frozen whey and cartons full of orange and mint caramel popcorn for a friend’s barbecue…. Joshua Morris in a recent tes.com article comments on how we have perhaps become too concerned with success and do not allow our students the option of failing. With the now obsessive culture of school, teacher and student success we are at the stage where everybody is scared to get things wrong. I have recently seen this myself at...

It is Thursday evening (start of the weekend in the Middle East) and I find myself sat here at a loss.  Tomorrow should be the 3rd Dukhan Triathlon with the longest event, in which I intended to participate, being an olympic distance race (1500m sea swim, 40km bike and a 10km run).  Over the past six months myself and a few colleagues have been training up to 5 times a week, with blood, lots of sweat, and a few tears along the way, and working up through the previous super-sprint and sprint distance races in the aim of taking part in this 'biggie'.  But then the weather had other ideas..... Screenshot of Windguru.com - 6.6mm is a LOT of water! Now, although not a preference, I do not mind swimming in choppy water or running and cycling in wet/windy weather, but the race has had to be postponed due to the accompanying thundery weather.  The event will now take place in May but, due to the heat at that time of year will only be a sprint distance race (750m ...