Thanks flarepilot -- I think the reason for my touch and gos not doing so well was because of a subconsious fear I'll use up the whole run way so I had a habit of trying to bring her to touch-down too soon.
I've been making some good landings for the past while now so I'm about ready to go solo --- everything seems to have come together.
In the past my landings were a mess and I always did something wrong. Maybe to help out anyone who has had all sorts of issues like me I'll post up a few things that seemed to fix my issues. Me and the original poster probabaly have certain things in our heads which were not solved by instructors saying things like to look down the runway, explaining how its like slow flight or chanting to hold off ect.)
I hope the following might be helpful for some people having similar issues:
1) Think of the flare as a three step procedure: The round-out to stop the descent, then the level-off to bleed off the excess energy then the final "flare". One of the problems I had was thinking it was all a singular movement and I would go from descent attitude to nose up which caused ballooning, rising then stalling then dropping to the runway, ect.
2) Go to the airport and watch the C172s approach. I noticed that the nose angle was only slightly pointed downwards and the round-out was fairly gentle and only took a little bit of back-pressure to lift the nose a few degrees to level attitude.
3) I read some good stuff on "Stick and Rudder" about how it says people's distance judgement is crap and pilots use angles and "perspective". It didn't really help me right away. I did try another exercise which helped where someone suggested squattng up and down and looking at a table top or bookshelf and judging angles...then things started to click together.
4) I found by looking at the end of the runway a bit before crossing the threshold helps. Too often I would get fixated at the numbers/aiming point, pull back then look at the end of the runway...at which point find the nose above the horizon and rising again. I find it helps to look at the end of the runway (picking a point like the numbers at the opposite end)even before the round-out. Picking a spot at the opposite end of the run way helped me think of it as a pivot point or some angle thing which seemed to kick off some kind of trigonometry thing in my head...as the angle gets less and less the distance to the ground is getting smaller until I just seemed to mysteriously know when to round out.
5) The next thing was to get used to that sliding feeling you get when in ground effect and to not get scared an pull up ect. I taught my self to appreciate that feeling as it means I'm about the right distance off the ground. It also means I'm at that point where I should be looking for the "site picture" you hear instructors talk about.
Some other things I did which might help but unsure of is:
a) stop watching videos of aircraft landings other than what you currently fly. Somehow this got into my head a C172 lands as fast as a jet and with high nose up attitudes.
b) Pretend your hand is an airpane and land it on the table top with point #3 above emphasizing the roundout and flying level seemed to help me get a kinesthetic "feel" for the landing process. I know this sounds wierd but I think it helped me.
We dont have much wind here but I guess the next step is to try some of those nasty crosswinds