I first became acquainted with Nathan Miller through a blog I wrote about a month ago: "If Doctors Were Treated Like Teachers." Nathan teaches English and drama at a high school in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota and wrote me asking if I would be interested in reading his book, Teaching in Circles: My Journeys in Teaching High School (Kaplan Publishing, 2009).
I read his book with considerable interest, not only because it was well-written and gave details about Nathan's teaching experiences over the last 13 years, but because of his brutal honesty about what he felt were his failures to "reach" his students as well as his successes. Near the beginning of the book he admits: "I am highly suspicious of anyone who claims to have a clue of what's going on in America's schools today... Complexity doesn't sell, though," he adds, putting his finger concisely on one of the fundamental problems Americans will not easily face: there is no simple answer to the problems of educating a citizenry that seems to be remarkably resistant to being educated.
The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-shatzky/educating-for-democracya-_1_b_792080.html)