Teaching with a Pulse: Compassion, Chaos, and Rebuilding from the Inside Out

Author(s)
Lena Garrison
Edition
1
Copyright
2026
Pages
174
Book Type
Retail

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Help Me Choose

Paperback Book

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ISBN: 9798319744371
Details: 
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Teaching with a Pulse: Compassion, Chaos, and Rebuilding A&P from the Inside Out is not your typical teaching manual. It’s a candid, humorous, and deeply human memoir of transformation—both personal and pedagogical. Through a braided narrative arcs, the book traces the journey from accidental teaching and chaotic survival, through dismantling inherited systems, to personal restoration and the compassionate redesign of an Anatomy & Physiology course that retains the rigor needed to grow students into effective health care professionals in today’s world. 

This book invites educators to unlearn the rigid “Thou Musts” of science teaching and embrace vulnerability, humor, and humanity. It’s about surviving the emotional CrossFit of A&P, rebuilding yourself alongside your curriculum, and creating a classroom where compassion is not a contaminant of rigor, but a catalyst for real learning. With anecdotes, practical tips, and reflection prompts, readers are guided to become coconspirators in a movement toward sustainable, joyful, and effective teaching.

Whether you’re a seasoned instructor or a newcomer handed a textbook and a syllabus, this book will make you laugh, reflect, and rethink what it means to teach with rigor tempered by heart. It’s a story of chaos, rebuilding, and the joy that emerges when you stop trying to be the professor you inherited—and start becoming the teacher your students need.

Chapter 1: So You’ve Decided to Teach … or Accidentally Ended Up Here

Chapter 2: The Early Years: Creativity and Chaos 

Chapter 3: Falling Back on What I Inherited 

Chapter 4: The Weight of Tradition 

Chapter 5: Breaking the Mold: First Steps Toward Change 

Chapter 6: Backward Design, Forward Burn 

Chapter 7: When Learning Hurts: The Emotional Toll on Students 

Chapter 8: The Emotional Cost of Teaching 

Chapter 9: When Teaching Costs More Than You Have 

Intermission: The Comedy of Survival 

Chapter 10: Restoration: Rebuilding Yourself to Rebuild Your Teaching

Chapter 11: Reimagining Compassion: Intentionally Teaching With Humanity 

Chapter 12: Modeling Authenticity by Showing Up as Human 

Chapter 13: Assessment With Heart: Reimagining What Counts 

Chapter 14: Reimagining the A&P 2 Lab 

Chapter 15: Putting It All Together and Stepping Forward 

Lena Garrison

Lena Garrison is a biologist, educator, and storyteller whose work lives at the intersection of science, memory, and the human heart. Trained in biological anthropology and evolutionary anatomy, she earned her doctorate studying how bodies change across lineages and has spent more than thirty years teaching college biology and anatomy and physiology. In the classroom, she blends evolution and physiology with narrative, humor, and deep attention to the lived experiences of her students—building spaces that are both demanding and profoundly human.

As a writer, Lena explores the inner terrains that science can’t quantify: grief and resilience, identity and burnout, the emotional labor of teaching, and the quiet ways people learn to mend what breaks. Her poetry and nonfiction draw on the natural world, the architecture of childhood, and the fault lines that shape a life, pairing emotional honesty with a biologist’s eye for pattern and detail.

Guided by curious restlessness—and the creative spark of ADHD—she journals, kayaks, bird watches with her wife, experiments with watercolor, and follows whatever new craft calls her next. Across genres, her work invites readers into spaces of reflection and connection, where humor and humanity matter, stories can heal, and even the smallest glimmer of warmth can become a doorway to light.

Teaching with a Pulse: Compassion, Chaos, and Rebuilding A&P from the Inside Out is not your typical teaching manual. It’s a candid, humorous, and deeply human memoir of transformation—both personal and pedagogical. Through a braided narrative arcs, the book traces the journey from accidental teaching and chaotic survival, through dismantling inherited systems, to personal restoration and the compassionate redesign of an Anatomy & Physiology course that retains the rigor needed to grow students into effective health care professionals in today’s world. 

This book invites educators to unlearn the rigid “Thou Musts” of science teaching and embrace vulnerability, humor, and humanity. It’s about surviving the emotional CrossFit of A&P, rebuilding yourself alongside your curriculum, and creating a classroom where compassion is not a contaminant of rigor, but a catalyst for real learning. With anecdotes, practical tips, and reflection prompts, readers are guided to become coconspirators in a movement toward sustainable, joyful, and effective teaching.

Whether you’re a seasoned instructor or a newcomer handed a textbook and a syllabus, this book will make you laugh, reflect, and rethink what it means to teach with rigor tempered by heart. It’s a story of chaos, rebuilding, and the joy that emerges when you stop trying to be the professor you inherited—and start becoming the teacher your students need.

Chapter 1: So You’ve Decided to Teach … or Accidentally Ended Up Here

Chapter 2: The Early Years: Creativity and Chaos 

Chapter 3: Falling Back on What I Inherited 

Chapter 4: The Weight of Tradition 

Chapter 5: Breaking the Mold: First Steps Toward Change 

Chapter 6: Backward Design, Forward Burn 

Chapter 7: When Learning Hurts: The Emotional Toll on Students 

Chapter 8: The Emotional Cost of Teaching 

Chapter 9: When Teaching Costs More Than You Have 

Intermission: The Comedy of Survival 

Chapter 10: Restoration: Rebuilding Yourself to Rebuild Your Teaching

Chapter 11: Reimagining Compassion: Intentionally Teaching With Humanity 

Chapter 12: Modeling Authenticity by Showing Up as Human 

Chapter 13: Assessment With Heart: Reimagining What Counts 

Chapter 14: Reimagining the A&P 2 Lab 

Chapter 15: Putting It All Together and Stepping Forward 

Lena Garrison

Lena Garrison is a biologist, educator, and storyteller whose work lives at the intersection of science, memory, and the human heart. Trained in biological anthropology and evolutionary anatomy, she earned her doctorate studying how bodies change across lineages and has spent more than thirty years teaching college biology and anatomy and physiology. In the classroom, she blends evolution and physiology with narrative, humor, and deep attention to the lived experiences of her students—building spaces that are both demanding and profoundly human.

As a writer, Lena explores the inner terrains that science can’t quantify: grief and resilience, identity and burnout, the emotional labor of teaching, and the quiet ways people learn to mend what breaks. Her poetry and nonfiction draw on the natural world, the architecture of childhood, and the fault lines that shape a life, pairing emotional honesty with a biologist’s eye for pattern and detail.

Guided by curious restlessness—and the creative spark of ADHD—she journals, kayaks, bird watches with her wife, experiments with watercolor, and follows whatever new craft calls her next. Across genres, her work invites readers into spaces of reflection and connection, where humor and humanity matter, stories can heal, and even the smallest glimmer of warmth can become a doorway to light.

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