Teaching with a Pulse: Compassion, Chaos, and Rebuilding from the Inside Out
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2026
Pages: 174
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2026
Pages: 173
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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 intoeffective 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 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 intoeffective 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 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.