"When we learn how to teach, we must also consider what it will feel like to teach."
Books by Diane Manser
I Didn’t Sign Up For This: One Classroom Teacher’s Journey Through Emotional Fatigue to Personal Empowerment
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is an honest narrative, filled with real-life teaching stories, pain points, feel good moments, and deep introspective learning that validate any teacher who has questioned themselves and the profession.
You will absolutely find yourself and what it feels like to be a teacher in this book.
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The book shares personal experiences journeying through self-doubt and fatigue to emboldened empowerment that will help all teachers as they navigate their own fulfilling and challenging professions that are above anything else ... emotional.
Teaching is Emotional: Key quotes to get you thinking about the emotions of teaching (The Journal)
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Teaching—more than is recognized—is an emotional profession that will challenge us in ways we may never have expected. Whether you’re a new teacher or a seasoned educator, you know that teaching has its way of lifting us up with moments of joy and fulfillment while also bringing moments of overwhelm and self-doubt. Teaching can demand more than it gives, asking us to show up as educators, mentors, advocates, cheerleaders, and counselors. Journeying through this profession, we learn that our teaching day can stay with us long after the day has ended, and that sometimes it can test our patience, our resilience, and our sense of purpose. While we experience these feelings, we also trust that we are doing something special and unique as we serve others and as we give the best we can.​
THIS Is What I Signed Up For: A Guide For Teachers To Foster Empowerment, Build Resilience, and Embrace Who They Are
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is a reflective, interactive resource designed to help aspiring, new, and current educators gain intrapersonal awareness, understand their influence on their classroom culture, align personal values with classroom goals, manage stress to avoid burnout, and celebrate the resilience of confident educators.
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COMING SPRING 2025!!!
Seeking validation? Want to discuss book 1 together?
Visit the Book Study page to experience a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of book 1, providing readers reflective questions, quotes for consideration, and supplemental resources—all intended to encourage readers to reflect on their own teaching journey and the emotional impacts they may experience, as well as their methods toward resiliency and empowerment.
Want to facilitate a book club with colleagues or friends? Let's connect! Diane would love to join you!
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ACT 48 BOOK CLUB | EARN ACT 48 HOURS WHILE YOU READ AND DISCUSS!
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​Join Diane and other amazing teachers as we engage in meaningful conversation about the stresses we experience as teachers, and as we break through the stress with empowerment and resiliency strategies. You are not alone. There is a whole community eager to open space for this conversation. Anyone can join this book club that meets for 6 Thursday evenings on Zoom! If you also happen to be a teacher in PA, you will earn ACT 48 credit hours!
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BOOK CLUB SESSION #2 STARTS JANUARY 23RD, 2025. SPACE IS LIMITED. REGISTER TODAY!
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Session #2 is already in the swing. Stay tuned for our next ACT 48 Book Club Opportunity!
Join the mailing list to be the first to know!
Book praise by Rob Bell, New York Times Best-Selling Author, International Speaker, and Spiritual Teacher
“When I met Diane in the summer of 2023, she was telling a group of us what it’s like to be a teacher—how you start the school year strong in September, but then it’s very easy to find yourself wearing down over the coming weeks and months as a teacher’s interactions with her students can take a devastating emotional toll.
It was fascinating to hear her describe this phenomenon and how teachers aren’t taught what to do about it. I don’t know what it’s like to be a teacher, but as I looked around the group while Diane was talking, I could see everybody was as compelled as I was by her energy and insight and joy and honesty and fierceness.
That word FIERCENESS. Is that actually a word? Diane would know.
FIERCENESS is important here because she wasn’t complaining, she was explaining what she had learned about how to deal with these very real emotional challenges and how she wanted every teacher everywhere to discover what she’s learned. Which, of course, is why you’re holding this book in your hands.
It’s all here—coffee and tornadoes and doormats and AI and several decades of Diane’s wisdom on how to be a teacher in such a way that you find yourself saying ‘THIS IS WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR.’”
“Not only is Diane Manser a beautiful and brilliant writer, but her gut-honest transparency and raw vulnerability is a freaking gift. By bringing to light the emotional struggles and exhaustion teachers face—and doing it with humor, joy, and love—she’s literally going to change lives. Her words offer comfort and encouragement to disillusioned, burned-out teachers and give them permission to be honest about their challenges and to ask for what they need. She is so unbelievably brave—not because she’s fearless, but because she feels the fear and does hard things (like writing this book) anyway. Chapter after chapter, this book absolutely blew me away. I hope it finds its way into the hands of teachers everywhere.”
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—Marla Taviano, author of Whole: Poems on Reclaiming
the Pieces of Ourselves and Creating Something New as
well as other poetry masterpieces and amazing books
