Crying, Learning, and Laughing: by Tamika M. Murray

Crying, Learning, and Laughing: Why Students Visit the Teen Center by Tamika M. Murray

Release: September 1st 2020
Format: Ebook
Publisher: Celestial Publishing LLC
Source: Pump up Your Book
Find it at: Amazon, Kindle,B&N

The struggle is real, but the help is sincere for adolescent students in Crying, Learning, and Laughing: Why Students Visit the Teen Center. The author recounts the stressful, but the often fun position as a case manager in a Teen Center. Students’ daily interactions. Set in a School-Based Youth Services Program add color to the murky topics of teen dating violence, child abuse, and mental health issues. The unexpected crises don’t hinder the adolescents’ high energy, but it brings insight for the curious reader. Interesting and helpful, Crying, Learning, and Laughing explore the often chaotic life of teens and how social workers in schools shine a light during dark times.

About the Author:

Tamika M. Murray, better known as Mika, was born in the urban, seaside town of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Also, Mika is a certified social worker, owner of Celestial Publishing LLC, freelance writer and soon to be author. She graduated from Stockton University with a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and a Bachelor of Science in Social Work. Since then, her writing has appeared in over 50 online publications through ghostwriting. Mika’s helped over 200 children and adolescents during her career as an Adjunct English Instructor and Case Manager.
She plans to raise awareness about School-Based Youth Services Programs (Teen Centers) and why they are a necessity in all schools through the release of her book Crying, Learning, and Laughing: Why Students Visit the Teen Center, releasing on September 1, 2020.
She currently resides in Southern, New Jersey, with her boyfriend and three rambunctious kitties

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Crying, Learning, and Laughing: Review

This book is very useful and nicely written to highlight the various issues that teens face from the author’s experience as a case manager at a Teen Center. The book very articulately provides awareness to help a teenager overcome their issues.

The author organized the book in a wonderful manner. It The book covers a variety of topics for awareness like Mental Health, Teen Pregnancy, STDs, Child Abuse to college admissions. Each of these issues is categorized into the causes, details, and ways to prevent them. Moreover, the author also provides useful resources on where you can go for more information. I found the topic of bullying particularly fascinating, as the author gives details and examples, and how to prevent it.

However, it would have been nice if the author included a few success stories or statistics from the students who followed the technique successfully. To expand, there are some personal experiences that the author provides with the students which is very interesting. However, some of them did not come across like the students took it seriously. While this showed the current process in a realistic manner (where it is not effective at times), it would have been nice to have more success stories from the students perspective.

Apart from that, this was very informative. Overall, I recommend this to anyone that knows a teenager facing difficulty.