The second half of this series turns the lens around. If you teach while neurodivergent, the same variability we design for in students is running the class. Working memory, time perception, and attention under interruption are exactly the things live teaching demands, and exactly the things many of us cannot rely on in the moment. The answer is not to try harder. It is to stop asking your working memory to do a job that paper does better.
I keep one cue sheet for every class meeting. One page, large print, four things on it.
The purpose: one line stating what today is for. When a tangent or a technical failure knocks me off course, that line is how I find the path back.
The essential activity: the single thing that must happen for the class to count. If the projector dies and half the room is late, this is what we still do. Everything else on the sheet is optional by comparison, which means I can drop it without guilt when the hour goes sideways.
The checkpoint: a moment, usually two-thirds of the way in, where I stop and check whether the room has the idea. A quick question, a show of hands, a one-line answer in the chat. It is written on the sheet because otherwise I forget to do it and discover at the exam that nobody had the idea.
The closing prompt: the sentence I end on. Ending is a transition, and transitions are where I lose the thread. Having the last sentence written means the class ends on purpose rather than trailing off when the clock runs out.
Two more tools live next to the sheet. A visible timer, on the desk or the second screen, because my sense of elapsed time in front of a room is unreliable in both directions. And a parking lot: a corner of the whiteboard or a sticky note where tangents go. When a great question pulls me toward something three weeks ahead, I write it in the lot instead of following it, and I say so out loud. Students see that their question mattered, and I keep the sequence.
The community college version of this problem is scale. Five sections, three preps, two campuses, rooms that change without warning. A cue sheet travels. It works in a room with a whiteboard and a room without one. It works on a day when I slept four hours. And because it is a single page, it takes ten minutes to write, which is the only reason it exists.
The general principle: anything you have to hold in your head during class is a thing that can fall out of your head during class. Put it on paper and let your attention go where it is actually needed, which is the students.
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