Teaching costs energy in a way that is hard to explain to people who have not done it. For an hour and a quarter you are performing, monitoring thirty faces, making a hundred small decisions, and, if you are neurodivergent, very likely masking: suppressing stims, forcing eye contact, filtering sensory noise, holding a script. Then you do it again in the next room. By Thursday afternoon the account is empty, and Friday’s grading comes out of overdraft.
The community college load makes this acute. Five sections is a normal assignment. Adjuncts teach at two or three colleges, driving between them. There is no sabbatical and often no office door to close. Protecting usable energy is not indulgence. It is what determines whether the students in week fourteen get the same instructor the students in week two got.
Three practices have kept me solvent.
Build a quiet transition around teaching. Ten minutes before class, no email, no hallway conversation, just the cue sheet and the room. Ten minutes after, the same. I sit in the empty classroom or the car and let the performance drain off before I pick up the next thing. Back-to-back sections make this hard, which is why I ask for gaps when schedules are made, a topic for the next post. Where I cannot get a gap, I take the walk between buildings slowly and on purpose.
Reuse everything that can be reused. Instructions follow the same template every week, so I am filling in blanks rather than composing. Feedback comes from a comment bank of the things I say most often, personalized with a sentence rather than written from scratch each time. Announcements have a skeleton. None of this makes the teaching generic. It moves the effort from formatting, which nobody benefits from, to the part where I actually respond to a student’s work.
Keep a simpler version of every lesson ready. I call it the floor: the smallest class that still meets the day’s objective. It is usually the essential activity from the cue sheet, one worked example, and a checkpoint, with the discussion and the extension exercise cut. On a day when I slept badly, or the migraine is coming, or the previous section left me hollow, I teach the floor and the students still learn the thing. They do not know it was the floor. What they would notice is an instructor running on fumes, trying to deliver the full version and failing at it.
The pattern here is the same one we use for students. Reduce competing demands, make the sequence external, offer a workable option for a low-capacity moment. We are not exempt from the design principles we apply to the room. If anything, the person who has to show up sixteen weeks in a row needs them most.
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