Let me walk you through my usual morning routine. My "normal" work hours are 0830-1630 with the earliest class beginning at 0900. I typically arrive at school around 0815 and begin sweating furiously. The heat isn't so bad but the humidity in the school is very high and I'm wearing a shirt + tie.
First things first: I climb 4 flights of stairs, enter my classroom, and turn on the AC and computer. I want to have the sweating under control by class time, so I like to give the AC 30+ minutes to knock the humidity down. I turn on the computer because it takes like 25 minutes from power on for it to reach functionality.
Next I dip into my super-secret stash of extra-soft, absorbent toilet paper (left behind by previous teacher for who knows why). I use this to mop some of the sweat off my face and arms.
Then we're off to my office space, where I deposit my belongings, turn on my other computer and drink some water. The AC is not turned on here until 0830 if I'm lucky, so I leave quickly, bound for the staff lavatory where I mop some more sweat with TP. (Motion speeds the drying process.)
I was going through this sweat-control routine today when I was informed of a sudden, drastic change in my schedule. I was already at work early because I had to teach a class that was rescheduled due to last week's typhoon. My school likes to reschedule these classes for as early in the morning as possible, meaning I started teaching today at 0830 instead of 0900.
When I went to my office after turning on my classroom's AC, I was informed that my schedule today had been changed: I would now be teaching all the day's classes back-to-back, in one big chunk broken only by 45 minutes of lunch. This meant 5 straight hours in the classroom. The other teachers considered it grueling and my supervisor made me drink both lemonade (for calories) and coffee because she thought I would collapse. Why can't this school figure out its own schedule?
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