A companion to the main ADHD article, written for professors and higher-education professionals.
You're three lectures deep into a rough week, your own executive function is fraying, and you watch a normally sharp student freeze mid presentation, unable to finish a sentence they clearly know. Two flares, one room.
What this actually is
A flare day is a spike in ADHD or autistic symptoms, sensory overload, executive shutdown, emotional flooding, brain fog, that has real causes even when they aren't obvious in the moment. It is a readout of nervous system load, not a verdict on competence or effort.
How it shows up
In you: the week your grading backlog feels unmanageable even though the pile is the same size as always, the day faculty meeting small talk feels physically unbearable, the lecture where you lose your thread mid sentence in front of eighty students and have to fake your way back. Academia calls this a bad day, chalks it up to stress, and moves on without ever naming the actual mechanism underneath it.
In your students: the one who nails cold calls all semester and then goes completely blank during a graded presentation, the one who submits brilliant work some weeks and nothing at all other weeks. Reading this as inconsistent effort or a discipline problem misses what's actually happening in front of you. It's a variable capacity system running the work, not a variable character running it.
What actually helps
Build one low stakes flexibility mechanism into every assignment: a resubmission window, an alternate format option, an "email me before the deadline, not after" policy that removes the drama requirement from asking for grace.
Normalize noticing your own flare days out loud to colleagues, even briefly. It breaks the myth that academic rigor requires uniform daily output from everyone, including you, every single week of the semester.
In your UDL redesign, offer more than one way to demonstrate mastery: live presentation, written response, or recorded video, so a flare day landing on presentation day doesn't tank a whole grade for a student who knew the material cold three days earlier.
When a student's performance dips suddenly, ask what changed this week rather than assuming they simply stopped trying. That single question, asked with real curiosity, often surfaces the actual barrier in under two minutes.
One move this term
Add one alternate submission format to your next major assignment, and give yourself permission to use your own version of it the next time you have a flare day.
A flare is data about load, not a report card on discipline. Design the course, and your own week, for the swing you actually have, not the flat average nobody really lives.
Go deeper
Read the full piece: Flare Days Are Data, Not Failure
ND Hive is coaching and community, not therapy or medical care.
Written by ND Hive.