A calmecac stood physically within or immediately adjacent to the temple compound it served, and Sahagun's informants describe its residents living apart from ordinary Mexica domestic life under a demanding daily regimen: predawn rising, cold ritual bathing, sweeping and maintaining the sacred precinct, fasting, and regular self-bloodletting performed as an ongoing devotional discipline rather than an occasional rite. Alongside this physical austerity, students received sustained instruction in the sacred and solar calendars, the conduct of ceremonies proper to their temple's cult, formal oratory, and the pictorial writing system used to record ritual, historical and calendrical knowledge.
Because every major temple across Tenochtitlan, and comparable temples throughout the wider Aztec-controlled territory, maintained its own calmecac, the institution existed as a distributed, repeated architectural and educational pattern rather than as a single unique school, comparable in that structural sense to how a seminary functions as a repeatable institutional type within Catholic Christianity rather than as one singular building.