Autism and Auditory Input: Part 2, How I Survive School (in Regards to Excessive Noise)

Let me tell you: when you're autistic (or have sensory processing disorder), the world is Very Loud and Disorienting.

My iPod died while I was checking out at Krogers, just in time for me to hear someone's very loud phone call and several cash registers beeping at the same time. Luckily for me, I made it out in one piece.

When I'm at school, my go-to situation for navigating halls and concentrating on work in class is to first put in my earbuds (which are noise-isolating already) and then put my noise-cancelling headphones on over those. Total isolation of what I want to listen to with none of what will hurt!

I especially enjoying listening to Cool Games Inc. podcasts when in this set up. I tend to get weird looks when I start laughing over something Griffin or Nick said, but I'm having too good a time to care!

With as much as I have to do to get through the day, you'd think my teachers and classmates would catch on and realise that they don't have to yell to get their point across, or aggressively scoot their chairs, or throw their water bottles, or chew their gum like cud, or bang their fists on the table in a half-assed attempt to make a beat (guess what? you suck!), or eat every food like it's a bowl of small animal bones, or... make any noise near me, ever.

Big classes, like my physical science class (filled with underclassmen, too!! The freshmen this year are okay, but the sophomores are insufferable!), are just the absolute worst!

But, for my smallest class of the day (AP studio art), things are much more calm (for an art class) and there's more space for activity. Since it's a self-guided class, I'm free to make any type of art and experiment without the teacher (or fellow classmates) breathing down my neck.

Of course, she still looks at our work and grades us for our projects, but it's up to us what we create. We have no guidelines besides those set for if we submit our portfolios to AP board at the end of the year.

My sound isolation set-up is perfect for this class - I'm never afraid of missing important information, because there never is any, and I can focus my entire attention on the work in front of me.

By the way, whoever said autistics aren't creative can kiss my ass.

In my other classes, however, I do have to be wary of a number of things, including:
-Getting all instructions I need (preferably in writing. Please.)
-Is this mandatory group work (the bane of my existence) or can I work alone?
-Will there be more instructions later?
-How much time do I have to complete this task? The whole period or just a short part of it?
-Can I even focus with all the extra sensory cushion, or will I just doodle in the margin the whole time and upset my teacher?

I'm in a kind of autistic limbo at school. I'm very smart, so I'm in mostly advanced and AP classes, but the way school is structured goes against everything in my body, so I pull a C-D-F average in all of my classes.

Spreading all this effort across seven classes is really hard work, but my teachers all want to ignore my disability just because I'm smart. It's rarely that the subject material is hard, it's normally I either:
A) Can't compute the English language at that time
B)Get confused while trying to read the question and get increasingly frustrated until I reach a melting point or
C) I'm tired, hungry, in pain, or a combination thereof.

And sometimes, I forget my headphones either in another class or at home, and then I can't focus in any sense because then Everything Is Happening At Once. I have a hard enough time functioning with all in the internal input from my body (oh chronic pain, how I hate your guts), you Can Not expect me to be like my peers in a room full of tapping feet, clicking pens, popping gum, loud swallowing, coughing, sneezing, desk pounding, water bottle flipping, snoring, breathing, and a yelling teacher.

I've been told that teachers aren't yelling most of the time, but why should I believe that? It's loud and it hurts, that sounds like yelling to me!

If any teacher or aspiring teacher is reading this, trust me: your voice can carry just fine without yelling. I tell actors this constantly just doing tech for the drama club, I don't want to leave the theatre and have to tell all my teachers to please, Please stop yelling!

(Oh boy, I hope this is coherent!)