Struggling with Student Teaching as an ASD Teacher

I wasn’t a teacher, but a paraprofessional support, but the mental and sensory toll it took on me just wasn’t worth it. I wasn’t able to do my best, and I took off a lot of work, just because the school environment is not friendly to neurodivergent students or staff. Not to mention, trying to stand out and self-advocate for my needs when most people don’t understand autism or ADHD was stressful. I hope that you can find some support and advice here! We need more autistic teachers in schools, it’s so important to those kids to have someone that understands and can create space for them.

im a preschool teacher and i get it! i have a really hard time removing that professional attitude and calming down after being overstimulated all day when i come home! my boyfriend helps me de stress by squeezing me/putting pressure all over my body or i take a nice bath in the dark. sensory deprivation helps me a lot after i have been very overstimulated for the whole day

I'm having a similar problem. I am a student teacher atm so I observe a classroom in the morning and take classes in the evenings. I, too, am exhausted after acting professional all day! I also am on the smaller side and have a meeker voice, so getting the kids to listen to me is really frustrating and I am getting overstimulated by smaller and smaller things all the time now. There are so many loud noises in the school. I use fidget toys (especially the spiky ring thing) and my Loops when I need a quick calm down which really helps me.

Noise is a big sensitivity for me, my friend-a teacher got the Loop headphones to help with that during the day, if at least just during planning period.

I teach preschool! I can get super overstimulated and irritable and approach shutdown when there's a lot of loud and constant sound. The flare calmer ear things that the person above mentioned are great for taking the edge off of sound. I also pop my noise cancelling headphones on throughout the day to take little sound breaks. I have a posting in my classroom about me being autistic and the accommodations I use, so my families understand if they see me with headphones on that I'm not listening to music or blocking out their kids :)

(Commenting mainly so I get notified for if someone responds w advice but-) I'm with you, it's incredibly stressful & I'm in online school now so I only have a few in person events, but I have these earbuds that only block certain frequencies, the brand is called flare audio I believe, you can just look them up on Amazon, they're maybe $20, they've helped me and they might be good for you if that's something you wanna try. They're pretty inconspicuous & don't look like normal earbuds if that's something you have to worry about. good luck though!! o/