What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right
What resonated with me is how impossible it is, as a kid, to make sense of being in the school system. The interaction with an administrator was school discipline gone awry... but it could have easily been something else. (Discipline is the most likely, there are <i>tons</i> of misguided zero-tolerance policies.) I&#x27;m lucky that my parents were advocates and organizers and that they knew people in the school administration. When a teacher emotionally abused me in class I was in a different class the next week. When I ran out of math classes to take at high school, I took them at college.<p>Years afterwards I was tutoring a high school student in mathematics. They asked me a question about school and I felt a moment of panic, as I remembered all of the shit that I went through.<p>By the time I finished college, it made sense to me. I could make it through an awful class or cut through red tape and weird requirements. I knew that I had survived a couple decades of bullshit, I was still here, and a little extra bullshit wasn&#x27;t going to kill me. But at age 14, I remember being angry and upset <i>all the time</i> about things that happened at school.