"To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller." -Ursula K. Le Guin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx12fTwOQl0

I grew up in an estate where I was the only girl in a group of over ten boys. The rest of the girls were too young for me to play with. It is not that I couldn’t play with them, but my stern mother kept insisting that I join kids of my age. This was quite hard for me in the first few days but when I became accustomed to them, I could barely remember that I was female. I played all their games, and they actually treated me as one of their own. We could run after each other in the police and robber game, play hide and seek and marble games. I even taught them how to hula-hoop. We went to the same elementary and middle school and learnt in the same class. After school, we could run home and change into our home attire.

I grew up in a house on the corner with a big backyard surrounded by gardens and a white fence.  We were surrounded by three other yards, so we felt very cut off from the main roads; we loved to create our own mystical worlds.  My younger brother and I used to gather large branches that fell from the pine trees, set them up around the biggest tree, and create teepees. We played games where we would sell guavas (balloons) from our own shops, and someone typically would end up crying because they stopped seeing the fun in having their fruit stolen.  Most of our games revolved around being outside; we found all different types of forts in the bushes and if we couldn't find any, we would make them.

My childhood memory is just full of play.My parents thought play is pretty essential for a child in the process of her growing up, it helps me to become happy and healthy both mentally and phisically. When I was a child, I always had a bunch of friends around, most of them were at the same age of mine and we literally knew each other since the first day of our birth. Our families lived in a close community, which our daily pattern is to hang out in the afternoon together untill our parents called us back for dinner. After dinner, we usually were calling each other's name standing unde their windows to ask them out.

We have been analyzing the impact of our high school experiences a lot in class and it has only affirmed my pride and hesitation towards discussing charter school education.  While I acknowledge not all charter schools allocate their money in a way that is beneficial to students I would push everyone

When I was an elementary school student, I love roller skating. Every day after finishing my homework, I would change my roller skates as soon as possible and rush out to find my “roller-skate-mates” ----also some elementary school students live in the same neighborhood as me. But as I went to middle school, the workload in school became heavier day by day, I have no choice but to reduce the time I spent on roller skating. After getting into a boarding high school, I hardly have time to play it any more. But this summer I bought a pair of new roller skate. I thought I might have already forget how to play it, but to my surprise, I’m still a proficient roller skater.

As a child, play could be practically anything. However, I explicitly remember how my imagination would always play a large role in my "play." Whether it be playing with polly-pockets, pretending to be mermaids, or hosting a fake car wash with miniature cars, I've always used my imagination to the fullest.

First off, my apologies for posting so late. This has been a rough weekend for me, starting before we even went to the museum and as I tried to write plenty of times, I simply could not find the words. However, I was reflecting back to our time spent in the Penn Museum, and I started to see parallels, connections, and points of entry. So here I go: