We played soccer a lot with our friends and at school. We weren't on an official team or anything, but we'd definitely be up for it in gym or in after-school pickup games where we live.
I was pursuing the arts with theater in school, and I was doing after-school activities, but not in any real movement towards a professional career.
I always liked my teachers, and I was in a lot of after-school projects. I was a Girl Scout until my senior year, when I couldn't be a Girl Scout anymore. I was in clubs like Junior Achievement, and I ran track and field. My grades were good, but then toward 11th grade they were nothing. I always went to summer school.
In high school, one of the things I loved doing was this after-school program where you would teach computer skills to some of the maintenance folks at school.
In Chicago, you have an absence of strong family units, and that absence gets filled by gangs. You have a failure in the school system, after-school programs and other social programs to help keep kids off the streets. Amnesty International speaks to that in some way, by keeping these issues in the forefront.
Parents need a full continuum of care and support from birth to kindergarten that is affordable and accessible - that means full day and full year. And let's not forget that even in elementary school, working parents need access to the same kind of quality, affordable after-school programs!
I didn't have any terrible survival jobs. The main job I had before I was able to transition over to acting full-time was working at an after-school program at a middle school teaching improv and standup. So even when I had a regular job, I was still lucky enough to be doing the stuff I loved in some way.
For me, acting was a reward. I had to get good grades in order to act, in order to be on TV. I had to do well in school so I could work. To me, it was like an after-school activity, something to look forward to.
I joined the after-school club, School of Comedy, which progressed wildly, and in quite a Hollywood way. It sounds like 'School of Rock', right up to trying to raise money to pay for a venue in Edinburgh.
Let's talk about after-school programs generally. They're supposed to be educational programs, right? And that's what they're supposed to do; they're supposed to help kids who can't - who don't get fed at home, get fed so that they do better at school. Guess what? There's no demonstrable evidence they're actually doing that.
Through my school years, I learned more about slavery, anti-black racism, and oppression in the U.S., and my blackness could no longer be an afterthought. I started wearing it proudly, and as my consciousness deepened, so did my love for black folks.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
I was about six, and Liverpool had a community summer camp. They sent a few invites to my school and my age group, to my class specifically, and they were like, 'Who wants to go?' So every lad in the class put their hands up, as you'd imagine, so the only fair way was to pick names out of a hat, and luckily, my name was picked out.
I was kind of a weird kid in high school. I didn't have many friends in my age group because all they wanted to do was fight and have riots.
I remember being back in Knollwood Middle School back in Piscataway. I remember waking up Saturday mornings playing with my age group and the age group above me.
Once you have done with school, you realise that it is just a smaller version of life, and really I have felt that I should have been an adult since I was aged about five.
There are so many young women in film school right now, and it's just about foreign sales companies, domestic sales companies agreeing to finance films directed by and starring women.
Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.
I'm looking through old things of mine, and there was this binder from when I was 14 years old. It is essentially a dream board. It is a school binder that I had put magazine clippings on. It said, 'TV actress, fame, a picture of Halle Berry, a picture of Christina Aguilera.' I was obsessed with both of them.
I just thought making machines intelligent was the coolest thing you could do. I had a summer internship in AI in high school, writing neural networks at National University of Singapore - early versions of deep learning algorithms. I thought it was amazing you could write software that would learn by itself and make predictions.
