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Illegitimacy Rates

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So what is the explanation for the 70% illegitimacy rates among black Americans? Does anybody know?

The idea that this is a result of some welfare program is dumb. You can’t erase the prestige value of having a dude in your life with some paltry handout. Millennia of social conditioning have taught women that having the father of your children around is good and not having him is bad. I can’t think of anything that would lower your prestige among the female peer group more than having the co-author of your pregnancy evaporate the moment that pregnancy happens.

Middle-class divorced white people, please don’t project this onto yourselves. Your ex-husband who would rather die than not see his children, divorce or no divorce, is a completely different story.

34 responses to “Illegitimacy Rates”

  1. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    Is it primarily a correlation with race, or with income? Below a certain tax bracket, illegitimacy rates appear very high even among white people.

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    1. Occasional Reader Avatar
      Occasional Reader

      Yes. I believe that single parent households are very Hugh in Appalachia which is almost exclusively white. And among middle and upper class Black households, rates of single parents are low. So poverty is absolutely a factor. I don’t quite understand how it plays in…….but it seems to me that poverty leads to hopelessness which leads to an inability/refusal to consider the future which leads to a sort of reckless focus on present pleasures which leads to high rates of single parenthood (and substance abuse.)

      It’s a terrible cycle that seems very linked to those who have experienced generational American poverty. For instance, Nigerian immigrants– usually Igbo people– who often come to this country with very little are a successful immigrant group and don’t seem to experience this generational hopelessness. So there are multiple factors at play here.

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        I’d love to see an explanation of why generational poverty in America is so special, though. Like, why is it that the “generationally impoverished” from certain other countries can come here and do much better? I’m genuinely curious about this, and suspect intelligence, religion, and culture play into it quite a lot.

        Met many poor people in VN– stayed for weeks in the house of a farm family of very modest means (they took us to meet people who were really, desperately poor, in case we could help somehow). By local standards, that was a poor-to-working-class neighborhood. Two houses on the same block were plywood shanties, and I met the families in each. They were really nice people, and the neighborhood as a whole was extremely clean, orderly, friendly, and safe. Never had a moment’s anxiety about my safety, even walking about town by myself.

        I have heard similar from people who’ve visited impoverished neighborhoods in other parts of the world– I remember reading someone who’d experienced it in Turkey, and various missionaries, travelers, and intl. workers who’d noted it in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia… that there are plenty of places out there where poverty is decoupled from social dysfunction. It’s possible to be poor and still have a civilized culture.

        So why is it that in the US, poor neighborhoods are automatically crime-ridden and dysfunctional? Why am I safe walking around a poor farm town in VN after dark, and not in a poor neighborhood anywhere I’ve lived in the US?

        Is this the difference between external-causes poverty, and internal-causes poverty?

        My friends in VN, and everyone in their neighborhood, were basically poor because of official government discrimination against Catholics. If you could magically transplant them to the US they’d be wildly successful in a very short time. Everybody was running a half-dozen or so ‘cottage industries’ out of their homes– raising chickens and ducks, farming vegetables, growing mangos, making fruit leather and rice paper, drying coconuts and cashews by the roadside, selling soup in the mornings to the men headed out to the fields, running little cafes… if you magically transported them to the US they’d be wildly successful in a couple of years.

        The people in my current neighborhood? Nobody’s discriminating against them. The only contact they have with church is sending their kids to VBS down the street, because it’s free childcare for a week. They smoke pot and make payments on new cars, but sometimes fail to pay the rent and get evicted. They don’t get married, but they do have kids. They spend SNAP money on junk food. When I send the kids outside with snacks to share, I get the *weirdest* feedback on it. “Kennedy says they never have anything like that at her house, just chips and soda” (I’d sent out grapes and fresh bread, it was devoured to the last crumb)… these people are already in America, and will never be successful. I don’t believe transporting them anywhere else in the world would help them be successful. They’re poor because they make bad choices.

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  2. Avatar
    Anonymous

    The sexual revolution. Before the 60s, you didn’t see this.

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “what is the explanation for the 70% illegitimacy rates among black Americans?”

    Years ago I floated the idea that it’s a west African thing and you thought the idea was patently ridiculous…. But the broader area is known for both female sexual independence, low paternal investment and lots of informal foster/pseudo-adoption type situations. In a lot of Africa working women compete for the attentions of men that…. don’t do very much in the way of work. Lots of individual exceptions but that’s the overall trend.

    Anecdotally, in US schools, among other races boys fight over girls but among AA students it’s more likely the opposite (and female sexual competition for men is a far more common song topic among Black musicians (since the 1920s) than other types of music in the US.

    “primarily a correlation with race, or with income?”

    Mostly race though income level plays a secondary role.

    IIRC in 1967’s Tally’s Corner (or another study of Black urban ‘streetcorner men’) the family picture that emerges is a woman and her children (by different fathers). A sick boy is in the hospital and receives dozens of visits from female family members and female friends and not a single man.

    It’s a longstanding pattern. Social pressure to marry and stay married reduces it but when the pressure is relieve (like for the last 30 years at least) it’s what returns.

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    1. Avatar
      Anonymous

      Black mothers were, largely, married, from the end of slavery through the first half of the 20th century. I don’t think that I buy that West African thinking about family patterns were secretly held by black Americans whose families had been in America a century or more, then suddenly asserted themselves as soon as the coast was clear in the 60s.

      I used to assume that the total disregard for the family unit among slave owners (selling spouses, parents, children, etc.) was the explanation, but once I looked at the actual times these patterns emerged, I mostly discarded this theory.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “don’t think that I buy that West African thinking about family patterns were secretly held”

        Of course not, I’m talking about much more general and durable values like female sexual independence (IINM there’s a general inverse correlation between female independence and paternal investment…).

        There is also the fact of sexual exploitation of African women by white slaveholders (responsible for the lionshare of the 18% white admixture into American Blacks’ ancestry) so… I’m sure historical factors enter in there as well.

        There is also, of course, other genetic possibilities which nobody wants to even think about.

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      2. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        I also bought into the standard narrative that it’s a result of slavery. But the numbers don’t remotely check out. Black families were strong for decades after slavery. Stronger than even white ones at a time when marriage was the norm. Then, it suddenly all collapses by the 1970s.

        By the way, Ukrainians were mostly owned as serfs until 1861. Families separated, sold off, tortured, killed by serf owners. The most important Ukrainian writer Taras Schevchenko was a serf. We do have a sad phenomenon of absentee fathers but it’s not about serfdom that happened very long ago. It’s a result of the insane Soviet gender policies.

        It’s always something more recent, in my opinion.

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        1. cliff arroyo Avatar
          cliff arroyo

          “always something more recent, in my opinion”

          I’ve read that welfare laws ultimately discouraged marriage and encouraged single motherhood though I don’t know if the numbers check out.

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          1. methylethyl Avatar
            methylethyl

            I’ve toyed with the numbers a bit, because my kids need serious dental work and I was morbidly curious.

            And the answer is: if I got divorced, then even with child support factored in, yes absolutely it’d get my household income low enough to qualify for Medicaid and a bunch of other state assistance. The state would pay for my kids’ orthodontics.

            Not that we’d ever contemplate that. We used some of those programs back when we were broke, and they are extremely intrusive. But I’m pretty sure that’s how some of the women on our street manage it: Habitat for Humanity built a house a few doors down for a single mom with a couple of kids. All very nice, and glad they have a place to live and all. Within a week that “single” mom had a man living in the house. Does he contribute financially? Is he the dad of those kids? Who knows? But if he’d been married to her odds are good she wouldn’t have qualified for the HfH house.

            If you’re living anywhere in that gray zone where marrying a man with a steady job would disqualify you from state assistance, there’s a definite negative incentive.

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            1. el Avatar
              el

              \ marrying a man with a steady job would disqualify you from state assistance

              If this man is not their father, one can understand why he wouldn’t want to take responsibility to support several kids, who are not connected to him biologically.

              Biological parents have responsibility for their kids, yes. I am NOT talking about the kids’ father.

              Doesn’t sexism enter into those assumptions that if a woman is in a sexual relationship with a man, then he’ll support her and her kids too?

              We talk about equal partnerships and separate accounts, but when push comes to shove, government sees women as selling sxx and men as a money purse.

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              1. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                I don’t know if it’s sexist, but it’s very American.

                In VN, if a couple gets divorced or widowed, the kids go to the mother. If the mother remarries, the kids go to the maternal grandparents. This is done because it is not normal for Viet men to take responsibility for kids who are not related to them.

                However.

                In America, if a man marries a woman who already has children, it is expected that he take some responsibility for the kids, and everybody will praise him for it if he adopts them. It is not all that uncommon in the US for a child who was raised by a stepfather– if they liked the stepdad and have no connection to bio-dad, that is– to take the stepfather’s last name upon reaching adulthood, as a sign of affection and gratitude.

                Because this is normal in the US, when older, divorced, expat US men go to Vietnam, they are actively pursued by single mothers– they are a catch! Not so much because of wealth, but because they know that if they marry an American, they won’t have to get rid of their kids. American men believe that if they marry a woman with kids, that’s a package deal, of course they will not make her send the children away to grandparents, and of course they will help support them financially while they are minors. That’s just the way we do things here.

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              2. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                …for state welfare purposes, I do not believe unrelated parents are expected to contribute to supporting children, but since they *are* expected to contribute to shared household costs like rent and utilities, they effectively *are* supporting the kids. Rent’s always the biggest expense anyway, and if there are kids, you will have to rent a place with more bedrooms, which is more expensive.

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        2. Avatar
          Anonymous

          —It’s a result of the insane Soviet gender policies.

          Which particular gender policies? I thought that these were mostly wars and repressions, which killed men at a higher rate than women, and which made surviving men valuable, women competing for men,etc…

          v07

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            When I was in school, I was literally persecuted by the teachers because I was quiet, shy, not pushy, not in charge, and my voice was too quiet. I was in 3 schools by the age of 11, and everywhere it was a problem. In the meantime, there were zero boys pushed into being louder, more active, more in your face. In short, boy-like behavior was promoted in girls and vice versa.

            To anybody who doesn’t believe I was quiet and shy, I know, right? It’s true, though. And I was consistently and methodically engineered out of my very girly girl persona my whole childhood. And that’s what we observed among adults, too. Women were pushy, screamy, in charge. Men were pliant, quiet, always giving in to women.

            I have 5 aunts. What do you think they talked about in the kitchen while we kids listened in? How to badger, cajole or convince their husbands to have sex with them.

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            1. Avatar
              Anonymous

              This may have been specific to Ukraine, I do not think if this was country-wide policy.

              v07

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              1. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                So at school, who always spoke in class? Who was the leader of your pioneer unit? Who was the class commander?

                I literally first heard a boy my age speak in class when I came to Canada. I distinctly remember feeling stunned. I didn’t know they were biologically equipped to speak. 😁😁😁

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              2. Avatar
                Anonymous

                —Who was the leader of your pioneer unit? Who was the class commander?

                I was, despite being completely unfit for this kind of job, both temperamentally and politically, so to speak (I was not any kind of a dissident, I just saw this stuff as a performance and it upset me when genuine belief was expected.) And another boy was before me.

                And nobody ever volunteered to speak in class, that was considered being a show-off, which was considered a bad thing. Regardless of gender. And, of course, most people did not know the answers in the first place.

                v07

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  4. overgrownhobbit Avatar
    overgrownhobbit

    See “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action Office of Policy Planning and Research United States Department of Labor March 1965”

    It’s got the data on the problem you are describing.

    This is multi-factorial problem, and this particular factor is only “dumb” is assumed to be the only one.

    See also… hang on: “From Mutual Aid to Welfare State: How Fraternal Societies Fought Poverty and Taught Character”. These societies which relied heavily on the Booker T. Washington model for Negro success* were deliberately destroyed by both commercial and socialist/planned society interests of the 1920s and 30s. Black cultures of the day had less social capital and were more fragile than white ones, but the long-term affects are similar. See also Life at the Bottom, which hilariously is often called racist (by Americans) because they do not realize the author is describing an English, white subculture.

    At the same time, the Soviet Union** helped to fund and build networks driving radical feminism to tie the women’s rights movements within socialist and communist politics to sexual license, multiple partners, and the demonization of marriage and family life. The consequences of promiscuity, a popular choice for both young men and women, were mitigated by

    The push to keep women in the factory/industrial/office workforce (i.e. traditional single-earner husband jobs) plus the 1965 immigration reform act and various open border initiative served to drive down wages. Planned or not, it lowered the value of having an attached male, which, again, hit those at the bottom of the social scale harder, which again, meant urban blacks.

    Finally, also at the same time, education at the local schoolhouse, homeschool, and religious school models were either limited, destroyed, or co-opted into the Prussian factory model. This works – barely – for high social capital groups, and not at all for people on the margins. Creating children progressively less capable and with less social capital every generation. See “Waiting for Superman”. Public employee unionization is possibly a factor in the degradation of black schooling as well, but IDK.

    *See: “Up from Slavery” if you have not already. It also models the problem of the destruction of the Amerindian BIA clients, albeit tangentially)

    ** (pace Kasparov? – I can’t recall, and this is rapidly turning into a Busman’s Holiday – and pace also information from the Venona intercepts)

    ***A side note for a linguist: Get a group of people together and have them separate into smaller groups, each assigned a racial/ethnic/color subgroup in the United States: black, brown/hispanic, Asian, and European/white. Then have each of them come up with ethnic or other slurs for their subgroup. The degree of discomfort, to the point that the participants cannot even write the full word on the page, directly mirrors the lack of economic and social success of the group as a whole. Interesting, no?

    HTH

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Curiously, after a short-lived experiment with “free love” in the 1920s, the USSR maintained extremely puritanical morality until its collapse.

      There’s a lot of hypocrisy in what the Soviets were selling around the world.

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      1. Avatar
        Anonymous

        Yes. Well known to the old cold warriors. No live lost for that crew.

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      2. Avatar
        Anonymous

        Do you think Soviet Union was capable of selling this kind of thing? Also, it sounds a bit like a mirror image of the “CIA coup in Ukraine”**… I may be wrong in this particular case, but I tend to be suspicious every time someone takes a position “this undesirable event could only take place because of enemy intelligence services, there were no internal/organic reasons for it”…

        ** It fascinates me how many Trump supporters /Canadian conservatives take this position. Seems conservatives have developed their own version of “America bad”… They do not stop at “not our war, why should we pay for it”, for some reason they need to shit on Ukraine and the West.

        v07

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I agree, the anti-Western sentiment is dominating both the left and the right. It’s very sad.

          I’m not suggesting, though, that there was a conspiracy to reverse gender roles in the USSR. Nobody came together and made a 10-point plan. It’s simply that events have a logic of their own. Women are and always have been easier to organize into fanatical ululating crowds that would take direction without choosing their own. So women were played up. Not based on a strategy somebody wrote out but as a result of a myriad tiny decisions made by a myriad people every day.

          It’s exactly like the silent female students in my classroom. Nobody is purposefully making them that way. But they are turning out precisely that way. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s the logic of events.

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          1. el Avatar
            el

            \ It’s exactly like the silent female students in my classroom. Nobody is purposefully making them that way. But they are turning out precisely that way. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s the logic of events.

            I still don’t understand what you mean by “the logic of events.”

            Haven’t noticed this in Israel, f.e.

            What creates this in USA?

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              We are seeing right now in several leading countries that national elections have turned farcical. It’s not a conspiracy of evil globalists who are doing it to make people lose faith in the nation-state. We kind of all collectively engineer things in that direction because we need it for some reason.

              I have absolutely no idea what caused this sudden shift in female behavior in the US. There’s nothing like it in Spain, for example. I’m mystified.

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  5. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    A possibly related anecdote: my dad worked as a carney for a few seasons, twenty-odd years ago. While making the rounds of county fairs in the deep south– AL and GA in particular– he observed a striking pattern. He was running a kids’ ride, so he got to meet and chat with many hundreds of working-class parents of young children. Says in rural AL and GA, what really grabbed his attention was that he saw masses of single moms carting around ill-behaved children. White moms. Black moms. Didn’t signify. Lot of poverty and obvious dysfunction.

    Among the working class people there, the ones who seemed to be neatly dressed, married (attending the fair with both parents!), and had kids who seemed happy, healthy, good-mannered and well cared-for… were by and large interracial couples. Didn’t seem to make much difference which half of the couple was black or white. Dad tried to get them to talk without being too nosy– complimented them on their polite and intelligent kids, etc.– and from those brief contacts, his working theory was this: in these rural towns, the smart kids with money all go off to college and don’t come back. What’s left in the local dating pool are the dumb, socially dysfunctional, and abject losers, mostly. For the small minority of people who, for whatever reason, were not college-bound, but still functional humans with some self-discipline who wanted a decent life– a stable marriage and kids– being willing to date outside their race doubled their odds of finding a suitable partner. So young people who prioritized *getting married* and having a normal family life… were extremely likely to have biracial families due to the limitations of the rural dating pool.

    Dad’s extremely curious how this has worked out for them over the long haul, but isn’t a carney anymore. He was surprised and very optimistic about it, because these parents clearly had their priorities straight.

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  6. Post Alley Crackpot Avatar
    Post Alley Crackpot

    A Jewish answer: it’s a set of overlapping fields you can model with the help of Goldratt’s theory of constraints.

    But many people will not like the results that come from this.

    Specifically, the notion that people can simultaneously game systems of constraints and also claim innocence with flavours of victimhood goes right out the window once you see the effects come directly as consequences of gaming the constraints.

    So the ugly answers: these dysfunctions weaponise learned helplessness against social systems for the purposes of benefits transfers, and anything substantive to remedy the situation inevitably destroys the people, the systems, or both, because they must change as being within hothouse conditions maintained by the bubbles of previous constraints.

    Before you say that there are levels of systemic competence you would be willing to lose for this status quo ante, be sure you understand that the systems included in this gaming of constraints also include your own.

    Eventually change happens when people shift their thinking away from believing no price could be too great to accepting that no price could ever be small enough.

    Giro benefits systems exist because collectively enough people believe they are an affordable alternative to solving hard problems with hard choices.

    Now imagine the sea change when those alternatives are not seen as being so affordable.

    If you want predictive models for hardship, definitely check out Goldratt.

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  7. Post Alley Crackpot Avatar
    Post Alley Crackpot

    methylethyl: “What’s left in the local dating pool are the dumb, socially dysfunctional, and abject losers, mostly.”

    There is a map of the US by county that shows the ability to advance beyond the social strata of the birth family.

    Find that map and you will see the true differences in Americans.

    That map shows the areas you are talking about as being stagnant most likely for the reasons you described, but more interestingly, they are quantifiable at a county level on a map so you can see the phenomena at a grand scale.

    We found the map and realised there would be no winning where we were in Florida.

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  8. el Avatar
    el

    \ So at school, who always spoke in class? Who was the leader of your pioneer unit? Who was the class commander?

    A Ukrainian currently living in Canada posted yesterday:

    Матриархат

    В Канаде не обязательна, но широко распространена практика стерилизации самцов домашних животных, которые не предназначены для разведения.
    Так они становятся более спокойными, дружелюбными и приятными в общении.

    Так вот, по-моему эта практика домашними животными не ограничивается.

    https://snake-d-ha.livejournal.com/1721630.html

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      The only place where I observe the young generation here is at work, and traditional gender roles are alive and well. Boys are active, seeking, talking, curious. They initiate contact, ask questions, share their plans and life goals. Girls giggle and fade into the woodwork. They do not come by to chat ever. Don’t ask questions beyond “will this be on the test?” ever. There were two (2) exceptions in my entire career. One was a diagnosed schizophrenic and another an FtM transgender.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “gender roles are alive and well”

        Polish gender roles are a bit similar to but not nearly as extreme as what you describe in Ukraine.

        Anything related to arts/language/culture tends to heavily skew female so my sample is a bit skewed but….

        When I think of ‘most likely to interrupt to ask challenging questions or disagree with me or just add unsolicited (but mostly very welcome) comments’ females outnumber males about 5 to 1.

        Students who are actually really committed to academic life-of-the-mind issues… close to 50/50 (though sadly far too few of them).

        In mixed classes females don’t defer to male students but they don’t treat them with contempt either. Male students usually huddle together in a group.

        A group that is entirely female is liable to go one of three ways…

        -they buckle down and work hard

        -they become enormous pains in the ass with endless inventive reasons to not do anything in class

        -they sulk and glare at the teacher like cobras that have seen a mouse and trying to do anything is like pulling teeth with no anesthesia (the worst option)

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Even Mexican female students are more likely to challenge me in class than American students. Gosh, I have a Muslim student in a bloody burqa who is more active and loud than local female students.

          Apparently, being showered with “girl power” messages since birth has the exact opposite effect than their authors hope.

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      2. Avatar
        Anonymous

        How do the courses you teach typically fit into these boys’ life goals?

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I find such incredible stuff. One recent student, for instance, is training to be a software engineer but he finds that writing poetry in Spanish compensates for what he perceives as the dry matter of his programming classes. Another is a construction major who discovered that he gets a ton of street cred on the site when he can speak to Mexican workers about the stuff that interests them in their language. One was obsessed with working for the FBI, and he actually got into one of their training programs. He was probably successful because I never heard from him again. 🙂 One wants to be a dentist in the poor regions of Guatemala. Another wants to do missionary work.

          And the part that I find absolutely crushing is that I don’t know any such stories about our female students. I’m sure they have great stories. But I’ve never heard any.

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