I think it's becoming clearer why that is...the one who had no math classes in the first two years of college was the one who attended the Russian Class at which she met the kenyan student...and the one who did attend math classes was probably at the university of Chicago, where her uncle was Deputy Director of the Library for something like 60 years.
So how did she get a phd in Social Anthropology? Maybe that had something to do with the masses of research material Maya and Alice Dewey said they found on discs in a dusty drawer. Alice was the 'Indonesianist' as she likes to call herself, she now lives in Indonesia permanently. She published a book with the title Marketing in Java...iirc, and SAD's book when it was being touted, bore the title Blacksmithing in Java. They then changed it to 'Surviving Against the Odds' - and Alice was the editor. The granddaughter of John Dewey was a very masculine woman and I have a sense she worshipped Stanley Ann Dunham.
I've written that off the cuff from memory. I'll add some links later and correct myself if necessary.
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2008/Sep/12/ln/hawaii809120379.html
EXCERPT:
SEPARATION AND DIVORCE
In the early 1970s, as her research and success in helping villages increased, Soetoro and Dunham split up — and eventually divorced in 1979.
“He got a job with Union Oil,” Dewey said. “Lolo joked that they got divorced because she was falling in love with Javanese handcrafts and he was becoming an American oil man, which wasn’t far from the truth.”
Maya and her mother returned to Honolulu in 1973 and, for three years, lived with Barack on Poki Street, just ‘ewa of Punahou School.
“My father did not live with us at that time,” Maya said. “They lived apart. They were still together and still wanted to make a go of the marriage.”
Dunham took young Maya back to Indonesia in 1976 to live with Soetoro’s mother, while Barack moved into his grandparents’ apartment on Beretania Street while he finished his high school years at Punahou.
“We spent summers with him, we spent winters with him and there were a lot of letters in between,” Maya said.
She, too, was homeschooled by Dunham until 1981, when Maya enrolled at the Jakarta International School and then, at age 14, returned in 1984 to enter Punahou.
“It was an extraordinary childhood,” Soetoro-Ng said. “She was such an interesting and vigorously intellectual woman. I owe everything to her example. Her life of service is something to which we should all aspire.”
Dewey later traveled with Dunham to the same village in Kenya where Obama’s father came from and — decades later — saw a video of Obama in the same village near a building that arranged micro loans.
Obama had arrived at the place where his mother had helped so many people years before.
“He followed in her footsteps and didn’t even know it,” Dewey said. “I know, because he certainly would have said something about it because his mother meant so much to him.”
It was a moment that brought Dewey full circle to the woman she had mentored and grew to admire — a woman whose work she believes could influence the course of U.S. policy.
“Sen. Obama often speaks of his mother’s dedication to helping people,” Dewey said. “How he was raised is part of how he will be as president.”
