Dochie May

Here  are my remembrances of Dorothy Menosky

My first contact with Dorothy was through Carolyn Burke.Carolyn taught a pre first grade in Angell? school in Highland Park Michigan , a suburb surrounded by Detroit. Dorothy was the teacher who got those kids after a year in Carolyn's class. Yettas's dissertation was a longitudinal study of six kids who had both.

Carolyn came into the Wayne doctoral program after finishing her masters with E.Brooks Smith. Dorothy followed her. When Laura Smith, a third teacher at the school left for the doctoral program the principal banned us from the school.

Dorothy as you may know but find it hard to believe had been a nun.. She also had  taught in Turkey and applied for and got a prostitute's licence there
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Dorothy had the view of decision making that came from her catechism. During our miscue studies at WSU we met regularly to review tough miscue coding decisions.. Any time we made s new decision during a miscue study it meant going back over prior codings and changing them to conform.. At a point in each study we locked the decision making and kept any changes for the following study. In this process Dorothy treated each decision to change as heresy. She had perfect recall not only of each  prior decision but of comments I had made (as Dr. God).

For a long period Dorothy was a chain coca cola drinker. We actually made her a vest of the can pulls from all the cokes she drank.

Dorothy was a frequent baby sitter for our daughters. Debi recalled some of her memories of those adventures. D. also spent some time in Tucson . On one trip while we were away Dorothy organized a tea party for the girls with our lawn furniture in our pool.

One summer she and I taught a course together at the University of New Mexico.Of course she had her little dog with her. On the campus there were a number of trees planted in concrete tree rings about 2 1/2 feet high. The little dog loved to jump over the tree ring and race around and around inside.
One day however what she  thought was a tree ring was a large pool pf water with a fountain in the middle.
Splash went the poodle and she found herself treading water until Dorothy waded in and rescued her.

Dorothy and Carolyn joined our family one year on a vacation in Acapulco.One afternoon we took a boat  trip. We realized at one point that she had been missing form our seats for some time. It turned out she  had gone to the bathroom and the door stuck on her stall and she couldn't get out,

On the way home Dorothy and I and our kids went back to Detroit while Yetta and Carolyn went directly to San Diego for the miscue project they were doing in a suburb. People assumed Dorothy was the mother and she did not disabuse them.

Dorothy had a long career at Jersey Cit y State University . She started several prominent miscue folks on their careers. And no one knows how many teachers she influenced.

She often had clever buttons made for special occasions like the Yetta Yetta Yenta Yetta button.
Dorothy was proud to be named a founding mother of the whole language umbrella.

She leaves a big hole in our lives.