Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lee, Dennis. Melvis and Elvis. Illus. Jeremy Tankard. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2015. Print.In this new anthology of poetry for children, the inimitable Dennis Lee lets us explore our moods: silly or serious, playful or pugnacious, riotous, rebellious and just plain rude. In typical Lee fashion, he eschews sentimentality: The dog got fat— His belly exploded And that was that. (“Cabbagetown,” p. 22)but he is also capable of stealing the heart with simple, lovely metaphor: Bobolink, bobolink, Take me along. I’ll be the silence And you be the song. (“Bobolink,” p. 21)He teases the tongue with creative wordplay (a Dennis Lee trademark): I thought I saw a potamus, Asleep upon a cotamus, But when I reached the spotamus, The potamus was notamus. (“The Notapotamus,” p. 29)Ever true to his audience, he does not flinch from the reality of childhood emotion, be it longing: If you could like me, Like me now, As deep as the dreams In your heart allow. (“The New Friend,” p. 30)or loathing: Doodle, doodle, poppyseed strudel, I’ve got a friend and he smells like a poodle. * * * Push him down a wishing well— Still can’t stop that awful smell. (“Stinkarama,” p. 26) The book is cleverly structured, beginning and ending with poems about Melvis the monster and Elvis the elf, the final selection subtly acknowledging both the “inner monster” and the “inner elf” of the child.Jeremy Tankard’s illustrations are highly suited to the text. He uses bold outline, vivid color, and complementary backgrounds to effect focus, clarity and mood. Preschoolers and beginning readers should have no trouble relating poem and picture.This is a book that could be shared repeatedly with children at bedtime or in storyhour. However, a parent, teacher, or librarian would want occasionally to interject, “Do we sometimes feel like that? Would we actually say that or do that?” That being understood, it is a good selection for home, school and public libraries.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Leslie AitkenLeslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship involved selection of children’s literature for school, public, special, and university collections. She is a former Curriculum Librarian at the University of Alberta.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.136 | 0.099 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".