Jesus Govea’s “Bruh” is Why Computers Can’t Replace Writers
Bruh sat on my word wall for a solid month in 2020 before we were spirited away to be safer-at-home. I returned to campus to retrieve (1) Tabasco from my mini fridge, (2) a stack of mythology books, (3) empty Windex bottles, and (4) to grieve the end of the year. I couldn’t erase it from the whiteboard just yet.
Poetry magazine is hands down my favorite gift I receive each year at Christmas from my husband. Some months I flick through and dog-ear pages, some months the beautiful colors call to me from piles of forgotten reading materials as I chase half-naked toddlers who have stolen my students’ papers to use as confetti or drawing paper or to grade (just kidding, my kids are terrible at grading papers, no amount of cookies can make that happen).
Despite the current critiques of the foundation and its work (which I hope will be resolved in a way that honors artists and their process) my ability to #teachlivingpoets often depends on this lifeline sent to my door that is offline, lingering in my home, and making itself part of my life each month, which is how I learned the word bruh with an homey intimacy that is usually reserved for phrases like, “please, stop touching that” and “please, just try one bite of the [insert green food here].”
Jesus Govea’s poem was in the first pages of Poetry in February 2020. It was so fantastic that I immediately googled him. He did not exist. How does a living, published poet not exist? No professional Twitter, no novel or anthology references, not even a Facebook (I am very old). Govea was, at that time, a senior in high school. Joy ran through my body as I discovered José Olivares’ tweet about the poem (complete with a photo that I would later print and photocopy because I needed that poem RIGHT.NOW.FOR.MY.CLASS.)
Pausing the grammar for a day to beg my students to interpret this word, bruh, wrapped us in language, culture, excitement, and investment in the power of words. My students defined the nuance with such patience and care. You’ll have to read it to fully understand the power of bruh, but for a moment it all made sense for 36 freshman and a few stray seniors who slowwwwlllyyy pass my open doors to hear what we’re doing today.
A real student made this. My real students read it. It was, in the moment, like watching hundreds of baseball players walk out of a corn field to play one last time.
As I plan for fall 2020, I wonder what online learning will do to support and inhibit the language I want to foster in my classroom (huge credit goes to all the things Govea’s teachers did right). In particular, I wonder if the auto-correct options we often use (and often forget we’re using) will stop my students from their bruh moment. (As I type, red lines are insisting that this word does not even exist.)
In particular, I wondered if the two sites that I most often recommend are hurting more than they are helping. The balance between structuring writing in a way that makes sense while also structuring writing to honor language and culture is always one fraught with tension in English classrooms. Can we decolonize classroom spaces while using Grammarly.com? Does easybib.com just allow me to shift the blame of centering on whiteness to a machine? (Will the first rule of robotics absolve me? Bruh.)
I ran Govea’s linguistically rich poem through both programs (which did not seem to care that it was, in fact, a poem at all). Grammarly.com was perfectly satisfied: it offered the author a 99%, though it was concerned that it is plagiarized (to be fair, I did copy and paste it from the internet; to be honest, I am not paying currently for plagiarism software because I am seeking a higher plane of existence in which I create assignments that cannot be plagiarized). So far, so good.
Easybib.com, on the other hand, did try to change some word choices and, without the common sense of an outside reader, would have changed the content with the word changes. It did, however, push the comma+but rule that seems to be the most likely offender in a laundry list of high-school-style errors. It’s not a huge insight, but it does eat up teacher time and effort that could literally do anything else and feel more rewarded and more productive.
Neither website told me what I really want to know: how we can embolden and encourage students to create writing so beautiful that we eagerly tweet, re-tweet, copy, and spread it? Neither website dug into the hours upon hours of work and revision that carefully brainstormed, partnered, practiced, and performed these words. So far, we need a writer to do that.
