At my north-of-50 age, I feel like you’re supposed to start protecting the trivial cultural treasures of your particular generation and start railing against the crazy new trends, fashions, music, and expressions of the dumbed-down next generation—tomorrow’s treasures of today’s “kids.”
Happy to say when I hear and use the recent but already ubiquitous phrase, “You feel me?” I’m all down with the kids.
As a mid-career educator, I understand and use the phrase to mean, Do you understand this? Do you really get what I’m saying? Do you feel me?
It’s still so totally new in the history of our language that it’s still considered slang, and perhaps even a lazy, ambiguous, ultimately meaningless and simply trendy blip in the English lexicon, perhaps even threatening to shake the foundation of precise and correct English expression because it—gasp!—bubbled up from subcultures, perhaps even from lowbrow urban communities.
I love it and here’s why: by shifting the focus from the head to the heart – that is, from “Do you understand me?” to “Do you feel me?” – this phrase qualitatively changes the teacher/student relationship and opens the possibility for far greater flow of useful information.
When teachers say, “Do you understand me?” they’re asking the quintessential question of the teaching/learning experience. If you come to me to learn how to use the quadratic formula to solve math problems or how to examine and come to deeply appreciate a Shakespearean sonnet, and I tell you and show you how it all works, I want to conclude by checking whether everything makes sense to you and whether you’ve understood. So I ask, ”Do you understand that?” or “Does that make sense?” or “Do you get that?” Notice how all three questions focus on your head and the workings of your mind — Understanding and making sense of and getting are jobs for the brain.
“Do you feel me?” is a game-changer for students and teachers. It shifts the focus from the head to the heart and shifts the backdrop from getting something to really owning it and being able to make use of it. In my experience many students are too quick to think or say, “Yeah, I get it” for many reasons that have to do with their self-perception of their intelligence, thinking ability, or cognitive fire-power—stuff that goes on in their heads. They often say, “Yeah I get that,” but under the hood they’re really thinking, “Yeah, that all kind of mostly made sense as you were going through it, but I’m not totes sure I really get it.” It takes a very brave student in today’s worship-the-brain/thinking culture to say, “Not really. No, I didn’t get that.”
“You feel me?” has taken my teaching to a whole new level over the past few years. Students respond with their whole selves and communicate—through body language, social cues, and words—what’s really happening inside them. For me as an educator, student answers that come from the heart give me a much more accurate read than those that come from the head. In my pedagogical toolbox, “Do you feel me?” is a tool that enables me to build much better bridges with students than “Do you understand me?”
So thanks for the phrase, next generation. I feel you.
~Dr. Yo
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