Back in 2006, I started my academic life at PUC Minas, and I had a great time learning Portuguese, Spanish, and English. When I was a university student studying linguistics and literature, I had to submit papers in my classes, and that included the phonetics class.
I’ve written a few papers on different aspects of speaking such as the Schwa sound, Connected Speech, Vowel and Consonant Sounds, and I confess I thought I just knew a whole lot about those topics. This happens to so many of us, freshmen college students. We think we are “the man”, but at the end of the day we find out that we are at the get-go. So, I was obviously proven wrong.
Well, and I hadn’t pictured that until I laid eyes on my graded assignment with a big FAIL on the front page. It wasn’t written FAIL, but it felt like that. I’d gotten a 65%, and not feeling okay with it, instead of questioning myself, I went up to my professor and asked her for a review. She calmly explained to me what had happened and I learned a simple lesson: DON’T ASSUME YOU KNOW EVERYTHING.
Turns out, I based the paper on my own perception rather than on academic theories that we had studied throughout the semester, which was not all bad or wrong, but my evidences were not enough to back up an academic paper. Thus, my grade was lower than I expected. My professor told me that what I had written made sense, but I didn’t have enough support to back up my ideas. She was right!
Later, I went on to find out that what I had written was not fully correct. My experiences have proven me wrong once again. However, that has played an important role in my career as a teacher. I have become someone who is SURE that we know only what we know. We don’t know what we don’t. It sounds pretty obvious, but how many of your friends talk about something they have only heard of, either on TV or on a TikTok video, and assume they are totally versed in it?
I’m happy to say that the feedback my teacher gave me on my paper didn’t make me lose interest in learning more about my field of expertise, and it actually made me raise that learning bar to the next level.
Learn as much as you can. Invest in your education. You never know too much!
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Rodrigo P. Honorato
