PhD in Spanish LITERATURE
I’m Clara Verónica Valdano — most people call me Vero. I earned my PhD in Spanish at UIUC and have spent years teaching Spanish, most recently at Stanford Online High School and before that at Chabot College, Lafayette College, and Universidad San Francisco de Quito. Over those years I worked with every kind of learner imaginable: nervous beginners, heritage speakers reconnecting with family, graduate students preparing to read in Spanish, professionals who needed the language for their careers.
What I learned is simple: people don’t learn a language from a textbook alone. They learn it from conversation, patience, and feeling genuinely understood. That’s what I bring to every lesson.
My approach
Every learner is different, so every set of lessons looks a little different. But a few things stay constant:
- We speak from day one. Even beginners leave the first lesson having said something real in Spanish.
- Your goals set the syllabus. A trip to Buenos Aires and a DELE exam need very different preparation — we build around yours.
- Mistakes are the method. My classroom is a place to be wrong comfortably, often, and on the way to being right.
- Culture comes along for the ride. Language and the world it opens are inseparable, so we explore both.