Francisco Rosales-Varo

By far the worst professor I've ever had. He is rude to his students and is very passive aggressive. For every subjective assignment it feels as though there is an unsaid set of rules that he expects you to follow, when getting feedback he would get upset at things that were nowhere on the rubric and not grammatical errors. He grades based on the vibe of the day and if you upset him once he holds a grudge. He goes on rants in class about how he hates our generation. I don't know what happened a couple years ago that made him go from such good reviews to this.

First Spanish class that I took at Columbia, and I absolutely enjoyed it. He is an extremely kind professor and very passionate about the topics discussed in class. Not only that, he takes time to check if everyone understands all of the content we discudd. Overall, take this class for SPAN3300 if you can. No regrets.

If someone were to ask me who has been the worst professor I've had so far at Columbia/Barnard, it would be Francisco. Not only does he straight up hate his students, but he is the most condescending person I've ever met in my life. If anyone in class asked a clarifying question about an assignment or task we had to complete, he would get annoyed, roll his eyes, and explain the assignment as though we were little kids. I genuinely do not know how he has a gold nugget on this website. He is also the least understanding person when it comes to absences. The class itself is also very boring, and I always dreaded going to class. The entire class consists of learning straight from the textbook, writing some sentences down, and then discussing with a partner on repeat, maybe like 6-8 times a class. He brought no positive energy to our class, no fun at all; everyone did not want to be there. Do not take his class, there are so many better options.

Y'all know that scene in mean girls when regina is writing in the burn book? Ya. thats all I have to say about this professor.

By the end of the semester, Francisco had accused nearly half of our class of cheating on tests due to a gadget in Canvas that tracks activity on the website. He was incredibly pessimistic during class times and very mean over email. It was clear that he did not like students who struggled more with the language or didn't have a good Spanish accent when talking. There were many times that he was outright rude and condescending during class, and it made us very fearful of asking questions. If you want to have a teacher who cares for you as a person, DON'T TAKE HIS CLASS.

I took Spanish Pragmatics with Francisco this year to complete an elective requirement for the Hispanic Studies major. It was easily the most organized class and the most prepared teacher I've had at Columbia so far. Every class is taught with powerpoint presentations (that are also available on Courseworks) and he give many helpful handouts with short exercises and examples. You're going to review movies, clips, very short texts. Very few "theoretic" knowledge is required (most students are not native speaker or linguistics/philosophy majors), most of it is immediately applied to examples and concrete stuff. Very easy to understand and great if you're planning to study abroad in the Hispanic world. The final proyecto is very long but doable if you start in advance. No midterm/final! Overall a great class!

I learned about past tense, imperfect and preterite tenses of 4 chapters that built on Elementary 1 pretty well. Francisco teaches ONLY in Spanish so this class is extremely immersive and throws you into the language and helps with your conversational skills.

Spanish, subjunctive, indicative , vocab

This course helped get me back into Spanish after not taking it for a few years. It was effective in improving my conversational skills and confidence in speaking the language.

Goated. So lenient with extensions, very passionate about subject matter, engaging in class. GENEROUS GRADER. Definitely take this class for Advanced Lang through Content.