Staff Spotlight: Betsy Quero, Spanish Teacher at Scots College
Spanish teacher Betsy Quero's path to Scots College has taken her from Venezuela to England and a PhD in Wellington. A former interpreter and university language instructor, she joined the College in 2024 and, in July 2026, walked part of the Camino de Santiago on a teacher-training scholarship in Spain.
Growing up in Venezuela
Betsy Quero was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, and grew up in a middle-class family. Life was easy at first, school and after-school activities filling the days. When her parents divorced, she moved to a quieter city, Mérida, which she compares to Wellington: "It reminds me of Wellington, more similar in size," she says. "A smallish city, for Latin American standards."
Teaching was never part of the plan. Betsy studied languages because she wanted to see the world, not because she pictured herself in a classroom. When asked what shaped the direction her life took, she credits her parents. "For better or worse," she laughs.
A career built around language
Her career before New Zealand was built almost entirely around language. She began as a language instructor at university level in Venezuela, teaching Spanish to exchange students and English to Venezuelans, before taking a post as a language assistant in the north of England for a year, then six months at a publishing house in London. It was there she first thought the English were "very good at organising things," and that theirs was "the only way things could be organised" – an idea that only lasted until a week-long trip to France, where she found "things do work in France, but the way of organising things is totally different." It was an early lesson in something she now says every day to her own students: there is no single right way of doing things, only different ones – and language is often the door into seeing that.
A Wellington PhD and a return to teaching
A scholarship at a prestigious Applied Linguistics Department brought her to Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington to complete a PhD. Once in New Zealand, she tried more than once to change direction professionally, but the pattern proved impossible to shake. "Whenever I went for interviews, people kept saying, 'It seems like your passion is teaching as well,'" she recalls. "I just gave up and said, well, let's give teaching another go."
Her PhD research examined the vocabulary size of Spanish-speaking learners of English, and how much vocabulary is genuinely required to read medical textbooks with real comprehension. The focus on medical texts was not accidental. Alongside her studies, Betsy worked as a community interpreter, much of it in hospitals and counselling services, where the gap between everyday language and medical language became obvious fast. Her findings pointed to something she now carries directly into her teaching: it takes surprisingly fewer words to get a language off the ground. "There are very few words that do the job," she says. "It's really important that, as teachers, we focus on that."
Why learning a language matters
Betsy joined Scots College at the start of 2024. She had been covering a year-long fixed-term role at her previous school, and when the teacher she was covering for chose to return, her contract came to an end. Scots advertised a position, and she applied. She now teaches Spanish and speaks readily about why she thinks language learning matters, well beyond the classroom. "It opens their mind," she says. "These days people talk a lot about global citizenship. It makes them citizens of the world, which is what you'd expect from open-minded people." She quickly points out that even within one language, culture varies widely. Twenty-one countries speak Spanish, she notes, and "we are not all the same."
Walking the Camino de Santiago
She had a chance to see that up close this year. In July 2026, with support from a Spanish Government scholarship and Scots College, Betsy attended a teacher-training course on language, culture, and the Camino de Santiago at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Alongside lectures and workshops, she visited historic sites and walked part of the Camino itself. "It deepened my cultural knowledge and strengthened my understanding of contemporary Spain," she says, giving her authentic stories and resources to bring straight into the classroom, and Scots students a more genuine window into the Spanish-speaking world.
"Being with the students"
Ask Betsy what she enjoys most about teaching at Scots, and the answer comes without hesitation: "being with the students."
Betsy's own path has carried her far from that quieter city in Venezuela, through England and a Wellington doctorate, to a language classroom at Scots. It is exactly the kind of journey she now encourages her students to go out and make for themselves.