Keeping a classroom full of children interested in human anatomy isn’t necessarily an easy task, but one teacher found a way to make sure her lesson was impossible to ignore.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Verónica Duque took a decidedly different approach to teaching her students about the human body, turning herself into a walking anatomy diagram by wearing a full-body suit to class, per Sky News.
The teacher wore an outfit mapping out what lies beneath the skin, giving her students a visual guide to the positioning of muscles, bones and internal organs.
Rather than asking the children to imagine where everything sits inside the body, Duque effectively gave them a life-sized model standing right in front of them.
Her unusual lesson attracted widespread attention after her husband Michael shared a photograph of her wearing the suit on X.
Clearly impressed by his wife’s commitment to the classroom, he wrote: “Very proud of this full of ideas woman that I am lucky to have as a wife,” before adding: “Today she taught anatomy to her students in a very original way. The kids went crazy!”
The reaction online was similarly enthusiastic, with people praising Duque for finding an inventive way to make the subject more engaging.
One person responded: “That’s thinking out of the box wish we had more like her,” while another comment, translated into English, read: “It is fortunate to have professionals of this caliber, always seeking to leave their mark on their students.”
Duque later explained that the idea came to her after she spotted the anatomy outfit while browsing online.
“I’ve been teaching for 15 years now,” the third-grade teacher explained to Bored Panda, adding: “I teach natural and social science, art, as well as English and Spanish.”
She said: “I was surfing the internet when an ad of an AliExpress swimsuit popped up. Knowing how hard it is for kids this young to visualize the disposition of internal organs, I thought it was worth it giving it a try.”
And anatomy isn’t the only subject where Duque has experimented with a more visual style of teaching.
“I decided long ago to use disguises for history lessons. I’m also using cardboard crowns for my students to learn grammatical categories such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Different grammar kingdoms, so to say,” she said.
Duque isn’t the only teacher to have used clothing to bring anatomy to life.
Dutch biology teacher Debby Heerkens adopted a similar approach in 2015, removing layers that demonstrated organs, muscles and the skeletal structure, per CNN.
Recalling her students’ initial reaction, Heerkens said: “At first they were a little bit in shock because they thought ‘the teacher is taking off her clothes,’ until, they saw what was underneath.”
For Duque, meanwhile, the creativity behind the lesson also carries a broader message about the work teachers put into their profession.
“I’d like society to stop considering teachers to be lazy bureaucratic public servants. We’re certainly not,” she added.
Featured image credit: MART PRODUCTION / Pexels
