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Veronica Duque wearing her famous anatomy suit
Being an educator in the American public school system is one of the hardest jobs in our nation. Not only is the work itself challenging, but with constant battles for educational funding and a student body increasingly tethered to their electronic devices, most teachers in America and around the world are navigating uncharted territory when it comes to finding ways to keep their students engaged in their studies.
And that's why when Verónica Duque came across a form-fitting, anatomical bodysuit while doing some online shopping, she thought it would be perfect visual aid to convey vital information (pun intended) to her students in Spain, in a way they'd actually remember.
Turns out, the entire internet would remember it too.
Duque's husband tweeted a collage of images from the classroom lesson, which quickly went viral, with nearly 70,000 likes. Loosely translated, the tweet from her husband Michael reads: "Very proud of this volcano of ideas that I am lucky to have as a wife. Today she explained the human body to her students in a very original way. Great Veronica !!!"
In an interview with Bored Panda, Duque explained the thought process that led her to presenting her third-grade-class with a unique approach to learning.
"I was surfing the internet when an ad of an AliExpress swimsuit popped up," she said. "Knowing how hard it is for kids this young to visualize the disposition of internal organs, I thought it was worth giving it a try."
This is a teacher who cares. assets.rebelmouse.io
Online retailers like Amazon have a number of similar anatomical bodysuits for sale. While most people apparently purchase them for Halloween costumes or as gag gifts, it's now likely that Duque's viral moment will inspire some other educators around the world to take a similar approach to teaching the body basics to their students.
Halloween costume, check. Amazon
While some on Twitter were critical of the suit, the vast majority have praised Duque for her innovative approach to teaching. And the anatomical bodysuit is reportedly far from her first creative endeavor in the classroom.
"I decided long ago to use disguises for history lessons," she told Bored Panda. "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."
And when it comes to the inevitable, made-up controversy that tends to latch itself onto virtually anyone that goes viral, Duque said she says there's another far more controversial stereotype she hopes her brief moment of fame will help address.
"I'd like society to stop considering teachers to be lazy bureaucratic public servants," she said. "We're certainly not." Get this teacher a raise!
What really works about Duque's presentation is that it engages students in a sensorial experiences, which helps lessons stick (and let's face it, anything that engages he sense nowadays is a godsend). But there are other methods teachers/parents can try that don't involve wearing a suit with guts on 'em.
Here are some suggestions for hands-on "DIY experiments", courtesy of the Little Medical School website:
1. Building the respiratory system by creating a model lung with straws, balloons, bottles, and duct tape
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
2. Sculpting Body parts with Play Doh
(Grab free printable mats on 123Homeschool4Me)
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
3. Build a functioning heart model
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
Of course, these lessons are a little more geared towards younger students, but at the same time, it could provide some inspiration for how to get students more involved in their own learning, just like Duque did.
This article originally appeared six years ago.
Home printers are incredibly frustrating to use, and they aren't getting better.
Anyone who has ever printed a document at home knows the inevitable rage of dealing with your standard home-office inkjet printer. They're clunky, unreliable, and prone to a litany of problems—everything from drivers to ink cartridges to the WIFI is bound to malfunction at some point. And without a usable interface, they're extremely difficult to troubleshoot on your own.
The problem with printers is that they have been around since at least the 80s. And while the technology has improved in some ways, they remain incredibly buggy and difficult, and printer manufacturers have found infuriating ways to make them even more annoying and expensive to use. (Ink cartridge subscriptions, anyone?)
The boys from Office Space knew how to handle wayward printers.Giphy
But YouTuber Gus Johnson is here to help. He's created a perfectly simple guide for anyone who wants to get their printer set up and begin printing documents. Let's go!
First, Johnson walks us through how to make sure our printer is turned on. It's on? OK, great! Now we're ready to print—well, after the printer installs the 18 mandatory driver updates.
Once those are all done, it's time to print. Except it turns out the ink is low—well, not low, but low-ish, which means the printer won't print until you replace all of the cartridges. And no, you are not allowed to print in black and white if your magenta is low, just so you know.
The cartridges, by the way, are not compatible between printers and often not reliably sold in stores. So, Johnson shows us how to order them online and then wait. Days later, now we're ready to print! Well, after one more new cartridge update installs, and of course given that you can figure out how to get your supposedly "wireless printer" to talk to your laptop.
Johnson's video is a gut-busting watch for anyone who's grappled with a home printer and been tempted to pull an Office Space on it with a hefty baseball bat. Watch the whole thing here:
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
Printers are a really complicated piece of technology. But that shouldn't let them off the hook. Most of the problems spoofed in Johnson's video are solvable. And that's exactly the larger issue.
The Wirecutter writes that "there is some amazingly complicated technology in your printer, including the printheads, the ink, and the mapping software. You take your printer for granted, but that box can cover a piece of paper in millions of dots of precisely located, color-matched ink in a few seconds," and that most manufacturers take a loss on the actual machinery of a printer, hoping to recoup the earnings via ink sales later down the road.
If printers were the only piece of technology that seem to get worse and worse, bleeding us for more and more money while offering a rapidly deteriorating product, maybe we'd be willing to spare a few tears for the poor manufacturers. But this is a global problem affecting practically everything we touch—from social media, streaming content, journalism, and even restaurants. We pay more or the same for something that doesn't ever get any better, and often gets worse!
There's a term for this phenomenon. It's officially called "enshittification," or platform decay.
Writer Cory Doctrow, who coined the term, describes the pattern like this: "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."
Bill Maher described Silicon Valley's approach to technology as, "If it ain't broke, f*ck with it."
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
Doctrow even mentioned printers specifically in a recent Medium post:
"They make printer-scanners that won’t scan unless all four ink cartridges are installed and haven’t reached their best-before dates. They make printers that won’t print black and white if your $50 magenta cartridge is low. They sell you printers with special half-full cartridges that need to be replaced pretty much as soon as the printer has run off its mandatory 'calibration' pages. The full-serving ink you buy to replace those special demitasse cartridges is also booby-trapped — HP reports them as empty when they’re still 20% full. ... HP tricks customers into signing up for irrevocable subscriptions where you have to pay every month, whether or not you print, and if you exceed your subscription cap, the printer refuses to work, no matter how much ink is left."
Ink is outrageously expensive, but the printer companies exploit copyright laws to make sure you can't buy third party cartridges. When that fails, they push out security updates that break compatibility with anything but their own ink cartridges. These kinds of offenses go on and on.
In other words, long ago it was very exciting that we were able to print our own documents at home. Initial innovations focused on making that process better and better. But we're long past that now and the problems with most home printers will probably remain forever, or as long as manufacturers think they can keep squeezing our wallets. They're not really incentivized to make a printer that actually uses 100% of an ink cartridge or reliably connects to WIFI—they just want to make sure we buy the next one.
Johnson's YouTube rant is so funny precisely because it's true, but also because it finds humor in the frustration we all share at this cycle of enshittification. If we can't get our $300 printer to reliably spit out a basic black and white document, at least we can all laugh at our shared misery.
A hoarder's home.
Sometimes, it simply starts with one pile. Some receipts, pay stubs, and bills. Then another pile forms—a shirt you meant to hang up, some workout gear. The piles begin to multiply, and before you know it, they've erupted like tiny volcanoes spewing lava (and junk) around your home. If you don’t even know where to begin in terms of clean-up, you're not alone.
Cleaning Hoarding GIF by 60 Second DocsGiphy
Mai Zimmy, on the TikTok page Mom Life & Cleaning, knows this feeling all too well. With over 400,000 followers and 9.1 million likes, she's living proof that an inability to organize is more common than one might think. In one post, she confesses that she was once a hoarder while showing screenshots of her cluttered house in 2020. Her voiceover exclaims, "I was literally drowning in clutter" as the camera pans over a junk-filled bathtub she dubs the "trash tub."
Now, just a few years later, she has helpful tips on how to remedy the situation. She mentions, right off the bat, that she learned the fundamental methods from "Queen" Marie Kondo. Questions like "Does it spark joy? Have you used/worked with it in the last year? Remove duplicates" and more, made famous by Kondo, help her begin. This leads to the truthful realization, "You can't clean clutter."
The first step, she says, is to "Learn to let go." Per Kondo, she shows how to put things into categories and work through them one step at a time.
@maizimmy Ok. Maybe I was 1% of the problem 😆😅 people ask me all the time how I got my house in order when it was SO FAR GONE. The decluttering and cleaning schedule was HUGE. But even more than that was how my life has changed and just gotten easier over time. The babies aren’t helpless babies forever. It gets easier there for sure one they are in grade school. Plus, the obvious elephant in the room 😅 being a divorced mom in MY situation is about 100 times easier than what I was going through as a “married single mom”. I by no means want to promote divorce, but I do want to promote healthy marriages. No marriage counselor would have ever said my marriage was healthy and that is abundantly clear with how stress free life feels after leaving. #momlife #motherhood #cleantok #cleaningmotivation #cleanwithme #declutter @Procter & Gamble @Clorox
Step two is to "Implement a cleaning schedule." The idea is for that decluttering becomes an actual habit, etched into your mind. She urges people to "find cleaning schedules that work for you." She writes over a cleaning video, "I personally aim to do a nightly reset of the kitchen and living room before bed because these are the most-used parts of my home." She adds, "Then I have my weekly 1.5-hour reset and the occasional 'panic clean' before people come over lol."
Zimmy tells us that the third step is the most important to remember: "Give yourself some grace." She confesses, "When my home was at its worst, I was a 'married single mom' of three kids, two and under." She further relays that she had a full-time job, only to come home "to the second shift of taking care of everything for everyone." She then, adorably, throws some clothes into drawers, writing she still believes in the #NoFoldMethod.
She stresses the idea that "sometimes we're just in the thick of it. Things won't be so crazy forever, and to make the effort to do what you can in the free moments you have." She jokes, "As kids grow and life sorts itself out, you'll realize you were never the problem. Everyone else was." (She then notes in her TikTok description, "Okay, maybe I was ONE percent of the problem.")
Many in the comments seemed to really connect to her use of the phrase "married single mom." Zimmy also writes, "I by no means want to promote divorce, but I do want to promote healthy marriages. No marriage counselor would have ever said my marriage was healthy, and that is abundantly clear with how stress-free life feels after leaving."
In Zimmy's vulnerability, she gets to the root of what was or wasn’t working for her without vilifying anyone. Decluttering is so much more than tidying up, and many therapists explain what it can do to lift depression and anxiety. In her piece "The Many Mental Benefits of Decluttering" for Psychology Today, Diane Roberts Stoler, Ed.D. writes, "Excessive clutter often leads to feelings of shame, hopelessness, and guilt. The feelings can spiral, making it difficult to find the motivation to address the clutter. If someone is already suffering from depression, a cluttered home can worsen that depression. It is often a cycle. The more depressed you get, the harder it is to clean and organize."
Big and small changes, with a game plan and grace for yourself, can help break the shame spiral and get your living space actually "livable" again.