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A teacher is going viral for giving a biology lesson wearing an anatomically correct suit

People are definitely paying attention now!

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.

Verónica Duque doesn't have that problem, at least not now. The then 43-year-old said she was looking for creative ways to engage with her students when she came across a form-fitting, anatomical bodysuit while doing some online shopping. She decided it was the perfect visual aid to convey vital information (pun intended) to her students in Spain.

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, 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."


Twitter

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.



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!


This article originally appeared on 12.28.19

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Walking past this artist's portraits will blow your mind, as one face transforms to another

Sergi Cardenas/Instagram

Optical illusions are always fun to play with, and the paintings of Sergi Cadenas are no exception.

If you walk up to one of Cadenas's portraits from one direction, you'll see a face. If you walk up to it from the opposite direction, you'll also see a face—but a totally different one. Sometimes it's a young face that ages as you walk from one side to another, like this one:

Or this one:

Sometimes it's a face that has the...um...face part removed.

And sometimes it's a face that simply becomes another face.

He can even turn Marilyn Monroe into Albert Einstein.

You can see that the painting is created in verticle 3-D lines of some sort and surmise that the two different faces exist on opposite, angled sides of those lines. But how? It almost feels like magic, the way the paintings transform as you walk past them.

This image of one of Cadenas's paintings up against a mirror lets you see both sides of it at once, which is super cool.

What's particularly impressive about Cadenas's art is that he is a self-taught artist who didn't even become a painter until he was 30. He got the idea for his dual-image oil paintings from "flip images" he'd seen when he was a kid. He creates his works in his home studio in small village in the Catalonia region of Spain and uses friends, family, and neighbors as models. It takes him about a month to complete one of his paintings.

How does he create the dual images? He fills an icing bag with painter's paste and uses a decorator tip to create verticle relief lines with two 45 degree angles. (Watching a neighbor who was a pastry chef gave him the idea.) Then he sketches out the basic facial features with pencil before painting the different faces from the two different sides.

"You have to get used to the lines being broken and not continuous on the canvas," Cadenas said in an interview with dw.com. But other than that, it's like any other painting. He completes one side, then completes the other.

"It's the magic, the surprise effect that I like best," he said.

Much of Cadenas's work hangs in people's private collections, though some museums and galleries such as the Galeria Jordi Barnadas gallery in Barcelona have some of his pieces on display.


Artist Makes Portraits That Age As You Move Around Themwww.youtube.com

Such great creativity and innovation, not to mention sheer talent. Here's to the artists who enrich our world with their incredible work.

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16 terrifying pics of Spain's growing desert you should show a climate-change doubter.

If nothing changes, southern Spain will be a desert by 2100.

If you're headed to the beach in southern Spain, this probably isn't what you're envisioning:

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

In July, this duo was spotted sunbathing at the Entrepenas reservoir in Duron, the second largest reservoir in Spain.

And the pics really are worth a thousand words.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

The reservoir has shrunken dramatically as water levels drop.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

The receding water has given way to cracked, arid soil...  

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

...and abandoned relics reflecting a region that once revolved around life on the water.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

Like the reservoir itself, tourism, and the local economy that benefits from it, are drying up too.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

So, what the heck is going on at the Entrepenas reservoir? Where has all the water gone?

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

The area's severe drought and dusty countryside are indicative of a larger force shaping landscapes across southern Spain.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

Yep, you guessed it: climate change.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

A 2016 study spelled disaster for the lush Mediterranean region due to human activity.

By 2100, southern Spain will have transformed into a desert, researchers have found — unless drastic measures are taken, like, now, to slash carbon emissions to curb the worsening effects of global warming.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

“The effect of the human is to deforest, to replace with agriculture and so on," lead author of the study, Joel Guiot of Aix-Marseille University, told The Guardian last year.

"You change the vegetation cover, the albedo, the humidity in the soil, and you will emphasize the drought when you do that," he continued, noting the Mediterranean is already very susceptible to the consequences of a warming planet. "If you have the [direct] human impact, it will be worse."

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

You don't have to be in southern Spain to see the alarming effects of climate change, of course.

In the U.S., researchers have pointed to similar dismal findings when it comes to global warming's impact on things like domestic tourism, expenses related to natural disasters, and food production.

Scientists, however, have not found a friend in the White House.

Unlike other prominent world leaders, President Trump has publicly rebuked the vast majority of climate scientists who say global warming is real and humans are to blame. He appointed Scott Pruitt — who's argued that the science surrounding climate change is still up for debate — to run the EPA. He's hellbent on resurrecting a dying, dirty coal industry and, in June, announced plans to pull the U.S. out of the world's best hope to collectively confront the woes of global warming: the Paris climate agreement.

Why doesn't Trump care?

Mother Nature certainly doesn't care about our national borders.

Similar consequences seen in southern Spain can also be seen in the U.S. and around the world.

Wildfires scorch the land near Santa Barbara, California, in July 2017. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images.

We need to act. Now.

Or else sad-looking beach day photos will become the norm.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

To learn more about climate change and to take action, visit the Sierra Club.

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These streets used to honor a Spanish dictator. Now they'll honor the women he persecuted.

From 1939 to 1975, Spain lived in fear of a dictator named General Francisco Franco.

During his rule, Franco captured and murdered political prisoners, suppressed freedom of religion, forbade languages, and created a network of police to secretly spy on citizens.

On one hand, calling him "The Hitler of Spain" seems like an advantageous simplification. On the other hand, here's a picture of him:

Uncanny! Photo via AFP/Getty Images.

Franco's regime was toppled decades ago, but the memory of him still haunts and angers modern-day Spain.

When a statue of Franco went up outside a Catalan cultural exhibit in Barcelona, it was decapitated, defaced, and completely toppled within days.

The wounds left by Franco are still relatively fresh, so any image or reminder of him is a sensitive matter. "[We] have a dispute anytime anybody says or shows anything to do with Franco," Bru Rovira, a Catalan journalist told The New York Times.

A defaced statue of Franco in Barcelona. Photo by Pau Barrena/AFP/Getty Images.

Unfortunately, a quick walk through Spain's major cities turns up reminders of Franco everywhere.

In Valencia, Barcelona, and more, streets are named after people who served in Franco's regime. General José Millán Astray, attorney Adolfo Muñoz Alonso, and minister José Enrique Varela were all part of Franco's dictatorship. All three have streets named after them to this day.

Fortunately, that will be changing soon, as Spain announced plans to remove every street name attached to the Franco regime.

The measure to erase Franco's regime was first introduced in 2007 but went widely unenforced. Last year, a political swing to the left put the issue back on the agenda.

Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images.

Even better? They're going to rename the streets after influential women.

Women are vastly underrepresented in Spanish street names (except for saints), giving the country a brilliant opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. In February 2017, street names in Spain will start bearing the names of women who were persecuted under Franco's regime,like Soledad Cazorla, the first public prosecutor to specialize in gender violence, as well as several civil rights leaders and activists.

Soledad Cazorla visiting Niger in 2008. Photo via Montserrat Boix/Wikimedia Commons.

Other streets will pay tribute to prominent Spanish artists and innovators — women like novelist Carmen Martín Gaite and Ángela Ruiz Robles who invented the first e-reader in 1949. Many more will bear the names of internationally influential figures like Rosa Parks, Frida Kahlo, and Jane Austen.

This move is a long overdue show of gratitude to women who have helped shape Spanish culture and a perfect way to heal the wounds left by Francisco Franco.

When it comes to street names around the world, women are vastly underrepresented. This will go a long way in closing that gap.

A 2015 study of seven major metropolises found that less than a third of streets were named after women. This might seem like a small problem, but street names are important.

Savile Row in London, Broadway in New York, Grafton Street in Dublin, Bourbon Street in New Orleans — these names are more than just markers on a map. They're cultural epicenters that help define a city's identity. The same goes for streets named after people like Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson, Peter Jennings, or Warren, Ohio, town hero Dave Grohl. Not having a proportionate amount of streets named after prominent women hardly makes any sense.

Soon, the names of women will play their part in helping to define Spain's identity and values from the street level on up. Other countries around the world should consider following suit.

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