“If you have something that’s more familiar, that’s more relaxing,” Connelly explained. “Something that’s not familiar is exciting, but it’s not relaxing. I want my students to feel as relaxed as they possibly can, because I think then, that’s how you can learn.”
When she was preparing a lesson on pseudomonas, she thought of the most famous Mona, Mona Lisa as painted by Leonardo da Vinci. Searching online, she found a reproduction of the image on a bathing suit as well as Mona Lisa herself wearing a bathing suit.
That, she said, fit the bill because pseudomonas is a bacteria, and bacteria usually like a wet environment. “You can get an infection from pseudomonas in a hot tub,” Connelly noted.
Plus, “pseudo” means fake and the images of Mona Lisa, whether in or on a bathing suit, are fake. A former student told her she always remembers that one.
In a previous class on respiration, Connelly brought in a bunch of glass grapes to show what the alveoli, or small air sacs in the lungs, look like. She found that item in a thrift store.
The props change often, year-to-year and on the fly, depending on whether her students seem to understand her quirky connections.
Connelly said she thinks her background might have influenced her penchant for linking unlike things and using unusual props to illustrate the interior world of the human body.
With her father serving as a commander in the United States Navy, the family moved around as she was growing up. When she was trying to learn a new language, like Danish in Denmark or Spanish in Panama, she would try to relate the foreign words to things with which she was familiar.
“We moved around, and I was always being introduced to new things,” she said. “And this isn’t that different.