Hump Day--History Day

"...still I am pretty sure that some few centuries from now the Portneuf will revive itself, discard the concrete girdle, and send our descendants scurrying back up to the benchlands with wet feet."  -Requiem For A River, Senator Perry Swisher, late 60s?

Today we looked at some primary documents that demonstrated diverse, changing feelings on the building of the concrete levees in the late 1960's, and then we investigated current plans to move levees, create access points and beautify our river.  We also looked at historical photographs of sections of the river and recreated these photographs on our ipads.  

A few things I learned:

-The levees were approved federally, but it took decades, and a few years of severe flooding for Pocatellians to vote in favor of contributing the small % of the funds that the federal government required.  

-We have exciting ideas for Rainee/Centenial parks as well as Raymond Park.  I hope to live to see their fruitions.  http://river.pocatello.us/

-Having students re-create historical photographs is a really cool, accesable activity.  I want to figure out a way to incorperate it into my teaching.http://river.pocatello.us/basics/

-JTUs are an obsolete unit used to measure turbidity, but that's not going to stop us from using Eric's old turbidity testing kit and comparing it with the data from the probeware we got.  (Spoiler alert, we didn't get equivilent values.)