Lesson #3163 - In Honor Of My Students

Maybe I've talked about the River Project before, but it's a Lab II project where my students have to try to develop a water treatment system for a unknown pollutant in a model river system. One of the factors they're trying to meet is to get conductivity (ion content) in the acceptable clean water range, which is always difficult because they also need to treat the pH, and any treatment for pH always dramatically increases the conductivity, too. So one group from this class of 2017 a few years ago decided to take my example suggestion of pig intestines (because it's an ion exchange resin and a cheaply available material) and add it to their river. You can see the clean river before the pollutant was added at the top, and Joe very proud of his pig intestine work in the middle . . . and then the very bad very gross very bad outcome after the pig intestine balls were left to float in the river. Billy at the bottom was proud of the sediment his group achieved, although there were plenty of issues with that river, too.

The lesson, as always, is that achievements are what you make of them. And that results are results, even when they're bad results.

More honoring of the class of 2017 tomorrow.