The Roman Road Project - The Ruts That Ruined It

On Friday, February 17, my students worked alongside DOTD to complete the concrete layer on our Roman Road Project. It was an arduous, day-long process that exhausted all of us, but we were so thrilled to be done with the construction phase of our little road/sidewalk.

 

We diligently placed signs and netting on the entry points. Our principal made an announcement to all our students to not walk on the wet concrete, and we had no issues getting everyone off campus for our three-day Mardi Gras break without damage to the road. I left campus that day feeling the glow of accomplishment. We had almost completed a service project that the kids had dreamed up nearly three years ago.

Just in case, we left orange netting and signs on all areas of the concrete.

Unfortunately, we didn't account for what might happen on an open campus during the Friday night neighborhood Mardi Gras parade. I returned after Mardi Gras break to this scene. Someone had ridden a bike down the whole length of the road leaving a high ridge on either side of the rut and effectively ruining our work. Many deep sighs were breathed. My students and I were devastated. We gave ourselves a whole day to be mad and grieve our lost work before we started brainstorming how to fix it.

We started by recalling how many ruts ancient Roman roads had. And then I reminded them of one of the most interesting articles I've read about Roman roads: "The Iron Streets of Pompeii" by Poehler, Van Roggen, and Crowther, which explored the Romans' use of molten metal to fill in cracks and strengthen damaged streets. (You can read a condensed version of the article here.) After many discussions about what to do, a few options emerged.

Option 1: Use Quikrete to fill in the ruts and then a sanding tool to flatten out the ridges. Not super Roman, but probably effective.

Option 2: Although I'm not going near molten metal of any kind with 12-year-old students assisting, I really love the idea of filling it in with epoxy resin. Maybe we could stain it the color of iron or put some glitter in it (alright, I might be watching too much TikTok). The contrast between the gray of the concrete and the shiny glitter would be striking.

Option 3: Leave it alone as a testament to vandals everywhere. The Romans dealt with vandalism all the time in their public spaces. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that we didn't end up with some other kind of symbol on our road:

(Yep, the Romans sometimes used phallic symbols like this one carved into their roads to advertise their brothels...so not really vandalism, but...pretty funny nonetheless.)

What do YOU think we should do?