Scoutmaster Podcast 10

And now, to you, Scoutmaster.

So three scout leaders, two men and one woman, are attending a training event, and they're doing a hike, and they get to a river, and they need to get across, and the first man says, well, the scout is prepared.

So he gets out his hatchet, and he has some rope, and he's going to do a pioneering project to get him across the river. And the second man says, a scout is physically fit, so I'm going to swim across the river. And the woman asks directions and finds there's a bridge about 50 yards upstream.

This is podcast number 10.

Hello.

Welcome back to the Scoutmasters podcast. Once again, thanks to all of you who have sent emails or left comments and ratings on iTunes. I sure do appreciate it. This time around, we're talking about in Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less, some thoughts about the patrol system. Then there's an interesting story about cleaning up after camping, some thoughts about choosing a troop, and then we're going to end up with a Scoutmasters minute about, quote, difficult, unquote, scouts. So I hope you enjoy it, and we're going to go ahead and get started.

Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. First post in 1920. Baden Powell put together a small booklet called Aids to Scoutmastership. In it, you will find the basis of the scouting movement as explained by its founder. And I think it's a particularly valuable resource for Scoutmasters and Scout leaders.

I'll have a PDF version of Aids to Scoutmastership on the blog at scoutmaster.typepad.com so that you can share this. During this podcast, I want to talk about the patrol system. The patrol really is the irreducible unit of scouting. You can have a troop, but if you don't have patrols, you're leaving out the heart of scouting. What Baden Powell had to say about this, the patrol system is the one essential feature in which scout training differs from that of all other organizations. And where the system is properly applied, it is absolutely bound to bring success. It can't help itself.

It's absolutely bound to bring success. The formation of boys into patrols from six to eight and training them as separate units, each under its own responsible leader, is the key to a good troop.

You can't have a good troop without having good patrols. So how do we have good patrols? One of the ideas is patrols have to be independent functioning units. They have to have their own leadership. Every boy has to have responsibility within the patrol. They need to be able to work together well to achieve whatever goals they set for themselves.

This is where scouting really happens. Now, how do we do this in today's society? How do we make this happen? Well, there's a couple of impediments to this. One of them is that scouting used to be and patrols used to be much more geographically based.

I mean, in a small town or in a city, boys lived in the same neighborhood. They went to the same school, and they were pals. And this was the natural gang that Baden-Powell talks about that would be formed into a patrol.

This is just kind of a natural affinity group. And so having a patrol meeting would be easy because they could just walk over to another guy's house and have their patrol meeting, and that would be it. Now, today, if your part of the country is like my part of the country, and I'll just assume that it is for the sake of argument, most of your scouts are being driven to the meeting. Most of your scouts are riding a bus to school, and they may live 15, 20 minutes apart from their counterparts, their buddies and their friends, that kind of natural gang. So making patrols up out of a geographic location is really not very practicable anymore.

Now, our troop gets together and meets three or four weeks every month on a Monday night. And this is what we came up with to try and reemphasize the patrol aspect of scouting.

And that is that we turned one of our troop meeting nights on a Monday, at least one every month, sometimes two, into patrol meetings. There would be no troop trappings. There would be no opening for the troop or anything like that. It would be you get together that night with your patrol, and you work on what your patrol wants to work on. Well, what does a patrol want to work on? Oh, it really depends on the scouts.

They might want to work on some kind of advancement work, or they might want to hone one particular skill. They might want to just play a game of basketball.

They might want to take a hike. They might want to go up to the local pizza parlor and have pizza. Whatever it is they're doing, they need to do it on the patrol system and with their leadership and everything like that. But they can function independent of any other oversight or any other leadership structure. And they learn to function as a patrol.

Now, we've been doing this for the past several months, and it has a promising start. Our scouts are still getting used to the idea. But I think it's going to be one way to really strengthen the patrol concept. And then we'll take that onto an outing. Let's take the patrol concept and let's go camping. Each patrol naturally is planning and preparing and purchasing their own food for the weekend. And this gives them one natural thing to kind of rally around and to work together as a team. The way we expand on that is to make sure that they are camping in their own setup and they're sharing their own tents and they are at a reasonable distance from other patrols so that they're not continually in each other's business and interfering. How about the program for a weekend outing? Well, what we're trying to emphasize now is that patrols need to assemble a program for that outing.

Now, they sometimes will share that responsibility out amongst themselves. And each patrol will come up with an aspect of a particular theme or something like that that they can emphasize during the course of the outing. And they might do this in kind of a round-robin fashion and spend a couple hours working on each individual patrol's interest. Or they might just work by themselves.

We've had a couple of instances where we've been able to get to camp on a Friday night and we'll all be fairly close together. And then during the course of the day Saturday, we send the patrols out on their own.

They'll go and find a place where they can backpack to and set up and set themselves out. We don't send adults with them. We will send somebody out to check in with them and see if there's anything they need and make sure things are running smoothly.

But this gives them a great deal of independence and they just love it. And they naturally sense that this is what scouting really is. This is where it really happens at that patrol level. These are a couple of promising things that I think can be incorporated into just about any troop. Yes, we have our outings that are just basically going to be pretty much troop-based activity-wise. We might go to a camperee or some other similar activity in which, you know, basically the troop is the irreducible unit in a lot of ways. For the most part, we work really hard on emphasizing patrols.

Now, I think competition is overemphasized sometimes and that it can be really a blunt instrument in scouting. And if you make everything a competition, well, you're kind of short-selling some of the ideals of scouting. But competition amongst patrols can be a very healthy thing if it's kept in the context of it being very positive.

So we do have an inter-patrol competition every once in a while, maybe about every five or six months in the troop, that the stealth leaders run. And the older scouts who are running their troop, in our troop it's called a venture patrol. This would be the senior patrol leader and his cohorts. They get to function as a patrol in this competition, and it makes for a lot of fun.

We also have a standard patrol award that is awarded on a monthly basis based on participation and advancement and patrol dynamics. Each patrol can earn that award by meeting certain benchmarks. And then out of all the patrols that earn the award, one is declared the honor patrol for that month.

Here's two or three ways to build patrols within the troop. But let's remember these things. Let's remember what our founding intentions were. That patrols were the most important unit of scouting, not necessarily troops, but patrols. In order for patrols to work, they have to have a certain amount of independence, and they have to have some very high expectations of being able to function together. I'd be very interested to hear how you emphasize the patrol system in your troop.

This has to be the truth, folks, because... This has to be the truth, folks, because there is no way... This has to be the truth, folks. This has to be the truth, folks. This has to be the truth, folks. This has to be the truth, folks. This has to be the truth, folks. This has to be the truth, folks. This has to be the truth, folks. Keith Monroe was the scoutmaster of Troop 2 in Santa Monica, California for the first 42 years of the troop's existence.

He was also a writer, and he wrote for Scouting Magazine, very involved in scouting until his death in 2003 at the age of 88. Keith's pseudonym for some of his writing was Rice E. Cochran, and I have a book called Be Prepared, The Life and Illusions of a Scoutmaster. I've read a couple of excerpts from it on the podcast before, because some of it is just screamingly funny. As a matter of fact, I don't know where I got this from, but somebody told me that this book was the basis of the Clifton Webb movie, Mr. Scoutmaster. Here's part that I thought you would be interested in.

The littered appearance of our campgrounds by the end of an outing always exasperated me, and I insisted on thorough cleanups. But at first, these took an interminable time.

When our scouts were instructed to walk through camp and gather up all the trash in sight, they wandered around like the spirits of the dam, aimless and without emotion.

Most of the orange peels and paper stayed on the ground until I personally pointed them out one by one and directed some scout by name to pick each one of them up. At last, I discovered how to get the job done rapidly.

Ten minutes before we were ready to depart, I announced the last thing we're going to do before we go home is to auction off these candy bars I have here.

The bidding will be by pieces of trash. Whichever scouts collect the most trash will be able to bid the highest. You've got eight minutes to pick up everything you can find. That always worked, because ten minutes later, with the camp as bare as if jackals and scavengers had been there, and with the victorious scouts munching their candy bars, and with the Scoutmaster smug in the knowledge that he had mastered his scouts once again, we all went home rejoicing.

You know what I found really funny here, because I can picture this in my mind. When our scouts were instructed to walk through the camp and gather up all the trash in sight, they wandered out about like the spirits of the damned, aimless and without a mulch.

Anyway, I'm sure we'll find some other interesting things in this book. Again, it's Rice Cochran, Be Prepared, The Life and Illusions of the Scoutmaster, and it is out of print as far as I know. But it's not that difficult to find from some of the used booksellers online. I cannot see. I have not brought my specs with me. I have not brought my specs with me.

You know, I love to go backpacking. It's always been one of the favorite things I've,

my favorite outdoor activities. My dad used to take us backpacking when we were kids, and we did a couple of family trips that way, and some I very fondly remembered.

So several years ago, I decided that I wanted to cover a few more miles, and I had a free week, and I decided that I would go backpacking, and I had a buddy drive me out to the trailhead and took off for four or five days of solo backpacking, and I ended it early because I could not stand it. I really did not enjoy myself at all. It didn't take long to figure out why. It was because I did not get to go with the people that I liked to go backpacking with, my fellow leaders and the scouts from the scout troop.

So I learned a little something about myself and about the nature of some of the scouting activities that we do. I recently had somebody ask me, they were in a bit of a conundrum about which troop of several choices their son should join. He described one real kind of like super troop, one really kind of overachieving big giant troop that had lots and lots of amenities in their own scout hut, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And one of the other choices, I mean, understand this guy and his son had visited like seven different troops and a couple of them twice. I know, a little more energy than I have. But one of the other troops was kind of smaller and maybe not as high functioning and everything and had a bit less to recommend it. But the fellow's son had been trying to convince one of his buddies from his Webelos den to go and join the big troop with him and wasn't getting anywhere. Most of the other boys in the troop were going to join the smaller troop, the one that looked less desirable on paper. So my advice to him was, well, you know, would your son be happy going backpacking on his own? Or would he rather be playing in the backyard with a bunch of his buddies? If he was able to go to Disneyland on his own, what kind of a time do you think he would have? Would he be able to go out and make friends and enjoy the experience, you know, with new friends on his own? Or would he kind of find it hollow because he wasn't enjoying it with the people that he knew and loved? You know, there's really not a right or a wrong answer.

It's just a matter of personality. Did I, you know, that would be the way that I would arrive at that decision. And the other thing is, and it's important to remember this, scouts don't marry troops. They don't sign a contract with a troop.

It's not till death do us part. What it is, is it's more like buying a pair of shoes. Try on a few pairs sometimes before you find one that fits real well.

And it's the same with a scout troop. I've had no qualms at all about boys changing from my scout troop to one that's a better fit for them. Well, anyway, how do you choose a scout troop?

Is it based on the amenities of the troop and things like that? Yeah, I guess in part. But it's also got to do with the broader concepts of being able to move on in scouting. A lot of guys are going to need their buddies to do that.

That's right. It's time for a Scoutmaster's Minute.

I'm on my hands. Hey, scouting is not all peaches and cream. It's great. But it's not all, it's not all just sailing along on flowery beds of ease.

Every once in a while, difficulty arises. And you're going to have some difficult scouts. And when I say difficult, it might be difficult in many different ways. It might be behavior. They might just be kind of cussed. It may be a physical or developmental barrier of some kind that causes you some difficulty.

You know, I'm talking about learning disabilities or physical capabilities, lack of physical capabilities. You know, we really have to educate ourselves to meet the challenge of working with boys who are challenged in one way or another. I think we really, we really have to guard against making broad assumptions and having prejudices. And we have to really think and study what's going on. Amanda at Ballast Existence, a blog written by a lady who is, has been excluded and bullied her whole life and who has had difficulties because of her autism. Yet is, you know, however physically limited she may be, is just brilliantly eloquent in writing about her disability.

And here's something that she wrote that I think is important for us as scout leaders to understand. She says this, I've read in the past about schools where children work together to solve problems and where the kids who learn faster in any particular area, instead of being separated out and told they're special and above everyone else, end up being taught to use their talents to cooperate with the other children. Winning or getting ahead isn't the goal here. They, and all the children, tend to learn more than they do in the more kind of, you know, competitive cutthroat schools. If schools have to exist, that sounds like a much better set of principles to run them on.

Children aren't born knowing how to behave towards other children. I'll say that again. Children aren't born knowing how to behave towards other children.

None of them are autistic or non-autistic. They have to learn that everyone's dependent on everyone else. That people aren't better than others just by being better at something. And that the tendencies to do bad things to other people are things we all have to fight and not give into if we want society to be remotely just to anyone. That's one nice thing about scouting is, see, we're not competitive and we're not exclusive and we're not elitist.

We're not cutthroat. At its best, we're a safe haven for learning to live and work with just about anyone, no matter what their abilities or disabilities, and being able to benefit from the experience. So that's all for Scoutmaster Podcast number 10.