Scoutmaster Podcast 104

And now to you, Scoutmaster, Seems like it's a little early in the year to start thinking about this, but we've already started planning our summer and our high adventure trip for the Scouts. We're going up to Canada again, going to go for a week of canoeing. You need to start thinking this early because you don't want to be up there in mosquito season. You go before or after mosquito season. The mosquitoes are huge. They're just too big.

That's why you don't go up during mosquito season. You know, you put repellent on, the mosquitoes come along, they grab you, they take you down to the lake, they wash you off and then they sting you- Yeah, that's how big they are.

And then they smack you in the head and take your wallet. Oh yeah, You don't want to go up there in mosquitoes. Hey, this is podcast number 104..

Hey, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. It's good to have you. Look at in the mailbag here. We got a message from Tom Gillard down in Tallahoma, Tennessee, And Tom had this to say. He says, talking about clinkers, I heard one the other day.

I overheard a group of Scouts talking and one of them was a little concerned about a merit badge that her son had been working on. She was worried that he hadn't worked on in about a year and wondered if he had to start it all over again or if he could just use the requirements he already had signed off.

So I piped up and I said no, once they're signed off, the requirements are good. He can work on them anytime he wants. Then another Scouter said no, no, if any of those requirements are over a year old, he has to do them again.

Well, I hadn't ever seen this anywhere And so I questioned him about it. I asked him if it was in the new guide to advancement. He backed down a little bit, said it was a troop policy. Aha, a troop policy because they didn't want to have a whole lot of unfinished merit badges on the books. Oh, that's a clinker. Yeah, you found one, Tom.

He turned around, he bit his tongue and he walked away. That's classy. That's classy, Tom. I'm glad you did that. Oh my, Yeah, those clinkers are out there, folks, They're out there. We find them every once in a while.

That merit badge one, that one's been around since they've had merit badges. I think There's a lot of urban legends that float around about merit badges, And I'm going back 100 podcasts ago. That's right.

100 podcasts ago we did a piece about merit badges. I'm going to replay that for you and the story we told back then. But before we get there, I've got a little something to say in Scoutmaster's ship in seven minutes or less.

And guess what? For the second week running, it's under seven minutes.

Oh, I am so excited I'll tell you. Hey, listen, I would love to have you get in touch. The only way that this whole thing works, as a matter of fact, is when you get in touch. I need you to stay in touch.

So your questions, your comments, your reflections, your baseless accusations, your funny stories, That's what we want to hear. We want to share them with the rest of the scouting community through the Scoutmaster podcast.

So I'm going to tell you right now how you can do that. You can email me, Clarke Green, at scoutmastercgatverizonnet- scoutmastercgatverizonnet. You can also just go to the scoutmaster blog, scoutmastercgcom. You can use the comment form there, That's right. Plus, we're on Facebook and Twitter and all those places. I'll tell you more about that a little bit later on.

You can also call. I need you to be in touch.

Get in touch this week, won't you? So we've got a pretty full slate for this podcast, So let's get started In seven minutes or less.

Last week I answered an email question about a young troop, new Scoutmaster, brand new troop, As a matter of fact- And the question basically came down to: you know, until these guys have a little bit more experience, should I just be leading everything? And my answer was: well, no, you should be enabling them to lead themselves.

And this kind of got me to thinking about this one question: What are the qualifications for a youth leader? What are the qualifications for a youth leader?

Dial back, Let's go back about 25 years. I'm a young Scoutmaster.

I want to do this right. I've been trained, I've gone through all this stuff, I've listened to what a lot of people had to say, I've read things, And so I decided: to have a good troop, We have to have really capable youth leaders.

And to have really capable youth leaders, we need to have some qualifications. So I sit down and I'm used about it for a little while, I ask around and we think, okay, well, you know, we're going to talk about maybe having the qualification for patrol leader. The patrol leader needs to be first class or above, And the senior patrol leader needs to be at least a star scout or above, And a patrol leader needs to be at least 13.. And maybe the senior patrol leader needs to be at least 14..

And so, you know, we get out the typewriter at the time and we, you know, put and we put this into effect and we make a policy, And then we wait anxiously for things to get better. Hey, we wrote a policy and it's designed to make things better, So that means that in the next six months things are going to get better. I'm trying to put our expectations into policy statements and into job descriptions and things like that. It's not going to work. Let me stretch my basketball analogy again.

You know, you go join a basketball team and you put somebody into the center forward spot. Do you have them sign a contract?

No, Do you have them read a job description of what the center forward does? Does anybody ever do that? I don't think so. And it's got to be the same type of thing with scouting leadership positions, to my mind. And very shortly after I wrote those qualifications, there were anomalies.

Hey, there was a guy who was maybe 12 years old, who would make a really great patrol leader, And there was a guy who was maybe 13 years old who would make a really great senior patrol leader And that's who everybody wanted to have. And why couldn't we go ahead and do that?

And yeah, he wasn't quite star yet, but he would be star in a month or two, or he wasn't quite first class yet, But you know he was. And then you start looking at the policy and you start thinking maybe this isn't such a good idea. And it isn't. You can't create things. You can't create what you want by writing a policy or a procedural or a job description. You can't create that thing.

You created a different way. If none of these qualifications worked, for me what works?

What is the qualification for a boy to become a youth leader, To enter into that progression of developing skills and things towards leadership? What qualification must he have? And the only qualification is that he is a scout, That's it. It doesn't matter if he's been there for one week, one month or three or four years. He is qualified to become a leader And he should be able to nominate himself for election to any leadership position that's going to be elect.

To my mind, the qualification for leadership is: is he a scout? Yes, does he want to do it, Yes.

Well, there you go. And then we work with whatever raw material the scouts give us through their elections. If, if they elect an 11 year old patrol leader, they elect an 11 year old patrol leader, we work with that.

We do what we have to do. If we have somebody who's just a total raw recruit, never seen very much in the way of a Boy Scout troop, and he becomes a patrol leader, What are we going to do?

Well, the first thing we're not going to do is we're not going to walk him through the 75 points of being a patrol leader and a lengthy job description about exactly what he's going to have, what. What's going to happen next?

How about letting him just do this in small bites? Let's not have him drink from a fire hose, Okay, Let's just let him discover this job in small bites. And maybe he needs a little bit more mentoring than that 14 year old who's a star scout who just got elected to be a patrol leader. Maybe he needs a little bit more mentoring in that wise. And maybe there's a guy in the troop, an older scout, junior assistant scout, master, who can take the time and work with him step by step. But he'll go to his first patrol meeting and he'll have no idea what to have.

What do I do now? Well, you got to take- let's have you take- attendance and collect dues and check uniforms.

How about that? That's pretty easy.

So he'll give that a shot. And we start talking about a camping trip coming up.

Well, what do you have to do to get ready for the camping trip? I'm not really sure.

Well, what are you going to sleep in? I guess we're going to sleep in a tent.

Where do the tents come from? The troop has them, right? Yep, the troop has them.

Now, how are you going to get them and get them to where you're going to go and take care of them while they're there and make sure they get back to the troop? Well, I guess somebody will be responsible to do that.

Well, do you know what the name of that person is? Oh, that's that quartermaster thing. Right, I read about that, I saw that somewhere. I heard about that. Yeah, that's what it is.

How are you going to eat? Well, I guess somebody's going to have to buy the food and stuff like that.

Well, how are you going to make that happen? Question after question after question, And you know. Finally he becomes a patrol leader. That's much Now.

I've already talked about that last week, but this is this is what I think is real important. We have the misapprehension that because we're the adult, because we are the mature, skilled leader, because we're the mature, skilled instructor, that we're the only ones that should be doing that.

Well, that, no, no, no. That's not the way that it works, The way the program is written. Scouts get these broad, wonderful, comprehensive opportunities, And what we do is we take and we build on each successive step they make in competence. And we do that not by doling out progressive responsibility to them, but by giving them encouragement and information each step of the way.

They're fully responsible when they have the name patrol leader, they're fully responsible, And so we work along with them. Each scout is going to progress through these levels of competency individually, at an individual speed. There's no regimentation about this at all. Some patrol leaders will develop very quickly. Some will develop very quickly in one area and not very much in another. Some of them will develop a little more slowly across all areas.

You, just you. Each one of them is an individual, And so our style has to fit each individual: The mentoring and the things that go on need to fit each individual scout.

And so we have to talk to them- and, you know, not in the middle of their patrol meeting, not in the middle of a camp out or an activity that they're running- but we do need to speak with them and we need to get an idea of what's going on and we need to observe. And that's the method, That's the process of scouting.

So here's the two or three typical scenarios that I get. First of all, the first scenario is: I have a brand new troop. They're all young. Nobody knows how to do anything.

What do I do next? Well, I think I told you just now. The next one is: I have 30 new young scouts. I have 15 older scouts. The older scouts don't seem to be very interested in doing any of the leadership, but the young scouts are all willing to do it And the older guys are just sitting back not doing much.

Well, that's fine, You know. If the older guys aren't interested in leadership and they're not interested in advancement and they just want to go camping and they're not making trouble, let them be. If they're going to elect themselves a 11 or 12 year old senior patrol leader, that's fine with me.

You know we work with the resources that the scouts bring to us. We don't get to pick and choose necessarily which those resources are going to be. We're going to work with whatever resources they bring to us And we're going to base it at the patrol.

So get patrol leaders elected and start working with each one of them individually. If you're big enough to have more than one patrol, then you get a senior patrol leader in there And you just start working with it little by little over time. But you do it at a boy scale, not an adult scale. You do it at their scale and their speed And it's going to work. It has to work. Baden Powell said it would work.

He said that the patrol method is the only method and it cannot fail if you apply it properly. I got to agree with him.

I think it definitely worked. If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods, If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods, Write me a letter, send it by name Email, that is folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails From Mark Bowie, Scoutmaster of troop 531 in Orange, California. He says: hello, Clark, I enjoy your thoughtful blogs and podcasts.

Well, thank you, Mark, And I'm interested to learn about your views on Meribadge days. Now, what I'm understanding is Meribadge day is kind of like Meribadge college or any kind of an event where multiple Meribadges are offered with counselors attached. I know our local museum near us offers two or three Meribadges a couple of three days a year And scouts can come in and as a group they can work their way through the Meribadge.

He says your podcast item about Baden Powell's view on badge hunters versus badge earners was timely, And we have recently been having a debate in our troop about Meribadge days. One side says that the primary purpose is to raise money for the hosting troop And I don't really know how that works, but I'll accept the fact that somewhere out there a troop is hosting a Meribadge day and they might be doing it as a fundraiser And not to ensure quality instruction for the boys, and that they're only a short cut on Meribadge completion. Others say that in today's business schedule is too hard to find Meribadge counselor and schedule meetings with them to review progress And that Meribadge days are the only practical way outside of summer camp to complete Meribadges.

What do you think? Well, I'm going to stand directly in the middle because I agree. I agree with both sides to a certain extent.

So let me explain myself. First of all, Meribadges: there's a very simple system and there's a very simple rules about who gets involved.

Where The boy brings you a blank blue card, Mr Scoutmaster, He says: I am going to do, you know, camping Meribadge. And I would ask who is your counselor?

And I would say: is he a certified counselor? And if I needed to check up on that, I would do what resources I needed to make sure that this was a registered Meribadge counselor And I would possibly review with the boy the youth protection specifications around Meribadges. There are no one-on-one meetings with adults.

In other words, bring a scout with you or there needs to be a second adult present And then I would pat him on his head and send him on his happy way. Several days, weeks, months later he will bring me a completed blue card.

I will tell him to take it to the advancement chairman or the troop scribe And then the troop scribe or the advancement chairman will hand me the blue card to sign at one point And I will hand the scout a Meribadge at our earliest convenience and shake his hand and congratulate him for a job well done. Now, nowhere in there, nowhere in that very simple process, does the Scoutmaster interfere with who the counselor is, If it's a registered Meribadge counselor, the rigor of the study of the Meribadge or the quality of the instruction of the Meribadge or the quality of work that a scout does with the Meribadge. I see only blue cards. I see happy scouts. I hand out Meribadges.

If, for some reason, I was to become concerned about the instruction of a given Meribadge, or I was to become concerned that, you know, somebody was just giving Meribadges away- which is a concern that's often expressed, but in 25 years I have never, ever seen anybody giving Meribadges away- then I would take that concern to the people who are certifying Meribadge counselors, Because it is not the scout's fault if the Meribadge counselor is not doing his job. It's the Meribadge counselor's fault.

Who certifies Meribadge counselors? Well, your council advancement committee does and your district advancement committee, and that would be the person I would take the concerns to. If you really think, if people are really thinking that these Meribadge days, as you call them, are just shortcuts, and take it to the next level and ask what kind of quality control is being done for the counselors that are operating there and things like that. Otherwise, keep your nose out and let the scouts go and do and achieve. Meribadge is not a certificate of completion of a course of rigorous study. I gotta tell you, A scout with life-saving Meribadge is not a qualified life-saver, nor is a scout with first-aid Meribadge and EMT.

Those kind of certifications require far more rigorous study. First-aid Meribadge and life-saving Meribadge are valuable and they're a valuable set of skills, But we would never depend on them as a sole indication of somebody's skill level, maturity and their ability to handle a situation that a lifeguard or an EMT would handle, would we?

Now I am going to differ with the others that say in today's busy schedules it's too hard to find a Meribadge counselor in schedule meetings and things like that. Well, we have things like email. I have done significant parts of Meribadges that I counsel with email. My inner drill sergeant would like to see more rigor in study and more rigor in the instruction of Meribadges, but understanding what Meribadges represent, what they're supposed to represent and how scouts will have learned a little something about a given field of study or endeavor. I'm quite satisfied with the way that the system works.

I will have a little internal dialogue with the internal drill sergeant and I will say, you know it's not that big a deal. Baden Powell said something about the jolity of scouting.

Jolity is not a word that you hear a whole lot, but you know Baden Powell was born in 1857, so let's cut him a break. That indicates to me a certain amount of lightness and fun and intensity and excitement surrounding the work of scouting. I wouldn't be too upset about the Meribadges days. I kind of agree. I'm a little suspicious of the whole thing.

I'm suspicious of, you know, 30 guys and a 16-year-old counselor trying to complete swimming Meribadge at camp. Just how rigorous and complete can the instruction be in that kind of a situation?

But it's been going on for years and you know I'm satisfied that the guys have gotten out of it what they need to get out of it. These are not my badges to protect, They're not my standards to protect. I have yet to embroider, hand, embroider a Meribadge and hand it out at a court of honor.

We go and buy them from the Boy Scouts of America who own the Meribadge and who own the program, And I will assent to the way that they're going to administer it, even though the inter-drill sergeant may have some difficulties with it. So I hope that helps you, Mark, And if you need more clarification on that, do drop me a line.

This has to be the truth, folks, because there is no way anyone could make this up.

So I've been a Scoutmaster long enough that my career stretches back to the Beavis and Butthead age. If you don't know what I'm referring to when I speak of Beavis and Butthead, consider yourself lucky and move on. Beavis and Butthead were characters in a cartoon show. They were your quintessential teenage kind of dopey kids And they had catchphrases and spoke in this kind of adolescent code And I never really cared for them personally.

I mean, I see, you know it was Mike Judge and the guys. They were, of course, very good writers and everything like that, But Beavis and Butthead, for one reason or another, just drove me crazy.

Now it's important to realize that it's the job of each succeeding generation to drive the older folks a little nutty. Right, You did it and I did it.

So I'm not making like a condemnation of anybody here, But I had a couple of guys in the Scout Troop And God bless them, They were the biggest Beavis and Butthead fans you would ever want to meet And they assumed the characters of Beavis and Butthead And they just were pretty much 24-7. They did not break character, They spoke like them, They acted like them And it just got so very tiresome to hear all little catchphrases and the attitude and things like that.

Well, we struggled with that for a couple of years And, you know, the worst thing you can do with something like that is draw attention to it by telling them to stop. You know, they have to live their own lives. It wasn't improper that, it was just aggregate. But I'll tell you something: I found a secret and I found out how to make them stop forever and ever.

We were on a backpacking trip and these guys were doing the old Beavis and Butthead thing And I had a younger assistant scoutmaster along with me And we were sitting there kind of you know, saying huh, they're at it again, They're doing these voices and they're using all the catchphrases. You know, I'm pretty sick of this And, for whatever reason, we just decided to start to adopt the Beavis and Butthead attitude and the catchphrases and the sayings ourselves. And it worked like a charm Because as soon as myself and my assistant scoutmaster started using these catchphrases and adopting the attitude and everything like that, the scouts dropped it Like a hot potato. Oh, I can remember very clearly the look of utter disgust and dismay that I received from the Beavis and Butthead adherents- the two of them- when we started using their holy phrases and attitude and the tone of voice. It's a good way to stop things like that. Just adopt it and say that it's the coolest thing you ever heard, And the boys will drop it and never go back, Never, ever.

And they didn't for the entire time they were in the truth. They never went back and did the Beavis and Butthead thing. My father was a wanderer and he was a good man. He was a great man as long as I could and he gave me good things. Never, ever.