Scoutmaster Podcast 128

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. Hey, it's camp week for me, That's right.

So I've got a few camp related jokes. What do you get if you cross an aquatics guy with the pioneering guy? You get an aquanaut. Aqua, oh my goodness.

How about if somebody lashes 3.14159?? What is it?

A pie-oneering project? They get better. The orienteering counselor. He had a magnetic personality. He was overbearing at times and everybody kind of needled him about it. See, I told you, they get better.

So which maripage plays the best music? Well, pioneering, because they have all the chords. But that's enough about pioneering.

How about the handicraft department? We were down there. The scouts were forging ahead. The basket rework was a little hampered because the counselor was a slow reader. Worst thing that happened, though, one of the maintenance guys was interred Apparently. He slipped and fell in the latrine.

All right, I guess that's enough for now. Sorry about that. This is podcast number 128..

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green. Hey, looking into the mailbag, we heard from Derek Morton this week. He said: Clark, great podcast. I really appreciate the talks. I'm always finding something new in each one.

What's the chance of updating the archive? Very good chance, Derek. Sometimes I just need a reminder and you should be able to go to scoutmastercgcom and the archive should be current for you. Dan White wrote in. He said this was a great episode, referring to our last podcast, Podcast 127.. I really enjoyed the sample agenda for troop meetings.

As a new assistant scoutmaster with our troop, I found the podcast to be very valuable. Hey, I'm glad you're finding it valuable, Dan. I appreciate you being in touch. Alan Green wrote in. He said I have my senior patrol leader playing out the skill instructions, the patrol business and the game at our troop meetings. We've never really done a pre-meeting activity.

I wonder if there's a BSA resource for this so we can get some ideas. What have you used in the past?

Well, Alan, there's four really big resource documents and there's a link to them in the post that contains this podcast at scoutmastercgcom. It's all troop program resources. They're all in PDF form. They're all from the BSA. Some of the information in a few of them might be a little dated. There's great game resources and things for pre-openings in it and I suggest that to you.

That's a real big compendium of program ideas. Hey, I think it's important to tell you. Friend of the blog and podcast. Mike Malone has announced the pending release of his new book, 4%, and that is subtitled The Story of Uncommon Youth in a Century of American Life, and you're going to love this book. It's an excellent, authoritative Eagle Scout history. Mike is a very well-known writer.

He was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and his articles and editorials appeared in major publications. He was kind enough to send me an advanced copy of 4% and it's going to be available very soon as an e-book, and it's the book of the Eagle Scout Award and Eagle Scout history. Mike's not only a skilled author, he's an Eagle Scout himself. He has a son as an Eagle Scout. He's mentored a lot of boys through the Eagle Scout process. It's been announced and it will soon be published as an e-book, and as soon as I have a link for you to be able to obtain it, I will make sure that it's on the podcast and on the blog.

In this week's podcast we have email questions. So hey, without further ado, let's get started.

Shall we Write me a letter? Send it my name,

Email, that is, folks. And here's an answer to one of your emails.

So I got this email this week and the sender asked to remain anonymous. He says: how far out from an event does your patrol leader's counsel work on plans for that event?

Our committee is kind of frustrated, and understandably so, with the last minute details. Instead of advanced communication, we're working through adult skills improvement on this topic. But a major factor is the boys planning well.

Well, to answer your question, our patrol leader's counsel plans anywhere from six months to six minutes ahead of the event. That's right. Naturally that is kind of aggravating.

Sometimes they're planning very well and they've planned out an event way far in advance and it comes off very smoothly. Sometimes they miss a whole lot. They do a lot of last minute details six minutes ahead of time. People don't have the right stuff, hey. But we meddle through and we take it as a learning experience and we examine it, look at it, we ask questions about it and it's frustrating.

But it's exactly what we want to have happen as part of the learning process and a very important part too. This is not something you fix.

It's something that gets incrementally better and then it falls apart, then it gets better, and so on and so on and so on. I will tell you that the only way to have complete, neatly and thoroughly planned events is for a team of adults to sit down and do it, But even then they're gonna miss something right? My best advice to adults who get frustrated by the lack of planning on the part of boys or the kind of last minute nature of their planning is that this is really what's supposed to happen as part of the journey, And this is a very difficult perspective to learn and to accept. Boys plan at the speed of thought: Hey, we're going camping. That's a plan. Thank you very much, see you next week.

That's the way they plan. You name another instance where a 13,, 14,, 15-year-old boy is sitting down with a group of his peers and having a formal planning process. I couldn't think of one. I mean, maybe there's some stuff at school, but that's gonna be heavily leveraged by adults being present and even being coercive about it. This is pretty new for your scouts. For them to sit at a table with notebooks and papers and to start talking about planning things.

I mean, we may as well all try to learn to speak Russian. You know, it's going to be a very foreign thing to them to begin with.

Now, as time goes by, they will become incrementally better at it And then there'll be this cadre of guys that have probably been on the Patrol Leaders Council in different positions for a couple of years and they'll have more of a sense of it. But every time, if you elect a senior patrol leader every six months, hey, you're starting over again basically every six months.

So, understanding first of all the position that they're in as boys, what they're doing, And then understanding that their perspective on planning is very, very shallow and very fast, These are not things that is going to come to them naturally. They need to learn how. That process of learning how to plan is an elemental progression towards adulthood and it can take a very long time for individual boys and it can take a very long time for a group of boys.

So patience here is very, very important. So what happens at a Patrol Leaders Council meeting that gets them to plan?

Well, I'll tell you I don't have a whole lot of a planning system. I sit down with a senior patrol leader, separate from the Patrol Leaders Council, when he is newly elected, And we kind of go over and discuss what happens next. And the way the discussion goes is not a very telling discussion on my part, It's an asking discussion.

So what do you think you need to do next. So how are you going to make plans?

What needs to be constituted in those plans? What details do you need to have?

Do you understand the importance of doing this? Because he's reasonably experienced now. He's been a patrol leader, he's had to do things for his patrol and he's moved up to senior patrol leader and he's had a chance, for a couple of years at least, to watch other senior patrol leaders operate.

So he's got some of this. But I'm going to not necessarily tell him what to do. I'm going to ask him some questions about it. I don't have any forms or directions or any written material that I put in the hands of the senior patrol leader- And I used to. I used to have tons of it. I love to make forms.

I love to sit down and write out sets of directions and procedural manuals. I mean that is really cool. That's a lot of fun. For me. It's not very useful for nine out of 10 scouts.

What I think we're more effective at in developing a really good patrol leader's council is to teach them how to fish. I think handing them forms and procedures and manuals and things like that is kind of giving them a fish.

Okay, I want them to come up with these processes on their own and to reinvent them. I can teach anybody how to read a manual and fill out a form. There's not a whole lot of development going on there When they're given the latitude to develop these processes on their own.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing what happens, And I think it happens faster that way. To tell you the truth, If you're giving the patrol leader's council a big pile of paperwork and that's all they have to do is complete this pile of paperwork, what does that sound like?

What are they going to regard it like? What other places in their life are they presented with papers and they fill out answers and then they present them back to you?

Well, that's school, of course, in tests and homework, assignments and worksheets and things like that. That's what happens, And I don't think those are optimal ways to teach this skill of planning.

So don't have much of a system there other than asking questions, other than listening very carefully and very basically, staying out of their way. Now I can tell you that, just by kind of a rule of thumb, the patrol leader's council has an annual planning conference where they get together and they plan the calendar for the year And then they refine each one of those plans about two or three months out and then they kind of lock them down, maybe about a month or so before that, But that rule varies very widely.

The other thing to understand is is they get all of the adult facilitating support that they need Somebody to deal with making reservations and rentals and doing whatever will make sure that they get that support. Sometimes they take that on themselves.

They call the park, they call the camp, they do things and they come back and they say: you know what? They said, that an adult has to do this- And we say, oh yeah, no problem, good job, You got the information, you found out what you needed to know and we'll follow up with you and we'll get that working for you. Hey, I hope that helps. Be in touch. You're gonna find out how to do that in just a moment.

This is Bob Mazzucchi, scout executive of the Boy Scouts, and you're listening to my buddy, Clarke Green, on the Scoutmaster podcast and he is doing a fantastic job. MUSIC.

Well, we're headed off to campus. Well, we're headed off to camp this week. Camp is just such a great place.

I mean you have to ask yourself why are you gonna go out in this heat and humidity and live in a tent for a week and eat in a dining hall and subject yourself to all of those seeming discomforts? Well, that's because they're great moments.

We'll arrive with a lot of energy anticipating a fine week on Sunday and then, as that whole week unfolds, we'll watch our scouts, We'll watch them challenge new things and we'll watch them begin to discover not only what it means to look after themselves- which is a new thing for a young boy- but to look out for each other. And then, as the week carries on, they begin to open their eyes a bit. They're out of their familiar territory and away from a lot of the distractions of modern life and they'll start to open their eyes a bit to the world, that natural world around them. Maybe they'll look at a tree or a plant or a bird or an animal with new eyes. One of my favorite things to watch happen is when the sun sets and the sky darkens just hue by hue, and the stars begin to come out. Some of our scouts notice them for the first time.

They're not used to being away in a place with out a whole lot of lights and things and that beautiful dark summer sky is quite a revelation. There's a great field where we can go at our camp that gives you a broad view of the sky and it's miles away from that landscape that they live in all year long so that they can look out into space and see those little twinkling lights. And this is what you hear.

You always hear that they never knew there were so many stars out there. They never knew how beautiful it was.

And you know we spend a little time so they can get familiar with what's in the night sky. They learn a constellation or two. They might be able to pick out one or two stars by the time we're done.

And if it's a good, clear sky and it's not cloudy, we're treated to that kind of thing that doesn't happen quite so often in our lives anymore. All the flashlights go off and this magical silvery light brightens the woods in our campsite and everybody just kind of stands and stares and looks up And besides all the merit badges and the activities and all the great things that scouts are going to do at camp, I've always valued those moments when they see beyond themselves and they see beyond the world that they're familiar with and they can even look out into space, They can appreciate their place in the natural world, Just like heresy. Rooted tooth to follow moon. Oh, moon is the biggest star I've ever seen. It's a pearl of wisdom. It's a slice of green cheese Turning just like heresy.

Turning just like heresy.