Scoutmaster Podcast 13

And now, to you, Scoutmaster. Hey, welcome back to... Hey! Hey! Hey, Bruce!

How you doing, bud? Listen, something that I've been thinking about lately.

What's your motto? Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared.

Really? That's my motto, too. Hey, this is podcast number 13. Hey!

Hey, welcome back to the Scoutmasters podcast. This is Clarke Green. Thanks again for the feedback and the emails and things like that. I'll have my contact information right at the end of the podcast. This time around, in Scoutmastership, in seven minutes or less, we're going to talk about mistakes and looking at mistakes. Having a safe environment for Scouts to make mistakes and how to handle them when they do.

Then, I've got a story that is under the title, you know, this has got to be true because nobody would make this up. Well, I made this one up. But it's based on a lot of true stuff. I hope you enjoy it.

And then our second of four installments on avoiding Eagle Scout trauma. And that's followed by a Scoutmasters minute about the difference between tour guides and leaders. I'm finishing up next week's show and I'm putting it together, next week's podcast. And it involves an interview with author Richard Bennett, who wrote a book called Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Boy Scouts. And it's a tribute to his troop and his Scoutmaster from Irving, Texas in the mid to late 1960s. And I had a wonderful time talking to Richard and we'll have the interview with him on next time around.

You're going to love the book. The book is really, really good. I really enjoyed it.

But we've got a lot to cover today, so let's get started, shall we? Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. If you watch football, and I really don't. And I'm not a big Giant fan, but I've seen some games over time. Watch a football game and somebody fumbles the ball.

And they're frustrated and they're, you know, they're kind of angry and they're disappointed. And I think I have seen, if I remember correctly, you know, even a big strapping NFL player just about reduced to tears over having messed up a play.

Have you seen that? I've seen it.

And so, but, you know, their teammates get behind them and pat them on the back and dust them off and say, hey, we've got to get back out here and play. So, you know, quit your crying and let's move on. If big guys can be frustrated in that way, imagine what it is in the mind and the life of one of your youth leaders. If he fumbles and he drops the ball. It's a pretty humiliating experience. Especially if you're a scout age boy.

Because you're very sensitive to what people think about you. What your peers think about you. What the adult leaders that you work with think about you. And what the fellows who are younger than you think about you.

So if a youth leader drops the ball or fumbles something or forgets to do something, he will either own up to the problem and deal with it directly. Which would be the best case scenario.

Hey, oh my gosh, I forgot to make that phone call. Or I just got busy and I didn't do it. I am sorry. That is a pretty rare reaction. Because it takes a lot of maturity and security to be able to just admit a mistake outright like that. More often than not, they'll react in a couple of other ways.

They will hide the mistake until somebody else finds it. Or until they get pressed on it.

They won't just come in and say, Oh, oh, you know, oops, I blew it. Nope. They'll hide it until somebody else figures it out. Then, they'll deny the responsibility or the importance of the task we're supposed to be doing. And they'll make a lot of excuses and equivocations and things like that. Making some kind of a leadership misstep, just not carrying out a responsibility, is not as clear as fumbling a football.

I mean, you fumble a football, everybody sees it. They see the ball on the ground and they say, Ooh, he fumbled the ball.

But the result in the person's mind, I think, is just as dramatic. And they feel bad. And they feel frustrated. And they know that they've let everybody down.

So what happens? Well, as I said before, If a football gets fumbled, the whole team jumps for it, right? I mean, they don't stand there and point at the guy who fumbled the football and shake their fist at him and try and beat him up. No. I mean, they all jump for the ball.

And then afterwards, they dust the guy off and pat him on the back and say, Oh, it's all right. We'll get back at it.

And why do they do that? Because they know if they were carrying the ball, it's just as easy for them to fumble. That they're not immune from making a mistake.

Now, if the response to a fumble was that your team ostracized you and, you know, you got a sound beating, Not many guys would want to carry a football under those conditions, would you think? What about scouts? If they make mistakes, if we find fault and punish them, we don't treat them with empathy, and we don't dust them off and tell them to get back in the game, they're not going to want a position of responsibility.

Now, I'll overhear somebody discussing the idea that, Well, you know, we just can't get our older scouts to step up to responsible positions in the troop. The way you handle a fumble or a mistake could have a lot to do with the willingness of your scouts to take on responsibilities.

If they watch you ostracize and, you know, figuratively beat up on a scout who's made a mistake of some kind, they are not going to be interested in taking up a responsibility. If we reply with empathy and encouragement, they're going to be much more likely to take on those responsibilities.

So it would be a good idea to make sure that, within your troop, you have a safe environment to make mistakes. Now, I'm not saying that scouts don't need to be accountable.

We can accomplish that without dramatics or punishment or bad feelings. This has to be the truth, folks, because there is no way anyone could make this up.

All right, so, you know, you become a Boy Scout. And then you're going to go on your first camping trip, and you've got to patrol, and everything is cool, and then you find out you've got to cook.

What? You've got to cook? Oh, yeah, the older guys say, oh, it's the best part of the trip. It's the most fun. It's great.

You know, we can make anything that we want, and then the entire world opens up around you, and you start thinking of all the wonderful things that you can cook, and you figure out that I'm going to make hunter stew. Hunter stew. It just, it sounds wonderful.

So, you find a recipe, and you make your list, and you go to the grocery store, and you buy all these unfamiliar things, like chicken and potatoes and stuff like that. I mean, things that, you know, you've seen around the house, and you've seen maybe your mom or dad work with before, but in your hands, there's something magical and something new and exciting.

So, you smile as you go to sleep that night and think, boy, the guys are going to be patting me on the back. Maybe they'll buy me one of those big white chef's hats, you know, after I make this hunter stew. Oh, it's going to be grand.

Well, then you pack everything up, and you get on the camp out and all that stuff, and you're waiting all day, all day, until it's time to prepare dinner. You might even go back to the cooler and kind of fiddle around with the stuff and just make sure that it's all there and everything's ready.

And then somebody says, well, it's about time we start cooking dinner. And so you turn around and bend down and grab a bag of potatoes, and you're about to hand them to one of your fellow patrol members and say, well, we need to peel these potatoes, guys. And you look up, and they've disappeared. They're all gone. They found things to do. One guy has decided that this is a good time to do tree identification.

So he grabs his scout handbook and two other patrol members, and they head off into the woods. They're going to, you know, work on that tree identification thing for second class there.

And then, you know, you find out the other guys needed to go use a little latrine. It seems like they've been away for an awfully long time.

But you look around, and there's your buddy. And he's going to help you build the fire and get things going.

So you start about 4.30, and then, oh, around 6.30 or so, you slice some potatoes into your hunter stew that's not really bubbling yet over the fire. You know, the fire needs a little help.

Well, finally, the patrol leader kind of figures out that there's something wrong, and he gets all the patrol members, and now you have a roaring fire, and it's built up around your pot there, and your stew is boiling and everything, and it's only 7.30. I mean, you've got plenty of time.

And so the water boils and everything looks great, and the, oh, my, the aroma coming off of that stew. Oh, it's just amazing. Just amazing. At around 8 o'clock, after the fire is burned out and the guys are running off into the woods to find more firewood to reheat the stew, you test a couple of pieces of potato, and they're still hard as a rock. Oh, well. It'll only take another half hour or so.

You hope. So the patrol finally gets desperate, and they decide at 8.30, you know, we're going to eat because we're starving to death.

My God, we didn't know this was going to take so long. So you dish out the stew, and everybody gets a big mess kit full of stew, and they all sit around, and they're chomping on it, and they have to saw at it hard with a knife to break it up and to get it into pieces so that it will fit in their mouth, and then you've got to chew on it for 10 or 15 minutes before you can get it down.

And everybody kind of looks at each other, and you say, well, how's the stew? And they say, eh, it's all right.

So you figure the next time, the next time, it's going to be some other sucker's time to, you know, buy the food and cook. I'm not going to deal with these guys anymore. Oh, no. I'm not going to mess around with them. Go and work my heart out and make stew for them, and they don't even, they don't even like it.

Now, secret is, you don't really like it either. You know, salt and pepper would have been a good idea, but of course, you didn't bring any along.

And then, then the light shines down from heaven, and it comes into your mind that there's something else in the cooler. So you go to the cooler, you grab that box full of popsicles. They're a little soft, but they're still good. And everybody's been sawing, and chewing, and carrying on, and trying to get that stew down for the past half hour. And they look at you, and you have a box of popsicles in your hand, and you hold them up, and you triumphantly say, hey, fellas, it's dessert.

And now, you're everybody's pal. You're everybody's friend. Ah, camping with scouts and your patrol.

What could be better? Have you ever wandered lonely through the woods? And everything that feels just as it should. You're part of a life there. You're part of something good. If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods.

If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods. So this is the second installment in our discussions about Eagle Scout drama and avoiding Eagle Scout drama.

And in the first one, we talked about the idea that, you know, Scoutmasters have a tendency to develop this idealized standard of what an Eagle Scout should be. And we get frustrated when we don't see that. It is a key source of drama in this becoming an Eagle Scout process.

What we need to understand is what makes scouting different from everything else. And this is the way that it's different. And you forgive me, but I'm getting up, I'm getting up on my soapbox here and I'm going to preach just a little bit because Baden-Powell hit the nail on the head. I mean, he founded and envisioned a movement that would give everyone the opportunity to challenge an achievement based not on a single standard of performance, but on a highly individualized and internalized standard. And what I'm saying specifically is this is a quote from Baden-Powell's Outlook. It's a column that he had in a scouting magazine and this is dated in 1921.

Now listen to this carefully. He says, Our standard for badge earning, as I have frequently said, is not to attain a certain level of quality of work as in school, but in the amount of effort exercised by the individual candidate. This brings the most hopeless case on a footing of equal possibility with his more brilliant or better off brother.

We want to get them all along through cheery self-development from within and not through the imposition of formal instruction from without. If we, as scoutmasters, can encourage scouts to define and internalize and follow a standard of achievement, we'll give them a set of skills that will immeasurably enrich their lives and their communities. Yeah, I gotta tell you, it's frustrating. Like a lot of scoutmasters, I was really frustrated with the lack of measurable numbers in scouting. And this is what I mean.

What is scout spirit? What's that all about?

How do you figure that one out? What percentage of meetings or campouts does a scout have to attend to be considered active?

What does active mean? How do you apply a measure of effectiveness to somebody's leadership?

Shouldn't you have a form and some numbers and be able to figure this out so it's fair all the way across the board and everybody gets judged on a single standard? Well, the numbers are missing from scouting not because somebody forgot but for a very good reason. Every scout and every scout's circumstances in life are different.

Scouts who are academically talented and scouts who are poor students, scouts from affluent families and scouts from families who are not so affluent, scouts with a whole lot going for them and scouts with not very much going for them, they all become Eagle Scouts. There are no Class A or Class B Eagle Scouts. When we understand

And embrace the concept of individual effort evaluated by an individualized standard, we're going to eliminate a lot of drama not only from the Eagle Scout process but from our entire experience in scouting. You've got to ask and it's a fair question, can't you use an individualized standard to justify just about anybody becoming anything and achieving Eagle Scout?

Can't you use it to justify bad behavior and poor performance and indifference? I mean, how does a Scoutmaster hold his scouts accountable if everybody is just going to advance anyway?

I mean, what would be the point? Well, the answer is really very simple and it's going to be in number three of this four-part series on avoiding Eagle Scout drama so make sure to listen to the next podcast. That's right, it's time for a Scoutmaster's Minute.