Scoutmaster Podcast 136

And now the old Scoutmaster. You know, scouting has actually changed one of my little evaluation methods for whether I want to take advice from somebody.

And my new question is: have they made more mistakes than I have? But if they have made fewer mistakes than I have, then they probably do not know more.

Well, that's probably why people listen to us, Walter is because, Yes, we have decades, Decades put all together, We have what about five or six decades of mistakes. You're being very kind. Hey, this is podcast number 136..

Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green. Hey, let's look in the mailbag. It's pretty full. This week. Victor Vergoli is a Scoutmaster with Troop 244.

And he writes in to say thanks for posting ten ways to help a senior patrol leader. I'm a new Scoutmaster here in Warner Robins, Georgia, and we have a new senior patrol leader. I'll put these to good use. Also, enjoy your weekly podcasts. I've gleaned valuable info from them. Keep up the good work.

Well, thanks for being in touch, Victor. Kind words certainly appreciate it.

Here's a couple of comments from Podcast 135.. Walter Torres wrote in to say the piece with the Charlie Brown voices was just great. That's what I needed. Larry Geiger joined him and said: I loved it. You turned Charlie Brown upside down with the wah-wah-wah being the kid instead of the adult.

I felt so very clever. Bill McFarlane wrote back in again and he said: hmm, doesn't Frank Maynard run Bob White's Blather Great blog? But I can't take credit for it. My blog is channeling Whittle and Jim. Besides being a Scoutmaster, I'm a bear, and a good old bear too.

Hey, Hey, Bill, You know I figured out that somehow in my adult brain I have Bill McFarlane and Frank Maynard, two completely different names. But somehow I've got the wires crossed there. Frank, I apologize. Go visit Frank and see Bob White's Blather blog. Frank does a wonderful job with that, As does Bill over at channeling Whittle and Jim. Bill is carving necker chip slides and things like that over there.

So go check those guys out. And thanks, Bill, for setting me straight.

Gary Downey is a Scoutmaster in Troop 1 of Blackstone, Massachusetts, And he says: Clark, I love your site so much so I added it to a slide in my Scoutmaster's specific training so people have your web address. Over the last several years I have trained over 200 adults that boys run the Troop, not the adults. The look of horror from some of the participants is priceless. I feel my main job is to give boys a safe place and environment to make mistakes. If they never make mistakes, they'll never really learn anything.

Well, thank you, Gary. Thanks for being in touch And I'm glad that you're finding the blog and podcast useful, And thanks for spreading the word. Really do appreciate that. Mark Bauer in San Diego wrote. I wanted to tell you about our troops experience at Fillmont this summer. Our troop had 15 scouts and six adults which were split into two separate track groups.

We did short tracks that last about a week. That makes it much easier to get adults that can take that amount of vacation time. This may be an option for other troops as opposed to the full 12-day Fillmont tracks, which may not be doable because of adults needing to take that much vacation time. We went out on the trail as the last track of the season. It was much nicer to be one of four tracks in a campsite or activity instead of one of 19 or 20.. The late season weather at Fillmont was fantastic.

We had thunderstorms like clockwork, starting about 2 in the afternoon, but they kept the dust down and, compared to the drier earlier part of the summer. We really enjoyed ourselves. Well. Thanks, Mark, for that report. It sounds like you had a wonderful time out there and hopefully that'll be helpful to people as they plan their trips to Fillmont. In this podcast we're finally back on schedule.

It's September. We're not running all over the place on camping trips and stuff like that. All the kids are back and that regular schedule starts to kick in.

So we have our September Scoutmaster panel discussion coming up And in this panel discussion we have a guest. His name is Enoch and we'll tell you a little bit more about Enoch. I realized as I was editing the panel discussion I did not point out something important. This is something that has to deal with youth protection. Enoch is 17 years old, He's a life scout in his troop and you'll understand how we got in touch with him and everything here in a minute. But just as a youth protection measure, we made sure to get in touch with Enoch's parents and we also made sure to copy them on all the emails and things like that and to double check and make sure you had their permission and they understood what was going on.

So, just in case you listen to the panel discussion and you wonder, there you go, and just in case that wasn't on your radar screen so far as emailing back and forth with youth members in scouting, remember that you want to include a carbon copy to another adult leader or their parents or something like that. And that's just an observation of no one-on-one communications between adult leaders and scouts.

So we're going to get to the Scoutmaster panel discussion in just a minute, but first I've got this for you: If a Scoutmaster speaks in a forest and there are no scouts around, do they still ignore him? It's true, adult leaders say the same things over and over and over again.

Now, tragically, much of this wisdom has gone unrecorded. That is until now, because, through the miracle of modern technology, we're going to capture 200 phrases that adult leaders say over and over again, And we're going to do that on the stuff adult leaders say t-shirt, A t-shirt just for us. That's right. 200 phrases that adult leaders say over and over again on a great t-shirt.

Go to scoutsmastercgcom and follow the link right there on the front page to a t-shirt just for us, And there you'll find out about my Kickstarter project and how it works and, most importantly, how to get a t-shirt for yourself and your fellow adult leaders: Hurry, because the project is going to close on September 30th at 11 pm eastern standard time. Now what's really exciting is you can help decide what 200 phrases are going on the shirt. You can offer your suggestions or comments at scoutsmastercgcom. Once again, look for the t-shirt just for us link.

You'll get all the information you need and it'll lead you to the Kickstarter project so you can make sure to pledge and get your stuff. Adult leaders say t-shirt, It's a t-shirt just for us.

So the project just launched just an hour or so ago and the backers we have so far are Edward Bruce, Adam Cox, Bill McMahon, Jill Blanche and James Murphy. Thank you so much, folks, for pledging on kickstartercom for the stuff. Adult leaders say t-shirt.

So as I'm speaking right now, people are e-mailing in and telling us what goes on the t-shirt and things. This is going to be great fun, But we've got a Scoutmaster panel discussion to present, so let's get started, shall we? It's time for another Scoutmaster panel discussion.

So it's time for another Scoutmaster panel discussion. And here we are again, and we've got a couple of our regulars. Larry Geiger is down there in Vieira, Florida.

How are you doing Larry? Hey Clark doing good, And Walter Underwood is out there in the wilds of Northern California somewhere.

How are you doing, Walter? We had a tiny bit of rain- it's what they call it here, but we probably not call it rain- And it's probably unconscionably cool and beautiful there while we're still sweltering in the early September heat. I apologize, And joining us today is Enoch, And Enoch is a 17-year-old life scout. I'll tell you that Enoch is from Texas and he came to our attention because he has a blog called Scouting Rediscovered. If you're a follower of the blog and the podcast, you've seen some links to Enoch's blog and you saw an article that he was kind enough to write for us about adult leaders from a scout's perspective. And Enoch, we're pleased to have you Well.

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Enoch got in touch with me and he was interested in writing an article for the blog, and I looked at Scouting Rediscovered and it was a really impressive job.

You really do need to get over and see that, And there'll be a link to Enoch's blog in the post that contains this podcast at ScoutmasterCGcom. I asked if he would write about his perspective of adult leaders as a scout. Enoch you talk about when you first join your troop really not what to expect Now.

Were you in Cubs at all or Weeblows at all before you became a Boy Scout? I was not. Actually, I didn't join Boy Scouts right whenever I was 11 or 12. I didn't really know anything about Boy Scouts until I was 13. And a friend from church told me about it and he was an adult and he used to be a Scoutmaster himself and he gave me a book and I started reading through it and I really liked what I saw and eventually that led to me becoming a scout at 13..

So not quite the normal joining age, but Can you identify any specific things that made you think this was something that you wanted to do? Well, I can't really pin down anything exactly in particular. It's not like I actually thought through it real logically, but I was just reading the book and it was the 11th edition of the Scout Handbook at that time and I really liked just the whole structure of the organization. It just sounded like a lot of fun and the opportunities to go on the camping trips and stuff was a really big motivator for me. The former Scoutmaster that first introduced me to scouting- he went on a camping trip with me and me and my dad and a few other families and kind of introduced me to that form of scout camping trip stuff and I was hooked after that first camping trip I really loved it.

Did you know anybody in the scout trip that you joined? I did not.

They were all new to me and there wasn't a scout troop, and there still isn't a scout troop in the town that I live. So it was a town near to me and I didn't really know anybody at all.

So you get started, you join a troop and what happens from there? How big was the troop that you joined? It was around 20..

So it was fairly small, small size, small town troop. I didn't really hold any leadership positions right off the bat. There was quite a few that were a couple of years older than me in the troop.

So I was mostly just kind of hanging out and just observing everything and I was going on the camping trips, participating and all that, and pretty soon I started to start to advance in the ranks fairly quickly. I guess, I don't know, maybe I was a little bit more motivated, maybe my dad helped me out with this, helped me be motivated, but I really sat through and wanted to read the scout handbook, so I read it from cover to cover.

Actually I think it was in my first year there and that really helped me pass an awful lot of the rank requirements and advancing and I ended up becoming patrol leader of my patrol and then actually ended up becoming senior patrol leader and held that position for about a year. So How did you figure out how to be a patrol leader?

When I joined, you know, there was already. There was a fair, fair patrol structure and there were definite patrol leaders and stuff, so they basically had a. I can't really remember.

It's been a while and so much stuff has happened, but I don't really remember if I was elected or if just the older scout who was the patrol leader left that and I was the next kind of in line, so to speak. I can't really remember it was either one of those two, so So you kind of picked it up from what you had seen. Yeah, yeah, basically at that point I hadn't really been doing any extra reading about scouting or anything like that, just what I had in the scout handbook and what I saw in my troop.

So patrol leader for a while, and then you moved on. Well, I was just saying that I had been a patrol leader actually for quite a while and I really enjoyed working with my patrol and I started to have- which no other patrol in my troop had done this- but I started to have patrol meetings with my patrol, separate patrol meetings apart from the troop meetings.

So I remained a patrol leader for quite a while and it was about a year ago actually that I was- oh well, a little over a year- a little over a year ago that I was actually just decided to run for the senior patrol leader elections and at that point I was one of the senior scouts in the troop and so I think I won with a pretty good margin, And so you spend a year as a senior patrol leader. How did that go for you?

I started out, you know, fairly routine, and so first I just kind of filled in the shoes of the previous senior patrol leader and I didn't try to do a whole lot different. But then I started to try to do more patrol leader council meetings. I tried to introduce those regularly because they hadn't happened in my troop really before that, and I started doing a lot of different things, trying to transition more power to the patrol leaders and more responsibility to the patrol leaders, and some of that went well.

This didn't go so well, so I had its ups and downs, but I really learned a lot. Yes, so we're all curious about what did not go well, because we're used to things not going well as outmasters.

Well, a couple things. Right after I had joined, my troop had lost some of the older boys that were originally in my kind of generation of the troop.

A lot of those had started to leave because they got older or just weren't really active anymore, and so just as I got elected as senior patrol leader, there was a whole new influx of like 12 scouts fresh out of cub scouts, so there was a lot of these really younger boys. I was 16 at the time, so there were 11 and 12, and so I didn't really know quite what to do and there was a bit of chaos at first.

So that was one of the difficulties I had to go through. The young scouts had their difficulties and had to mature up a little bit and stuff like that.

So that was one of the difficulties. Another of the difficulties was that I read about the new scout patrol and the concept of the new scout patrol in the scout handbook.

So I wanted to try that out and so one group of the new scouts of like six or seven I had set apart to be part of the new scout patrol- actually two of the patrols, since there was like 12, 12 new cub scouts, I basically had all the older scouts being two separate patrols and all the younger scout being two separate patrols. And that wasn't really. That wasn't really smiled upon by some of the adults and the scouters who were running the troop, because there was a tendency for these patrols to get off focus a while and get kind of wild at sometimes that I tried to spend a lot of time talking with them and helping and stuff but it would and I knew it would take time in order to kind of transition them to a more mature scout patrol. But that was probably one of the main things that they disagreed with me on. They wanted them to be split up among the other patrols and have an older scout as the patrol leader for each of those patrols.

So I suppose I kind of disagreed with that for several reasons. I guess you probably don't want me to go through all the reasons now, but that was one of the main challenges I had- or confrontations, I guess you could say- with the scouters in my troop.

So how did that turn out? My Scoutmaster had a certain thing where he would have no one- no senior patrol leader- run two terms in a row.

So after my first term I wasn't allowed to run for re-election. So the next in line for me- because all of the older scouts of my generation had by that time pretty much moved on- the next in line for me were a couple years younger than me. They were still kind of inexperienced and they didn't really know a lot about what I was trying to do with the troop.

And so once they had gotten elected, the Scoutmaster or several of the scouters came and they decided that they would go ahead and split up all the patrols and stuff. So eventually it did end up happening, but they did wait till after I was not senior patrol leader anymore.

So I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Did you talk to the new SPL and patrol leaders about your philosophy?

Did you try to pass that down a little bit? I did, I did, I had kind of I tried to have, especially up to the time whenever the new election was going to take place, I tried to have as many patrol leader council meetings that I could because with a bit of the patrol leaders and my assistant senior patrol leaders I had two assistant senior patrol leaders, so I tried to tell them during that time, I guess, more about my philosophy of the patrols and how I had come to view them and stuff, and to some extent I do believe they absorbed it and they took it in. But also they were more- the scouts particular were less inclined to take things as serious as I was and they kind of just would go along with the flow.

Whenever the Scoutmaster kind of came and said, well, this is how it's going to be, we got to do this or do that, they kind of just went along with the flow and, especially since they were new senior patrol leaders, they wouldn't feel like they wanted to come out and openly disagree with the Scoutmaster. So, okay, there's some interesting, a bunch of interesting questions here, because our troop does not do new scout patrols.

But that's really the decision of the PLC and having lots of PLC meetings is really important and I think that's a great thing that you've helped instill on that troop. We just reorganized the patrols because we have more scouts, we have a ton of new scouts and so we do more instruction on the patrols and so we like to have older and younger scouts in the same patrols. But that's you know. There's really different ways to do it.

New scout patrols can work too, so I think it was sounds great to push for that and I think it's. It sounds kind of like you know the troop has won and that you've got more PLC meetings and we're thinking about the new scouts. What we spend a lot of time doing on the blog and on the podcast is trying to give as much information and ideas and the benefit of our experience is possible to help people kind of sort their way through some of the stickier parts of working with youth leaders. You sound kind of like an ideal youth leader in a lot of ways. You had this kind of initiative and this kind of passion for making things happen and to me it's kind of. It's a little sad that you felt like you got thwarted there along the way, but it's a pretty common thing actually.

Well, in the end, if you'd been mentoring the SPL and you guys had decided he was really strong on doing it the other way. That's fine with me. The thing that I noted was you said that they went along with the scoutmasters.

Well, maybe the scoutmasters could have let you and the SPL and the patrol leaders kind of make that decision, and I think somebody shouldn't have necessarily have to be really direct- like maybe you were on occasions- to have that kind of freedom to do that. If a guy is going to show a lot of initiative and if he's going to really move things forward and he has a vision for the way this is going to work, I can't see anything but letting him follow that.

We're looking back on some years of experience and we've been around the block a few times so we understand that this is going to work. What do we tell Enoch's scout leader when he's in the middle of this and Enoch is just going great guns and pushing forward and he's shown all this initiative and everything like that?

What do we tell the scoutmaster who's a little nervous about this because he's never seen this before? Well, if I could, I would say: make sure you're doing the scout program, but in the areas of the program that's up to the boys, leave it to them, to the senior scout and the SPL and the younger scouts go out of the room and leave them alone. When they go to organize patrols, they get 12 new guys leave.

So, guys, you got to deal with this instead of then saying, well, I'm the scoutmaster and I think it ought to go this way. Do your best to let them make the decision and work it out, and that's to me that's key.

Yeah, we in our recent patrol reorganization, the youth leaders know the other boys so much better than I do and they're so careful in organizing this. You know, the signature mistake when I was scoutmaster was letting an adult reorganize the patrols after the scouts had done it right. I would say: make sure you're talking, put your hands in your pockets, and it's really hard as an adult leader if your SPL is not up to the job.

You know six months or a year they'll learn a lot. And if your patrol leaders are good, your troop is going to be fine.

You know people are learning when they're making mistakes. Can you, as a senior patrol, make any mistakes? I made a lot of mistakes the way I organized the patrols to begin with. I'm still not sure if that was the best way or not and I'm still firm about this and I do think that once they had been started they probably shouldn't have been changed just because I saw the aftermath of what happened after that. But I'm still not sure whether I had set everything up right to begin with and I know for sure that my communication skills were definitely lacking in a lot of areas. I guess probably the way I tried to present my ideas after the scoutmaster and to the older scouters probably wasn't the best way.

A lot of this stuff. It's hard to see what I'm missing, but I know that I am missing a lot, not only in my communication skills but kind of my way to actually step back and look at the overall picture. And I do know that after this tenure as senior patrol leader I definitely know a lot more about not only communication but also organization and troop organization and all that stuff. I know a ton more about that than before I started.

So a lot of that was through mistakes I made. It's not a failure if you learn something from it. It's really important looking back on it. If you had to do it again, you would do it better, and the next time you would do it better instead of making the same mistakes over and over again and you probably won't ever be SPL again. Someday you'll be something else- head of a scrum team, making software, working as a manager or being a scoutmaster- who knows. But those lessons will have been learned from mistakes over again.

So those aren't failures and it's good that you're rolling them around in your mind now. That's really good.

As scout leaders, we're in danger sometimes of trying to keep everything looking good and trying to have a really smooth, efficient program and that when things are a little chaotic or our youth leaders are making mistakes, they reflect poorly on us and so we try and coerce some changes to the way things are done. What we're doing right now is we're talking to somebody who has benefited from going through this kind of process of giving everything a try, making a few mistakes along the way, maybe doubting a little bit and everything. But that is the whole value of that youth leader experience in my mind is getting to go through that process and being able to do that as independent from somebody making judgments about your decisions or trying to coerce you into doing things a certain way. I just don't think there's anything that can replace that.

Scouting has actually changed one of my little evaluation methods for whether I want to take advice from somebody, and my new question is: have they made more mistakes than I have? But if they have made fewer mistakes than I have, then they probably do not know more well.

That's probably why people listen to us, Walter, because decades put all together, we have what about 5 or 6 decades of mistakes. You're being very kind, so make the mistakes while you're young, yes, and make the mistakes while you're millage. Make the mistakes while you're old, but you're doing something. And it all sounds a little trite because we hear this all the time: if you're not making mistakes, you're not doing anything.

You know, Enoch, the things that you went through as SPL. It's not natural for most adults who are teachers, managers, possibly military folks, it's not natural for them to do the best thing for you and your fellow scouts.

We don't always do the best job at letting you do what you need to do to learn that, and so we hope to encourage adult leaders to do that. I'm curious actually, Enoch: is there another place where you could have made the same mistakes or learned the same things?

Any place else- sports or school- where you could have learned the things that you learned in scouts? No, not so far. Maybe later, when I get more out into the workforce and stuff, I will have seen that if I hadn't learned these stuff earlier I would have been learning it now.

But so far scouting has been the only place- and I credit the whole commitment for this- scouting has been the only place that I've really truly developed my character. Another part of the article you wrote for me was the relationship between you and your dad in scouts. Tell me a little bit about that.

Well, I definitely know that I owe most, if not all, of what I was able to do with scouting and what I became through scouting to my dad. Like I said in the article, he didn't have any scouting experience. I joined the troop. He didn't have any experience as a Scoutmaster, scout leader or even as a scout. He wanted to be involved in the troop. He wanted to be involved in the camping trips and stuff.

Now sometimes his work would prevent him from doing that, but I always knew that he wanted to be there and he wanted to and he cared about the way things were happening. And the more time I spent in scouting, the more time I was able to contrast this with the other scouts and their relationships.

Unfortunately, you know a lot of the other scouts I could see they didn't have the same relationship with their dad that I had and I can see that their dad- you know, often times even their mom- just brought them to the scout meetings. Maybe their mom stayed for a few minutes or whatever.

But you know, sometimes I couldn't even tell who the dads were and the only time I even saw a dad was at maybe a court of honor. So I became really appreciative of the role of a dad- you know, father- in the life of the scout, because he communicated with me, he talked to me, he gave me feedback.

He said: you know well, when you said this, you really came across this way- and I know you didn't mean to, but that's the way you came across- and he really helped just by talking with me, giving me feedback and stuff. He just gave me so much advice. I can't think him enough for that.

Enoch, do you do any canoeing or backpacking? Oh yeah, when I can, does your dad go? He has, yes, he has.

Have you found your? Have you found your roles, beginning to reverse over time from when you were, when you were a little kid and he was kind of looking after you and sort of watching to see if you set your tent up to you.

Now kind of looking after him and checking up on him occasionally and okay, I guess. So I'm not, I wouldn't quite put it in a way.

You know, roles reversed, but I can see how our relationship has kind of changed and matured over time as I matured and more on the level, eye to eye, as opposed to dad, down to kid, yeah well, yeah, kind of I still look at- and I never won't be able to do this- I still look at him as my dad, my father. That that relationship, but I do.

You know, I do more things, I guess a lot more things on my own, and he hasn't been able to participate near as much just because of his work. You know, while I regretted that he still spent the time to talk with me and more became an advisor rather than actually coming through and helping me to step through things, I started my Eagle Scout project which I've been working on for quite a while now. He's been a really great source of advice, but he hasn't done anything really for me as far as I have to write all the emails, I have to make all the communications. I have to do all that, but I still rely on his advice and communication.

I still say, you know, hey, how does this sound? Does this sound like I'm coming across the wrong way and stuff like that?

So it has changed. So, yeah, that's really your question.

Yeah, yeah, one of the bits from training, from the older wood batch courses: use your resources, and your resources are pretty much everybody you know and your family especially. Now you've been through this process.

What's happening right now is you've got a lot of other Scoutmasters listening in and they have listened to this story and they are going to be thinking, yeah, this is kind of familiar, this is happening right now in my troop, or I had this happen in my troop, or this could certainly happen with my troop. So, Enoch, here's your big chance.

What do you tell these guys? I can't really think that I would be giving advice to people.

You know, of course we've had a lot more experience in scouting than I have, but, like I said in my post, the responsibility of the senior patrol leader and the patrol leader and stuff- it does mean a lot. I took it a little bit more seriously than a lot of my peers did. But still I know from experience and talking with them and stuff that they take it seriously too and although they may not take the initiative, a lot of times it's easier to let somebody else kind of run and head the show and stuff- but they really do take the responsibility seriously. But the only way they will take it really seriously is if you take it seriously too as the Scoutmaster. I was reading in a book about scouting the other day. I was talking about how the Scoutmaster should making like an announcement to the troop, the whole.

He should follow the chain of command down and allow the patrol leaders to spread that onto their patrol and stuff like that- just little things like that- shows the scouts that hey, the Scoutmaster- this guy I respect- is depending upon me to do this. He's depending upon me to to help my patrol and make sure my patrol knows and is on the right track, and that is really important.

And I think the more I've learned in scouting, the more important I've seen that that is the responsibility of the patrol leaders and the basically the scout leaders. So what you're telling me then is that even when it doesn't look like these guys care, or that they take their responsibility very seriously.

They really do, and they want you, they want the leader to to recognize that and say: you know I'm counting on you, I need you to do this for me and you know I can't help you. You know you've got to be able to figure this out on your own and you know it's a little different. Of course it's different. They've never done something like this before and often times, if they're really young, like 11 or 12, they there. It's just a whole new paradigm in their life to kind of be a take charge and be a leader. But they do have that.

They do have that inside of them and they want to. They want to, they want to help hold that responsibility and they want to live up to it. Yeah, that's a very powerful message. That's very, very powerful and that's coming from somebody who is younger than us and still is a scout. One of the things I love about our troop is that the scouts will will step up and say when a if an adult is trying to run things, they will say, no, that can be really, really difficult to do, and and they'll step in for someone else and it's a.

It's a great thing because that's you know, they've really picked up what it's about. Enoch, if you had joined at 11, 10 and a half or 11, would you like to have been a 13 or 13 and a half year old Eagle Scout?

Well, if I were to go back to to being 11, I wouldn't really know. I mean, and I would probably want to get it as soon as possible and the thought of being a really young Eagle Scout would appeal to me.

But from my perspective now, I wouldn't have it any other way. I mean, for instance, I I kind of felt this way a little bit earlier whenever I was a, a star scout, I think I. What I did was I passed up the opportunity one time I could have had a board of review for live scout, but I didn't.

I waited till the next term, which is, like you know, three or four months later after that, whenever I could go in for a review and I. The reason I waited is because I felt that I didn't have enough experience to hold the.

You know the title and you know I found out that that's that's not kind of a way of looking at things a lot of other people don't really look at, but the way it is now. I can tell you that if I would have got my Eagle Scout at 13, I would have missed out on so, so many lessons that I've learned through my project.

Now I chose something that was kind of difficult. So you know my project for over a year now but it's really challenged me.

I mean, I'm working with organization and different skills that you know are similar to stuff adults experience and adults have told me that and I know that this gives me such a great advantage to go through this now and learn all this now and be really challenged at this stage of my life, because I will. I will be a lot more prepared for whenever I get older.

Does that answer the question? Yeah, that's, that's an amazing answer. Great answer.

What is your project? It's a bit of a different project and I always kind of fear explaining it to other people because some people are like: what in the world is this?

But have any of you all heard of amateur radio, ham radio? A little bit.

I think Walter has heard of that a little bit. So there's a huge network of these amateur radio operators around the United States who do a lot of community service.

They do weather spotting anyway my dad has been into that for quite a while, since he was really young, and he kind of introduced me to that and so I'm a licensed amateur radio operator as well. I just kind of had the idea to install a amateur radio repeater.

So basically what this is going to do and is going to take transmissions from a little short range transmitters and be able to transmit it over quite a wide range of areas around this location, and I hope, my hope is that this will be used for a lot of stuff like storm tracking and that kind of stuff That sounds familiar at all. Peters are critical in emergency response and the slogan is: when all else fails, and with your radio, Exactly. Walter is quite an enthusiast For the past. Like I don't know three years, three or four years now- I've been going down to the National Scouting Museum in Irving in October for the annual jamboree on the air that they put on, and I've really enjoyed that. Yes, jamboree on the air is the largest scouting event every year, 700,000 people. I got a post on my blog.

If anyone is interested in ham radio, I got a post on my blog. You'll have to go back in the history a little bit, the archives at the blog, but it's on reasons that I think everybody should be involved in ham radio, or amateur radio as it's called.

So if anybody's interested, just check that out. Well, I certainly appreciate everybody joining us for a Scott master panel discussion. Enoch, very interesting, inspiring stuff. Really appreciate you being with us.

Well, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it and I hope that somebody maybe can learn through the mistakes I made.

So That's what we're all doing. Walter Underwood, K6WRU. Clear. Larry, we really do appreciate you being here. Walter, we appreciate you being here and we look forward to doing this again next time. You're welcome, Clark, it's been great.