Scoutmaster Podcast 138

And now it's the old Scoutmaster.

So what's the most important tool in any Swiss Army knife? Well, the nail file, of course. Why? Well, because after you've opened all the other pieces of the Swiss Army knife, you're going to have at least one broken finger.

Hey, this is my pass, number 138.

Yeah, Hey.

Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. this is Clarke Green Looking in the mail bag this week. let's see. Jim Woods wrote in about our post- it's four ways to be a leader. that was on the blog this week. He says this is golden. we have troop elections in November. I'd like your permission to use this on our application. Well, certainly, Jim, go right ahead, and thanks for being in touch. Thanks for the kind words. Mike Lotties wrote in about scout parent problems- Another post that went on the blog this past week. Great insights in a world where common courtesy is not all that common. This is a great primer for new volunteers and a good refresher for those of us who've been around for a while. Thanks for getting in touch, Mike, and once again, thank you for the kind words. Jason Reedy wrote in to say hello, I'm a new Scoutmaster of a new Boy Scout troop, Troop 101 in Colonial Heights, Virginia. Thanks for your blog. it's great. I've spent a lot of time here since discovering it recently And I look forward to reading it in the future. Well, thank you, Jason, and congratulations on being a new Scoutmaster with a new troop. Mike Rossender wrote in. he said: I just read your post on the phases of leadership development. It's a brilliant presentation: clear, succinct and actionable. I'd like to use it. Is it your own creation? If so, how can I contact you to get copyright permission? Well, thanks very much, Mike. Thanks for getting in touch. I'm glad that you're finding that stuff useful And, folks, you can use anything you find on the blog. that is stuff that I've created. Alls I ask for is that you attribute it to me, Tell everybody where you found it and that you don't modify it And you don't have to write and ask my special permission for it. You got it right now. A couple of weeks ago over on Kickstarter, we started with a project called the Stuff Adult Leaders Say T-Shirt And you know what It took right off. We got up to this week, about 50%, and now we're in the home stretch. I think we've got about 8 or 10 days left. We still need to get about 30 or 40 more backers to make the project a reality. Now, Kickstarter project is something that you go and you pledge to, And if enough people pledge, then the product gets fully funded and becomes a reality. And the reason that I chose to do it this way is that I don't have the money to invest in a big, giant pile of t-shirts and then maybe sell them and distribute them over a long period of time, And it just seemed like the Kickstarter idea is a very good match. Well, if you're thinking about going ahead and becoming a backer, this is the week to do it, Because what will happen is that, I think on Sunday, that project closes down and you can't be a backer after that. You can't get a t-shirt after that And, like I said, as of right now when I'm recording, we're about 50% there, So that's another 30 to 40 people need to sign in and become a backer to make the project a reality, And you can find out how to do that by going to scoutmastercgcom. You'll see links in the right hand column to a t-shirt just for us, And you'll also see a widget that will take you directly to the Kickstarter project, And I really appreciate those of you who've been backers and those of you who've sent suggestions about what should end up on the t-shirt. So this week on the Scoutmaster Podcast, we've got a couple of things. First of all, in Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less, we're going to discuss why smart people are often bad teachers. If you're a bad teacher, that means you're a smart person Who knows? But we'll talk about that more in a minute. And then I've got a reply to an email about Maripatches. So let's get started, shall we?

Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less.

So one of my contributors, who you hear on the Scoutmaster panel discussion, Walter Underwood, sent me a link to an article by Burke Camber, who is an engineer And he has a blog, And this article is titled: Effective Teaching Is a Long Con. The central thought here is that smart people are bad teachers. So how does this apply to Scoutmasters? Well, you know, if you're reasonably experienced and you're skilled, you're going to sit down and instruct scouts in a scout skill or you're training and mentoring your youth leadership. We have to accept something: Being smart and experienced and skillful does not make you a good instructor. It certainly helps if you are, But you can't get by on being a good instructor or a mentor just on being smart and experienced alone, Camber said in his article. he says smart people like to tell the whole story and end up reinventing the universe when all they set out to do was to teach a lesson on a single topic. Telling the whole story is kind of frustrating to the people you're trying to teach. It's too much to take in all at once. The smart person tends to forget that they learn the whole story over years of intense learning and experience. It's hard for the smart person to let go of pieces of the story, to consciously admit them, even if they're not of immediate importance. To me, that's a very fascinating and useful insight for us in our work as scout leaders. My temptation when I am instructing a skill or I'm mentoring youth leaders, is to be very verbose and to tell them everything, To tell them absolutely everything that's involved in the subject. So you know when this happens, right, You're instructing or you're mentoring or talking to scouts and you look at them and you see this kind of either a bored look or a distracted look or a look that says I am really hoping he's going to be finished very soon, Trying to escape, you know, And as we go through the fourth digression from the lesson or message that we're trying to communicate. we know exactly what's going on, right? So a good illustration of this: you're going to teach a scout how to tie a bowling. alright, Don't start with where the rope comes from and what kind of plant it's made out of. Teach the boy a bowling. alright. If you're mentoring youth leaders, you don't need to talk to them about every aspect of your experience and leadership and add in 17 different kinds of anecdotes and illustrations. You need to get to them a succinct message about the particular skill or the particular thing that they're working at. right. then You know, we don't have to give them the whole world and the whole story all at once, but we can kind of indicate that there's a bigger world out there, And Campbell calls this leaving a little trail of breadcrumbs. okay, Walter suggested this and we'll go back to the illustration of tying knots. So you're teaching a scout to use a square knot and you might drop a little breadcrumb like this: The square knot. you know that's useful for joining two ropes. Rock climbers use other knots that are stronger and easier on tie, but we're just going to concentrate on the square knot right now. You know that little breadcrumb there. Yeah, you know. so you're talking to your senior patrol leader and you're saying: well, the patrol leader's council needs to have a good agenda and I would like to see what you come up with for that agenda. There's a lot of places where you can learn how agendas are made and things like that. but concentrate on what you're going to do for the next few meetings and the next couple of addings and see what kind of an agenda you come up with. In other words, I've dropped a little breadcrumb there. There's a possibility that I might learn about how to do this in another place, or there is another level of complexity or interest or knowledge that I can obtain about a given subject. What's great about scoutmasters and adults volunteering and scouting is the intensity with which they approach the idea of instructing and helping and mentoring youth. I think that intensity is great. What the problem is with that intensity is a lot of times it gets expressed in a way where it's inaccessible. Mike Lotties wrote in to the blog on another post this week and he mentioned a Baden Powell quote that I think is particularly applicable right here. If a man cannot make his point to keen boys in 10 minutes, he ought to be shot. So when instructing and mentoring, we want to focus, We want to get on to the most useful information and we don't have to show the scouts the entire world every time we speak to them. I think we're going to find out that if we think about this it'll make us better instructors and mentors and it will make us more effective in our work as scout leaders.

In 1928,, 19-year-old Paul Cyple, an eagle scout from Erie, Pennsylvania, was picked in a nationwide contest to accompany the first bird expedition to Antarctica. The story of his life could almost be written in terms of the merit badges he earned when he was 14,, 15, and 16 years old. Dr Cyple has continued to play an active part in the scout movement. I wish every boy in America could be a scout and I'm convinced that every scout who takes his rank requirements and his merit badges seriously will find, as I have, that such preparedness is the key to many doors. Find me a letter, send it by name Email. that is folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails.

I had an interesting email discussion a week or so ago with Frank Maynard. He got this question and we discussed it back and forth a little bit so we're going to talk about it. This comes from a Scoutmaster, He says. I recently discussed troop meetings with a Scoutmaster from another troop and I found it very interesting because they have quite a different approach to troop meetings. In their troop the scouts meet for the first half of the meeting and conduct patrol business and demonstrations and the like. The second half of the meeting the boys attend merit badge workshops and they have four offered each quarter and they rotate between the merit badges. The boys attend merit badges they are working on for the entire two or three month periods. Required merit badges are covered here. This method's quite different from others where I've read that merit badge instruction is discouraged at troop meetings. I wonder what you take out of this and if you think it's a workable format for troop meetings. Frank and I went back and forth about an answer and we both agreed: no, this really isn't a workable format for troop meetings. I want you to get this message. Not that you're not allowed to do merit badges in troop meetings, because I guess there would be a way where I could understand that that might be an interesting thing to do. If the patrol leaders council decided that they wanted all to pursue a particular merit badge and they set it up and they got a merit badge counselor and they worked it out that way. I can understand the way that that would work. but setting this up just as kind of like this is the way we do business. first of all, we're going to have a meeting and we're going to have these merit badge sessions because we need to work on merit badges. Well, that's not really why we're doing merit badges. This is the important message here. Don't look at this as just like a set policy where now you're not allowed to do merit badges in meetings. I heard Clark say that on the podcast and that must be a national policy or something like that. Don't think about it that way. Why do we have merit badges in the first place? Why do we have them? Well, they definitely communicate useful skills. Why has scouting decided that merit badges are done this way, with counselors and stuff like that? It seems kind of inefficient, doesn't it? I mean, the troop meeting approach that's described here is much more efficient. Boys will get more merit badges and they'll learn more skills. But what we're missing what 80% of merit badges are set up to do? in my humble opinion, 80% of what a scout gets from doing most merit badges is derived from the process. Now, if he benefits by learning a specific knowledge or skill, that's great. But he's got to find a counselor, He's got to interact with that counselor, He's got to learn to manage his time, He's got to work on getting those skills And I think that's a really important process. Now scouts can do this in twos or threes and sometimes they do it in groups and things like that. I don't have an objection to scouts earning merit badges whatever way they can. But if we look at why we do merit badges, the way we do them, why it makes sense to do them that way, we have to honor the process. So most of us are pretty far away from high school. Most of us are pretty far away from college. at this point, And here's what I want to ask: you Try and come up with a specific skill or piece of knowledge you learned from college or a high school class. You probably be able to locate something like that after you think about it for a while. But what you really learned in your career in college was how to think and how to go through a process of learning things. We see that in the merit badge program too. You learn how to go through this process, You learn these social skills, You develop self-confidence. Ask any scout about a merit badge that he earned in summer camp this summer. Ask him to give you three or four different ideas or skills from that merit badge. He's not necessarily going to know them And that's not the single most important thing about the merit badge itself. Yes, we want them to learn skills. Yes, we want them to be able to demonstrate them. Yes, some of those skills are very important. Yes, those skills will develop lifetime hobbies or maybe even lead to a profession. But really, what's important about it is the process that was involved in it. Every once in a while you read about a scout that really gets excited about merit badges and they decide they want to complete all 130 or whatever there are right now And they go through that. and then there's always discussions about why all he probably didn't really learn very much from each of these merit badges. Well, you know what He benefited from the process. He benefited from going through that process And now he has basically an encyclopedia in his head of many different things And he knows- not necessarily from whether merit badge- exactly how to calculate wind chill, But he knows that it's possible to do so and he knows where to find that. information Process is really important. when it comes to the merit badge program. The short answer is no. it's really not a great idea to take merit badges out of this process that's been designed and to put them in a troop meeting. Yes, it makes them more accessible. Yes, it makes the whole thing a little bit more efficient for scouts,