Scoutmaster Podcast 14

And now to you, Scoutmaster. There's three ways for a Scoutmaster to get something done. Naturally, they can do it themselves. That's the first way. Second, they can request that the troop committee take care of it. And third, is to tell the Scouts that they're absolutely forbidden from doing it.

Yeah, that'll get it done, won't it? Welcome back. This is podcast number 14. Hey! Nice. Hey!

Hi, welcome back to the Scoutmasters podcast. My name is Clarke Green.

You know what I managed to do this week? I managed to kill my Twitter account. That is a sentence I never thought I would ever hear myself say. I killed a Twitter account. Yeah, I had a Twitter account at Scoutmasterblog. And I was doing something, and somehow I smashed it.

And I'm not really quite sure what happened. But now I have a Twitter account called ScoutmasterCG. ScoutmasterCG.

So if you want to go back to following me on Twitter, you're going to have to have heard this and then go back to ScoutmasterCG. I'm really sorry. I don't know how it happened. Oh, well. Hey, this week on the podcast, we're going to start off with Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. And we're going to talk a little bit about training, trusting, and letting as far as it concerns our youth leaders.

Then I have an interview with author Richard Bennett, who has written a book called Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Boy Scouts. And there'll be information on the blog as to where you can buy the book.

It's well worth it, in my humble opinion. Well worth it. Then we'll finish up with our third installment of Avoiding Eagle Scout drama.

So that's a pretty full slate. Let's get ourselves to it. Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less.

Good old Bill Hillcourt. Gosh, what a guy. He wrote the first patrol leader's manual and is famous for having said, train them, trust them, and let them lead.

Now, there's a formula for a youth-led organization, a youth-led troop. Train them, trust them, let them lead. Training. Yeah, they need to be trained.

Now, one really strong training method is not necessarily to do like a two-week junior leader training thing or a weekend or something like that. It's called OJT, on-the-job training, as opposed to JLT, junior leader training. Where there's a decent example of active and engaged youth leadership in a troop, what I find to be particularly effective is to train your new leaders using the existing leaders, using the experiences, and do it right on the job. And that seems to work very, very well.

As a matter of fact, that's worked well in my troop for a number of years now. If you don't have that established, then it might be necessary to go to some kind of a protracted youth leader training event and to give the guys a real good picture.

The other thing to do is to observe a troop with a well-developed youth leadership. But training and having that is the most important thing. Training, to me, is coaching and mentoring. It's a constant thing in the life of the troop. It happens in that five minutes before the meeting and that five minutes after the meeting in a little huddle on a camping trip where you're going to mentor and suggest actions and ask a lot of questions. Training.

Training never stops. Trusting. Wow, it's hard to trust youth leaders to begin with. It's very, very difficult. But I'll tell you something. The more responsibility they have, the more latitude they are given, the better they perform.

And I can't stress that enough. That is actually the way that it happens. Give them responsibility. Give them a lot of latitude. Give them decision-making power. Give them authority to do what they need to do.

And they will absolutely shock you with their skill and the ability that they have to take those things on and do them. But trusting, it's not easy.

Once you've jumped off the cliff, you know, you better start to fly. And that is actually the feeling that you get the first few times that you have to go through trusting youth leaders to really take over and do the job of running their troop. Training, trusting, and letting them lead. Letting is a pretty important thing. It's pretty close to trusting. But it's something that you have to renew every single time you function as a scout leader.

You have to let them lead. You have to let them lead. You have to let them lead. You can't stand in their way.

You can't constantly be, you know, coaching and mentoring and calling them apart and micromanaging in that way every single little thing they do. You have to let them go. Let them lead. They'll make mistakes. There'll be difficulties along the way.

But you know what? They're going to do just fine. Train them. Trust them. Let them lead. Bill Hillcourt wrote that.

Oh, it's got to be 60 years ago now. But it has proven itself over time in scout troops all over the place. And even with the one that you're going to meet with this week. I'm talking to Richard Bennett from Irving, Texas. And Richard has written a book called Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Boy Scouts. And it's the story of his Boy Scout troop, Troop 826.

I have really gotten attached to this book. And I'm very happy to be interviewing Richard from his home in Irving today.

How are you doing, Richard? Doing fine. Thank you, Clark. Tell you what I really like about this book. It is honest.

The first thing I wanted to do was to tell the story about the troop and the scoutmaster, Mr. Street, Warren Street.

And then I wanted to talk about the boys that I was in the troop with. They were my friends.

And then beyond that, it was basically the story of the Boy Scouts itself. And what a good program it was for us kids who were growing up.

So tell me a little bit about Irving about 40 years ago. Well, Irving is a suburb of Dallas. And it used to be country. And we used to have fields out here and rolling plains.

And in fact, Irving was right next to a ranch, the Carpenter Ranch, which is all now Las Colinas and Valley Ranch, where the cowboys have their training field. But when I was a kid, that was all farmland. Here you are growing up in Irving.

And what got you interested in the scouts at the time? Basically, my big brother, my big brother David, when he went into something, I, of course, I wanted to do it also, you know, because I didn't want him to have all the fun. He got into Boy Scouts.

We were in Cub Scouts together, but then he got into Boy Scouts when he was 11. And I had to wait for two years, you know, and listen to his stories, telling about campouts and the adventures they'd have. And I'd even go up to scout meetings at night. I was at a local schoolhouse.

And so I would go up there and watch the boys have fun through the windows. And I thought, man, this is what I want to do.

So when I was 11, I joined. And I wasn't the best scout, but I was okay. I guess I was typical. That's one of the things I really like about this, Richard.

That's the voice of, you know, 90% of the scouts that go through this program. Well, I just, I would just try to tell the truth as I saw it and as I remember it.

And, you know, now I'm in my 50s. I look back on a lot of the bright spots in my life, and that was one of them.

And I quit, you know, way too soon. And now I'm going, what was I thinking?

That was the most fun part of my teenage years, I think, you know. Tell me a little bit about Mr. Street, your scoutmaster. Mr. Street, Warren Street.

Well, he's what you call a rugged individualist. And World War II came along, and he joined the military. And he made a career out of it.

In his 50s, he was in better shape than we were when we were in our adolescent years. Yeah.

So, and he was, and he loved camping, you know, and so that was his thing. He loved camping, and he liked having fun with the kids. And he looked out for us. He was a second dad to a lot of us.

I think that's why some of the kids latched on to him like they did, you know. He was like a second dad. Me and my brother came from a pretty stable home. We really didn't have a real need for a second dad. But it was nice that he was there.

Now, did some of that military experience that he had carry over into his job as a scoutmaster? Well, you know, he didn't push it. But there was a kind of military bearing, you know. But he never did really, he never bragged about his days in the military or anything. He never talked about it. Right.

Because we wouldn't have understood it. Mr. Street had a good sense of humor. He wasn't what you'd call a jokester, but he was a prankster. Uh-huh.

He would pull pranks on us every now and then. You know, and there was a story in the book about the radiation man. Oh, right. I was going to say radioactive man, but you're right. Radiation man. Right.

We kids, we'd get out of our tents at night and go, you know, try and break the rules. So he would prowl the grounds at night in his radiation garb outfit. And this was after telling the story of radiation man by the campfire. I love that part of the book. I love that story. Oh, yeah.

In 2006, a bunch of members of Troop 826 got back together for a reunion. That's right. We'd had a few birthday parties for Mr. Street.

You know, he's still alive. He's 87 now. Uh-huh.

But when he started hitting the 80s, you know, we started saying, you know, let's get back together. And Mike Quine, an Eagle Scout, he put together a website of our troop. And we all gathered one time for his birthday. And we had a birthday cake for him and surprised him and showed him the website.

And then in 2006, we had a reunion campout. And we went on this campout, and Mr. Street did all the cooking for us.

Well, he already knew how you guys cooked, and he wasn't about to let you do that, right? That's probably right. You're probably right. I saw how the stories that were told there at the campout and people reminiscing about their days in scouting. And I thought, this means something. It means a lot to these men, grown men in their 50s.

It's hard to know until you're a bit older what those experiences do to shape your life. You don't really understand it. No, you don't. I didn't. Tell me a little bit about your first campout. That's always pretty memorable.

My first campout was my summer camp. I went to Camp Wisdom when I was 11 years old in 1968. And, of course, I was tagging along with my big brother, and I got in his way. No doubt. But I was there, and that was my first experience being around with the older guys. And that was my first time to be away from home.

And so it was a little tough on me emotionally. That was like a milestone. And the rest of the campouts were fairly easy compared to that. But at a summer camp, you don't have to cook for yourself.

Well, that's right. So that takes one of the impediments away. Yeah, that's true. If you do it in mine, Richard, there's a piece about your first campout.

Would you mind reading that? First campout. Things don't work in the country like they do in the city. There's no heating or air conditioning, no beds, no mother to cook, no father to tell us what to do next, no television, and no telephones. Most of us weren't used to taking orders from anyone outside the family or classroom. Here, we had to learn teamwork and cooperation, or else it wasn't going to be an easy time.

Your first week at Camp Wisdom. Right.

What responsibilities did you have, and how did you approach it? My responsibility was just lay low, stay out of trouble, and watch. Because I didn't know what was going on. I had no clue. But here I am around a guy who's just a year or two or three years older than I am, telling me what to do. And I had a hard time with that.

Were you the youngest guy in the bunch at the time? At the time, I was. Oh, and you're somebody's little brother to boot. Right.

Oh, well, see, that's not easy for anybody. Oh, and I got picked on. And David, everybody liked David, my big brother.

You know, he's the life of the party. Right. If somebody is having a hard time with David, they're not going to take it out on David. They'll take it out on me.

So, you know, I got to hear all the, you know, how I don't like your brother stories, stuff like that. The book is a lot of your own recollections, and then recollections from a lot of your fellow scouts. That's right. The thing that I find kind of amazing is everybody remembers what it was like to be 11, 12, 13, 14 years old. They remember that pretty clearly. And they remember they can look back through the eyes of that boy and at the experiences and talk about it still.

Well, you know, you give them enough time with a tape recorder. I was there when most of them were there, and I said, oh, don't you remember this? They go, oh, yeah, that happened. And when you have two guys together, the story comes together a lot clearer.

You know, some of the most memorable parts of scouting are not in the scout handbook. You talk about one thing, and you talk about it pretty extensively.

So it made an impression on you and your fellow scouts, and that's the geek. Well, there was a guy named Jack Rankin, and Jack Rankin owned this rubber mask. It looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame. The eyes were misshapen. The face was misshapen. But he brings this rubber mask to the camp out, and if we just looked at that, our imagination just took off.

Uh-huh. It must have just looked like a piece of gold. Oh, it was.

The older guys, my big brother being one of them, you know, one at a time they would take the geek mask out and go raid other campers. Or, you know, when they were. Richard, you're not supposed to do that.

Well, I watched it. I didn't do it. I just watched it. That's all I can tell about it. At night, when everybody's settling down and getting ready to sleep, they'd go into other camps and just scare these kids to death. The funniest part was listening to the screams about a half mile away.

Now, you know, you're not allowed to do that, Richard. Maybe now. I don't know how it works. But then it was hard.

The boys that are in my troop today, if you were to present them with that mask today, do you think they would do anything different? Probably not.

Probably not, but they'd probably be more coordinated because now they've got cell phones. They can tell you, you know, they can coordinate where the positions are, you know, and stuff like that.

And then they've probably got a camera and they could record a video of it and get it online. I'll put it on YouTube.

Another thing I like about the book is it's not about an idealized experience in Boy Scouts. It's about an experience in Boy Scouts.

And that's why I think it rings so true. But at one point, you as an adult and Mr. Street talked and you expressed to him that you were kind of disappointed that you didn't go that far in Scouts. That's right.

What was his reply to you? He said, well, it's not like Scouting is an Eagle factory.

And I thought, you know, he's right. It's not a factory, you know, to turn people out to be, you know, robots. Yeah. And that was another point of the book.

I didn't want kids today, if they ever got a hold of the book, I didn't want them to think that we were perfect. I think that's a really important thing for children to know.

That, you know, all these old people walking around, they had their achievements and disappointments. And the world is not all that cold and difficult a place. We had our little scrapes and fights and stuff like that.

Which I kind of, you know, we look back now, we go, what were we fighting about? You know, we should have been just having fun. I'm looking at page 161, looking toward the future.

Yeah, that first paragraph there, I think it might be a nice way to end our conversation. Thinking on my days with the Boy Scouts and Troop 826 gives me a sense of gratitude for Mr. Street and the volunteers who helped make our time with Scouting worth remembering. For me, though, these experiences remain in the past. For any young scout reading this, your experiences are in the future. If you want, you can go far, perhaps even to Eagle.

I've already pointed out that it's my belief that any scout who makes it that far has, for the most part, learned much of what he needs to know to be successful in his adult life. If you are willing, go as far as you can in your youth.

What do you think the most important message from your experience is? Well, if a scout troop is led by good men, if the young man can relate to the older men, that if a young man can learn to work with other people, make friends who are going as far as he wants to go, he'll go far. I certainly do appreciate having talked to you. Thanks for your interest.

Well, thank you, and thanks for the book. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I really have. I really, really have. We'll talk to you again soon.

Okay, Clark. So this is the third in our series of four little podcast segments about avoiding Eagle Scout drama.

And so far, we've determined that this kind of needless drama can be caused when a scoutmaster seeks to impose his ideal vision of an Eagle Scout on the advancement process. In addition, we've discovered that Dayton Powell founded scouting on the idea that it would offer scouts a way to challenge themselves towards achievement on an individual basis rather than against an ideal or a numeric standard.

As a rule of thumb in scouting, if there's no numerical metric applied to a requirement, it's improper and against policy to create one. So how in the world can a scoutmaster evaluate scouts fairly? If scouts challenge themselves against an internalized standard, then it is our task to learn how each scout evaluates their individual performance.

And that's why we have scoutmaster conferences rather than scoutmaster reviews. Conferring is an exchange of information, right? A discussion, a series of questions designed to establish a common understanding. And during conferences for ranks that require leadership tenure, I ask plenty of questions about the scouts' experience with the leadership position.

You know, what was your most and least successful moment as a leader? What would you change about the way you did the job?

How did you, how do you evaluate your performance? Do you think you fulfilled the requirement of being an active leader for that period of time? If I have an issue with the scout's performance and I haven't discussed this with him before the scoutmaster's conference, I'm not doing my job.

If I'm waiting until the scoutmaster's conference, if I'm watching the scout and he's disinterested and he's doing half a job and he's not really getting along very well and, you know, and I say, well, I'm going to get him at the scoutmaster's conference. Shame on me. That's an ambush. And that's, that, that just doesn't cut it.

If I have an ongoing discussion with the scout and he hasn't made any effort to address the issue, well, we'll discuss it further and try to find out what the real problem is. You have to be responsible as a scoutmaster.

And we have to keep an ongoing dialogue with our scouts that is marked by encouragement rather than fault finding. They address and resolve concerns and we don't let them become major problems. Adolescence is a long, infuriating power struggle sometimes. Our work demands we try to understand the process and not react out of anger. And we especially don't want to turn a scoutmaster's conference into some kind of sanctimonious exercise of our supposed power. Scout age boys do a lot of things they shouldn't and don't do a lot of things that they should.

Our role is to work with them and not against them. To recognize achievement and effort and downplay failure. And we accomplish this by helping our scouts develop personal goals.

Part of a scoutmaster's conference is, you know, what are your goals? What are you going to do next?

And then to overcome the difficulties they encounter and to deal with disappointment and meet the challenges that they define for themselves. A scout is going to be a lot harder on himself than you are.

A scout needs to be able to sit there and think about his past performance, what he has done, and then he needs to be able to answer for that. Be it good, bad, or indifferent.

And if we can teach them that skill, that is something that will follow them for the rest of their lives. We're going to wrap this up next time with a fourth installment discussing Eagle Scout drama.

So join me on the next podcast. Thank you for listening to this 14th edition of the Scoutmasters podcast. You can read the Scoutmaster blog at scoutmaster.typepad.com. We'll find links and information on how to find Richard Bennett's book that we talked about in the interview today.

You can follow us at Scoutmaster blog on Facebook and ScoutmasterCG now on Twitter.