Scoutmaster Podcast 174

This edition of Scoutmasters podcast is brought to you by the folks at Conahoe Creek Outfitters. They know camping and they know scouts. They are scouts And they know how to get you great gear and great prizes for all your camping adventures.

So go visit them at ConahoeCreekcom. That's C-O-N-O-H-O-Creekcom.

And now the old Scoutmaster Do have one question for you. Tell me what a scout banana is?

Yes, Well, you're going to need to listen to the entire podcast to get the answer to that question. It's worth it, Trust me. Hey, this is podcast number 175..

Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look at the mailbag.

Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look at the mailbag. Heard from Greg Gotcher- and he said this in the post- why you should be a scouting volunteer. You talked about not being sure if you're really suited to be a scouter. That's exactly where I was when I decided to take on the position of Tiger Cub den leader.

I continued with boys through wolves and bears, and next year I'll be the Weeblows den leader. Some were in there. I'm not sure when or where or how I became a cub master as well. Scouting kind of grows on you. I love working with my son and with the other boys. It's not too often that you really get to know your son's friends.

I love the fact that whenever I see the boys out and about, they know my name and they say: hi, I've got the bug and I will be hooked for life. I can tell I have another son coming up who will be a tiger the year after my oldest son moves on to Boy Scouts.

So I have a few years left doing this. I'm looking forward to all of it and the fun and adventures that I have before me.

Why me? Why now?

And why scouting? Well, why not Jump right in? You won't regret a minute of it. Greg, I couldn't agree more. That's right. Jump right in, You won't regret a minute of it.

Owen Heyman is in Sheffield, England, and he got in touch with us via Facebook to say: this is the most amazing resource for scouts online. Thank you for your work. Thank you, Owen. Good to hear from you, Glad that ScoutmasterCGcom translates into real English, which is what is spoken over in the UK. Scoutmaster Shane Strubart got in touch and he said: I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to keep this awesome page and blog going. It's by far the best resource for scouting I've come across And furthermore, it's renewed my enthusiasm for scouting.

Well, thank you, Shane. Things like that renew my enthusiasm for keeping up with the blog and the podcast, But, honestly, always appreciative.

John Rust is with Cubpack 44 in Manchester, New Jersey, And he wrote in to say I want to thank you for having a first class, informative and professional site. Scouting's purpose has always been to guide young boys as they grow and mature into men. Before and after the recent membership policy vote, that mission is still intact.

One of the best qualities we as scouts can pass on is tolerance, In my personal opinion, I think that the membership change will make it easier for us to do our job of guiding boys into independent, self-sufficient, responsible men who make decisions that will someday shape the world. Thank you for keeping your page impartial.

Well, thank you, John. I certainly do appreciate that. I hasten to add that your particular opinion of my impartiality is not shared by all, And several people have taken me to task for being impartial.

You know you do the best you can and you try to move forward, And that's what we're all about. So there's always plenty going on around here. Make sure to check out the blog at ScoutmasterCGcom and see what we've been up to Do. Make sure to get over to the YouTube channel. It's ScoutmasterCG on YouTube. This past week, This past week, we posted a review of the Echo Zoom, And the Echo Zoom is a wood stove.

It's particularly well suited to patrol camping. It's a really great idea And I want to make sure that you get in on it.

So go to YouTube, look for ScoutmasterCG or just go to ScoutmasterCGcom And you'll find that review with the video in a post from last week. We just had our June scout circle last night and the subject was the Order of the Arrow And we were happy to welcome Andy Koh, who is the Lodge Advisor for Octorero Lodge 22.. That's my OA Lodge. Andy did a fantastic job of giving us an introduction to the history of the Order of the Arrow and the way the Order of the Arrow works and the different things that are available to Scouts who are members of the Order of the Arrow.

So you want to make sure to check that out. It's the June scout circle at scoutsircleorg and there'll be a link on how to find that presentation and look at it in the post that contains this podcast.

Well, it's June and summer camps coming up and hopefully we're all going to be very, very busy and get ourselves into the outdoors. And I've got a whole bunch of email, questions and things like that that we've been saving up.

So don't be discouraged. We're going to get to those in a future podcast. But this week it's time for another installment of the Colorado experiment. Those of you that have been following along will recall that we're tracking the progress of a brand new troop out in Colorado. We got Arlam Ward, the brand new Scoutmaster of that brand new troop, to give us an update And that's going to take up the rest of the podcast.

So let's get started, shall we? And now our next episode of the Colorado experiment.

Well, I'm happy to welcome Arlam Ward back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. We're checking up on troop 17 out there in Colorado.

It's a brand new troop And I think, Arlam, this is our third installment, right? Yes, Just to catch everybody up.

Previously on the Colorado experiment, Right? Previously on the Colorado experiment, That's what I was looking for.

So previously on the Colorado experiment, we kind of tracked the whole idea of starting a troop. Let's just go back there real quick in case somebody hasn't heard the whole story. You decided to go ahead and start a scout troop. You had been a cub master And you found that there were any number of boys in your locality who had one time been in scouts who decided that the idea of a new troop was appealing to them and they decided to come back in.

It was originally started as a conversation between families that had Webelos and we were starting to look around at troops and the conversations were: well, we can do this or we can do this, or we can start one. Yeah, don't have those conversations, folks, You're going to be right, Otherwise you'll be on the podcast as an experiment. That's where it started.

And then, talking to the charter partner, it was: well, there's a number of boys that have dropped out of scouting. That like to. The part that really resonated with me is that they like to go camping, They like to do the outdoor stuff, but they dropped out of scouting And that was just kind of well.

Okay, that seems to me that there's a different approach that we can take to the scouting that will keep those boys involved. The last time we spoke you were still waiting on having, like, a meeting place.

Have you got a meeting place, yet Temporarily we have one. There's a church in our neighborhood that makes their facility available, So we have set up through the summer to work with this church before we move over to our permanent home.

I believe the last time we talked you had been out on a hike but you were looking forward to your first camping trip. Tell us a little bit about how that came about and how it went.

Okay, when we sat down originally with the very initial parts of the PLC and said, okay, let's start naming activities that we want to do on a monthly basis, We want to do something this month but we don't have time to really put much together, So let's go hiking. Then we set a date for the first camping trip, which was over Memorial Day weekend.

So we weren't really planning on doing a summer camp. But the boys came back and said: you know, we would like to go to summer camp.

So we found a summer camp to go to and set that up for July. And then in August we have camping trips specific to the PLC, doing annual planning and leadership training and stuff like that, Then kicking off the school year with a trained PLC and probably a court of honor and stuff like that.

And then after that it all depends on what they do in August. And so how did this camping trip go that you did on Memorial Day weekend? Nothing ever goes quite as planned, Get out, Really.

So the week that we were supposed to go camping, I get a call from the camp post in the National Forest where we were going. He called me. He's like: yeah, you have a reservation for this coming weekend. There's still two feet of snow in your campsite.

So we told him we'd find something else And we moved the campsite. But it turns out the place we were at was fantastic. As the adults we didn't really set much in the way of agenda. The boys, when they had set up this initial camping trip, said: let's do something where we all get together and get to know each other. He goes because we don't all really know each other at this point.

And there was about 10 scouts that went on. This trip Had a lot of parents.

I was really surprised at the number of parents that went And I think they were just kind of curious to see how this was going to go. So we had almost as many parents as we had scouts. The scouts were separated from each other. The two patrols were separated from each other by about 100 yards And they were separated from us by about 100 or 150 yards as well. And I kept all the parents up with me And when we had talked beforehand I said: bring a chair- preferably a good book- and stay out of their campsites.

It was where we started that conversation And it worked out really well, A lot better than I expected. We had two new patrol leaders, One's 12 and one's 13.. They'd never been patrol leaders before. They were very excited about it. They set up their own campsites.

We kind of gave them an area and you know beforehand had mentioned to them. Perhaps you want to read through your book where it says how to pick a campsite, because you're going to be picking one. One patrol brought a gigantic eight-person tent and put everybody in one tent, which was interesting. I'm not sure they'll do that again. It was an experiment. They did their own cooking, They did their own breakfast.

We got together for dinners, But it was a good chance for us to sit around and eat together and talk and things like that. Most of my weekend was checking in everyone somewhere with the patrol leaders and seeing what they were up to.

We figured, since we were coming up with Dutch ovens and cars and things like that, it was a good time to go through all the ax yard stuff, since you don't want to take those on a backpacking trip. The patrols would rotate through and they'd talk to one of the adults over at the ax yard who was teaching them about what an ax yard was and how it works, and somebody else went through how to sharpen an ax. For the rest of the weekend they chopped wood for fun, which it was completely unexpected on my part. The adults were laughing.

If we had sat down and said: here's a half of a pickup truck full of wood. Your job for the rest of the weekend is to split it into smaller pieces and burn it all up before we go home. It would have been complaints and drudgery and things like that.

But since it was their idea that they want- hey, we want to have another fire, Can we chop more wood? For the most part it was all kind of their direction. The patrol leader stepped up and did a fantastic job, better than I had ever hoped. One patrol was up before the adults. They had cooked their breakfast and had cleaned everything up and were ready to go fishing before the adults were even done with their breakfast. They're definitely motivated.

It resonates with them The whole working as a patrol thing. We did the start, stop and continue stuff as a whole group during dinner the last night And then I also met with the patrol leaders separately. The senior patrol leaders didn't show up, both being in high school and it being the weekend, right after school got out.

They were otherwise engaged, So it was really the two patrol leaders. It was very eye-opening for them and very eye-opening for me as well. I had a patrol leader that said I had a hard time this weekend getting people to do the jobs that they were assigned to do. When I was meeting with the two patrol leaders we kind of talked about that for a little bit.

I said: well, a lot of times it's one of those things where, as a patrol leader and the older guys, you guys want to do the fun stuff, So you assign each other to do the fun parts, the cooking parts, and then leave the younger, less experienced guys to do the cleanup. I said it's much more effective, first of all, to put an experienced guy with a young guy so that you at least have somebody involved that knows what's going on.

Another thing is to write it out as a duty roster. I had mentioned it beforehand, but they didn't do it, And so we talked about it afterwards and said, well, this is one of the reasons, so that everybody can see that the load is being shared around, that it's not favoritism, You're not picking on anybody. But here, written in black and white, is: the duty is to get us through the weekend as a patrol, and that that's really useful. And he took it to heart. The other patrol leader had a suggestion as well.

He goes: well, what we did was we had specific people cook, but then everybody was responsible for cleaning up. It's those little challenges along the way and the discussions that we have as the patrol leaders counsel. That kind of moves them towards more proficiency. You made a suggestion.

You kind of pointed out: okay, this might be a good idea, fellas, And both the patrols basically ignored you, Not out of any ill will or anything like that. They just, yeah, well, Mr Ward, that's a great idea. Thanks, They were focused on other things. Yes, Yes, they got to experiment and they discovered that, jeez, the old man might know something. We might actually give that a try To me that kind of defines the scout approach.

Instead of castigating them and saying, jeez, well, you know, if you've just done what I told you, you kind of go now. Do you see the reason behind this?

Do you get the idea that this might be a good idea? It sounds like you may have won one convert and one had a way of just doing it by himself.

Yeah, which work this time, may not work next time, or it may work forever, and then he never actually uses a duty roster. You know, that's fine with me as long as it patrol functions.

But when it comes to me later and says: you know, I still can't get everybody to do their jobs, I suppose we'll talk about it again. That's the heart of letting boys discover what they need to discover. You've cultivated a bit of a tolerance for the adversity and uncertainty that that type of thing causes.

Did you get any kind of resistance from the other adults involved, maybe being less tolerant about that idea? Oh, absolutely. Actually, on that very same topic, I was talking to one of the assistant Scoutmasters and he said I had noticed that they didn't do a duty roster and I was going to go tell them they had to and we talked and said, no, it's better this way, that they tried their method.

They didn't seem to work quite as well, so it bears a lot more weight. You know, when they can align it with their own experience rather than great. Here comes Mr Ward.

He's got all these forms I have to fill out for no reason, when really all we want to do is go to the X-Arch and chop wood. It's so much better when it comes back from them.

You know, sometimes they spend an inordinate amount of time actually cleaning after a meal, which I understand isn't Not unusual- Yeah, it's not unique to my troop, but they got better at it as the weekend went on. But I had one patrol the first day that I think breakfast kind of spilled over into lunch but nobody was leaving the adult area and running down there to see what the problem was. No, no, there was concerns.

You know, parents going, what are the patrols doing? And they said, well, you know this one's doing this one, this one's, you know, finishing up breakfast and they're like: still, it's 10.30, it's 11 o'clock.

It's like, well, yes, but they're working out. You know best way to clean their stuff.

And I talked to a number of adults over the weekend, you know, especially having a lot of the parents there, I think they saw the benefit. A number of them came up to me as the weekend went on and said I understand a lot more about scouting now than I did before this weekend started.

You know it's like you put them down there and they have to figure it out on their own. You know like it was, like it was my idea, Brilliant, it was absolutely brilliant. Yeah, it was like.

Yeah, well, that's true. You know we need to keep an eye out for certain things, like the safety things, and you know the overwhelming frustration that you know can set in after a while.

You know where you give them a bit of direction to go along with that, but for the most part you leave it to them to settle it out themselves. There's a couple of times I had to kind of follow a parent that I saw wandering off towards the patrol areas and I'd follow, kind of follow them down there and I'd say, you know they'd get down there and they'd ask the boys how things were going and then when they'd start reaching for stuff, come back with me, let's go this way, and they'd look at me like they got caught, and they'd kind of hit me in the head and come back up and come back up, but in talking to some of the scouts afterwards, I didn't catch as much of that as I think I probably should have.

For the most part, though, you know, let them figure things out. It's not like we kept them segregated all weekend long.

When the patrol says, hey, I want to go fishing, well, you know the dad's from that patrol- most of them went with them. They should be able to kind of suss this out a little bit, and they should be able to turn to the adults and say: thank you very much, but we're good, go away now, leave us alone. That's a hard thing for boys to be able to do, though, you know.

I think a lot of that comes from something that doesn't get stressed enough. You know, praise them for the littlest things, and I know that you've talked about this before, and you know, in trainings and things like that, it doesn't come up nearly as often as it should, which is when they do the littlest things right. Keep on the praise, reframe the failures, as we could do this better.

We- you know, not you, but we could do this better, even just in the course of a weekend you see the difference in their confidence. So you talk to them about: hey, you know you guys are doing great, but there's a couple of things we could improve.

When we did the stop, start and continue, it was the same thing. You know, you guys had a great weekend, we had a lot of fun. But let's just kind of take a minute to review.

So you're talking about a process called stop, start and continue. Just tell me what the basics of that process are. It's a review tool. You know. Stop, it's the things that you're going to stop doing, things that didn't work out for us, things that cause problems for us. These are the things that we're going to stop doing.

But you don't run down there and say stop, stop, don't do that. This is reflective. Yeah, this is a reflection tool. For sure. It's definitely better if these things come from the scouts than if they come from the adults. I was kind of leading them through the process.

The adults were quiet the whole time. These conversations came from the scouts, which was a bit surprising, but of course, at this point they had been through two days and we tell them- and believe the boys alone- maybe they were listening to them, chasing them down, throwing a lasso around. Yeah right, gentle, redirection.

So there's the things we're going to stop doing, the things that we should continue doing, and I think that's great that it ends with the continue stuff. When we started that conversation, you know I said this is a review tool.

What sort of things have come up over the weekend that were issues? And then a patrol leader raised his hand, he goes.

You know, we need to work harder at including everybody. That was kind of open the floodgate to that point.

So you know we should work harder at helping people feel included, that even if, as we go along, you guys are going to be, you know, tighten it as a patrol, but there's going to be outsiders of visitors that are going to be joining you and you're going to have to spend some time making sure that they're included and keep that in mind as you're going along. And that just led into a whole bunch of other things that they discussed as far as things that we should start doing or stop doing.

So this isn't your opportunity as the Scoutmaster to lay down a lecture. This is your opportunity to listen to what the boys are saying a little bit.

Is that kind of the spirit of it- Yeah, you know one to direct it kind of. In general, there's going to be a few silly answers, but you want to direct it. What really went on this weekend, because it wasn't all rainbows and sunshine. There's going to be conflicts. There has to be.

Otherwise it's not their reason for going out on these camping trips, but my reason for taking them out there is to put some challenging situations in front of them- and they're not always going to have the right answers- and to discuss that as a group and it means so much more coming from them than it does coming from me. But it allows in that environment for the Scoutmaster, whoever is leading it to you're facilitating a discussion more than laying down the law. Any time in the course of the last couple of months that I felt like I needed to just say this is the way it's going to be. I've had to pause and say it's not necessary that I lay down the law and do that. There's going to be struggles on their part if we remove all of that and it just becomes we're going to do things the way that this task master or Scoutmaster, ward wants to do it. It's not going to be any fun for anybody and they're going to miss out on the chances to struggle with the weekend.

You describe: you go, you go camping, you set up the patrol sites, the guys cook, they take whatever time they're going to need to do that. They maybe take a hike fishing. There was a little structured activity around doing a tote and chip and an axe yard and stuff like that. It doesn't sound like you were particularly driven on trying to get requirements done or anything like that. We mentioned it to the patrol leaders that they should go through the books and they took it to heart. You can look down and see them all gathered around the picnic table.

They all had their books out and they were going through stuff. There were a few things that I pointed out specifically in the course of making dinner.

We were talking about the raw chicken and handling that and controlling who touches that and what touches that. Why do you think that is?

And I looked in and said you know that's one of the requirements for first class is to discuss that and other things around food safety and it was like a light bulb. It was like really it was in passing more than it was now. We're going to sit down and we're going to work out all the food safety stuff for first class. They do this stuff if they go camping and they do exactly what you described. They're just doing that stuff. Anyway, you've had the first camping trip.

You went home with happy scouts. You went home having begun to establish the adult role in this new troop as how the adults were going to relate to the scouts and where the boundary lines were going to be.

And now you're going to be off to summer camp in july. Is that the next big event for you guys?

Between there, in june we have a backpacking trip. So you're going to go backpacking and just as a result of having done that, some advancement is going to happen for them. It's a load of fun for us. It improves that skill set for them to go on the backpacking trip. The program is not being driven by getting stuff done. The program is being driven by what the scouts want to do.

That's, I think, a really important distinction. You're not going backpacking because you want everybody to get backpacking merit badge. This is the slate of activities that they wanted to do.

I think that's a terrifically important piece that sometimes just doesn't get into the mind of an adult leader. I think that, as we're observing your experiment, it's going to be interesting to see how that pans out. Yeah, it was actually.

I think this was one that was kind of on the schedule from the very beginning. I don't know if this is going to take off or not, but I said, you know, this would be a fantastic opportunity to learn some map and compass skills, some more entering, and just mentioned that and they're like, oh yeah, that would be great ways you to do it while you're out there than it is for them to talk through, walk it through them in a classroom setting at a meeting.

So I think we're pretty well caught up on the progress of the experiment so far. I do have one question for you: tell me what a scout banana is. Yes, the last PLC meeting.

These are getting much more interesting now that we have a variety of scouts involved in the PLC. You've got the patrol leaders and the senior patrol leaders and.

But what happened was we were talking about troop t-shirts. This was more of a conversation between them and I was kind of out of it at this point. I was writing some other things down and just kind of listening to what was going on.

One of them said, you know, we should do it like football jerseys, we should put troop 17 across the shoulder, across the back. And one of those guys said, yeah, that's a great idea.

And something else says, well, what do we put on the front? And the scout says, well, you know, maybe we put troop 17 and maybe Thornton Colorado on it and the scout banana.

And like everybody was confused and the what he looks around, kind of exactly, you know, the scout banana, it's on everything. I'm just listening to this going.

What is he talking about? And then it occurred to me that he was talking about the Florida League, the scout banana, and from that I can't look at the thing now without seeing this banana shape in the middle. It was, it was hilarious. I took all of myself control to keep from busting out laughing.

When a few more rounds of discussion, you know, because you know, like in the middle of the scout badge, and they're like you mean this thing? And one of them goes: isn't that a fedora?

And somebody else knows that's, that's a hat, you know, you know. And finally I told them: you know, this is, it's a Florida League gonna be the scout banana, at least in this troop, and I think it's a fantastic idea to have it on the front of the t-shirt.

So, yes, yes, why wouldn't you want to call it the scout banana from now on? I have a friend of mine that's a graphic artist and I sent her the image of the world scout emblem, the Florida League in the center, and I said: can you take that in the middle and kind of turn it into a similar shape, but something that looks like a peel of banana?

See if we can get that into the t-shirts. But yeah, I was. That was a fantastic PLC meeting for me.

I had a 12 year old patrol leader that got everybody's attention at the meeting and said, okay, you know, kind of shyly, and looking down the table, says you know, I've been reading my patrol leader's book, which in itself kind of raised my eyebrows, like really, that's fantastic. He goes and in there it says it's good to have goals and it's like, well, great.

So not only is he reading this, but he's understanding it and he's taking it to heart. Again. I couldn't have signed this book and made him read it and had this kind of an effect. But he goes.

So let's set a goal of everybody advancing two ranks and then have like a troop meeting. That's all like games and food.

I just kind of looked at the patrol leader at that point, you know, because he wasn't talking to me, he was talking to the PLC, you know, and I looked over the patrol leader and was like, okay, just don't mess this up is what I was thinking, you know. It's like just encourage this as much as you can and just kind of made eye contact with him about, you know, with an approving look, as best as I could, without you know, actually saying anything. And he took it and ran with it and said, oh, that's a great idea.

You know, I think we should certainly do that. And at the next troop meeting, at the closing circle, that same patrol leader announced it to the entire troop and said: this is what we're going to do going forward.

You know, and you know it's been fantastic. I, you know I didn't dream that it would work as well as it does. The key to making that work is the attitude of the Scoutmaster, if you're willing, like I said, to have that kind of tolerance for uncertainty and a little bit of adversity and you're comfortable with letting them sit there and discuss without interjecting and without carrying on a whole lot.

They're going to catch on and I think once they catch on you have a momentum that it would take concerted effort to stop. It is remarkable that all of this crazy stuff actually does work.

You know, I said that back in Cub Scouts too. It's like wow, these things that they've talked about and they've done for 100 years, they actually work. The mindset of boys isn't that different today than it was when they kicked off scouting in the first place. You give them a pile of wood in an axe and teach them how to swing an axe safely. They'll spend all day chopping it into little pieces for no other reason than it's fun and a little bit dangerous. It really resonates with them.

We're out here, we're doing stuff, we're making a real difference because I can chop up this wood and I can take it over there and we can build a fire with it. They loved it. They were given enough freedom to kind of be masters of their own destiny without having someone come in and say: that's not how you make pancakes and eggs in the morning.

Free them up to do their thing and then you say: these are the things that we have to meet and you keep that as limited as possible rather than laying down the law all weekend long. We laid down the law before we left. We're not leaving a messy campsite and you're not putting away cook gear that has food on it. Still, it sounds like things are going swimmingly. You've got some happy scouts, you've got some slightly skeptical adults, but you seem to be managing. I'm going to be interested to talk to you after you guys are back from summer camp.

Well, thanks, it's been a great ride that we get to document it and share it this way. I certainly appreciate the encouragement along the way and I've learned a lot from the podcast and hopefully this will help somebody else out there that's either in a similar situation, thinking about being in a similar situation, or wants to revamp something that they've already got going on. It only takes one jump to get into the volcano. It does. It's a really small step. Surprisingly, there's a fair bit of research that went into this.

I've read a ton of stuff on the way scouting in theory is supposed to work. It's still surprising how well it works. Just offering it to the boys and saying: this is yours, go with it. Thanks again, Arlen, you bet

Thanks for watching. Don't forget to subscribe and like the video. See you next time. Bye.