Scoutmaster Podcast 185

And now the old Scoutmaster On the Wednesday at summer camp is kind of an open day for troops to go do their own thing And some of them go into Yellowstone for the day, which is what we did. You will be in uniform the whole time.

Well, do I have to wear the hat? Well, yes, of course you have to wear the hat as part of the uniform. There's been some some questions, especially by some of them that are getting to be of that age where they feel like it's dorky And I mean the younger guys love it.

They're like, Okay, put my uniform, no problem. But the 13 year olds are like, Really, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.

So they wore their uniform to Yellowstone And while they were walking around on the board walks around Old Faithful, these guys were like minor celebrities. Everybody was stopping to take pictures of them. There was one patrol that was kind of milling around trying to decide what they were going to do next, And this group of Japanese tourists- they were all like high school girls And they came up to me and they asked if they could get their picture taken with the Scouts.

And I just turned to the scouts and said: Is that okay with you guys? And the patrol leader looked at me like I was the stupidest guy on the planet and said, Well, yeah.

So they got their picture taken with them And everywhere they went, people were, you know, turning and taking pictures of them, And so, on the drive back to camp, I said, You know, those experiences you would not have if you weren't wearing a uniform And you wouldn't have opened the doors that were open for you guys while we were traveling. And the realization that girls may actually like the uniform- Right, Yeah, How about that? It's not as dorky as you think.

From a Scoutmaster standpoint, it's great to have them traveling uniform because you know you'll have people coming up all the time saying, Hey, it's a couple of your guys over here. I was like, Okay, you know, were they behaving? They're like, Yeah, they're doing great, They're just they're having a good time.

I was like, Okay, you know. So it's like, all of a sudden, everybody else in, you know, in Yellowstone, became, you know, informants for me on what my guys are.

Well, it's easier to keep track of a group that's in uniform And there are things that you may think twice about doing when you're wearing a scout uniform. So, yes, if you're in uniform, everybody knows you're a scout, There's a level of behavior that is acceptable And it will give you pause.

And they're like: Yeah, you know it does. There is what we call. The leash of this is Clarke Green. Let's take a look in the mailbag here. Kurt Huber is with Troop 415 in Swanee, Georgia, And he wrote to say this.

First, I want to thank you for the link you gave to camping kitchen boxcom. Now, if you look on the blog at scoutmastercgcom, you'll see a recent post about camping kitchen boxes, And I featured Kurt's site, camping kitchen boxcom, And he tells us that this is his hobby business. It gave quite a bump to my traffic when you mentioned it on your site.

More importantly, I want to thank you for the resource you created with your website, which I have been reading more and more of lately. I've been listening to the podcast since April And, as an assistant Scoutmaster, I'm always learning something new or at least being pointed in the right direction. Thanks again. Thank you, Kurt, for getting in touch and make sure to check out camping kitchen boxcom. Interesting take on a patrol box. This is the Monday of Labor Day weekend And I'm sure everyone has been taking a deep breath from all their summer activities and gearing up for this next year of scouting.

In order to get you ready for that, in this podcast we're going to have our next installment of the Colorado experiment with our friend Arlan Ward, And I'm sure you're looking forward to hearing that. And while we're talking about Arlan, this Sunday, September 7th, from nine to 10 Eastern Standard Time, Arlan will be talking with Derek Hansen, who is the author of a book called The Ultimate Hang That is an illustrated guide to hammock camping.

Derek is also a scouter, as well as one of the hammock camping tribe out there, And he will have some great information, not only just about hammock camping in general, but how it can be used in scouts, And so I'm really looking forward to listening to Derek again at scoutcircleorg between nine and 10pm Eastern Standard Time this Sunday, September 7th. So we're going to catch you up with what's happening out there with Troop 17 in Colorado. If you're a fairly new listener and you're not familiar with the Colorado experiment, we'll catch up a little bit, But 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.

Yeah, it's time for us to talk to our buddy, Arlan Ward, And Arlan is out in Thornton, Colorado. You'll remember, if you've been listening to the podcast for a little while, that we've had several installments of the Colorado experiment. We're kind of tracking Arlan's experience with a brand new scout troop. He started out as a cub master And, as his son was getting ready to transition into scouts, decided somehow that it might be a good idea to start a new scout troop. We've talked about that whole process. Go back and check those podcasts out if you want to catch up on the whole story.

But here we are in just the very end of August 2013.. And we're going to catch up on what Arlan's new troop has been doing for the summer.

How are you doing, Arlan? I'm doing great. It's been a wonderful summer. Give us a little rundown of your summer schedule.

Originally, when we set up the troop, when it was just the adults talking, we had said: this first summer we'll probably just have a couple of boys, you know, maybe four or five or maybe six, And so we figured we just spend the summer camping on our own. And we started the troop in April And I think the PLC meeting in April, they came back to us and said: look, we want to go to summer camp this summer, See what you can do.

And so we made some phone calls and looked around and did some investigating on the internet and found a few that had openings later in the summer. So we put those in front of the troop and said: okay, where do you want to go?

They decided they wanted to go to Camp Buffalo Bill in Wyoming is when I grew up going to, so I was familiar with it and kind of what was in the area and things like that. And I'm going to be the cynic for a moment. You ended up putting these different options out in front of the boys and they said, Oh, the camp that you used to go to sounds like a good option.

Did they know that you used to go there? Did you influence that decision at all?

Did you coerce them at all to make that decision? You know I had not mentioned to the Scouts at all that I had gone there, But I- but I knew enough about the camp, that it was close to Yellowstone, that we included all of that information.

You know, when we proposed this one that was a little bit further away, I said: you know we can, you know we'll leave a day early and you know, stop on the way up there and stop on the way back, And I think it did influence it. But it wasn't that I said, Hey, this is the one I went to before And I think you should go there.

I think that just kind of, as adults we have the guile and the experience to be able to kind of highlight a decision for the boys that we would like to see them make. I'm not saying that that is in and of itself necessarily a wrong thing to do in every circumstance. Were you, were you hoping for a certain result, Or was it just like, eh, it doesn't really matter to me. I really had hoped for this And I'm sure that we influenced it along the way- still their call, I suppose.

But but yeah, we were definitely influencing it. I think a mentor right is kind of the role of, of the adult leadership more than than the manager right.

So you know, it's not that they say you have to do it this way, But they say you know this, this looks like a really good way to go about it. You know, it's not blindly just throwing the options in front of and making it make a decision. This is that really interesting and fascinating part of working with youth leadership.

Do you just say, Hey, whatever you guys want to do, or do you kind of triage the decision making a say: look, you know, I looked at a lot of different options. This is the option that I like the best, or that I think is the most workable.

I think that it's appropriate to do both things, just depending on the circumstance And how complex the question is. I mean, if you're talking true t-shirts, there's a thousand different options out there And it's perfectly okay to give them all thousand different options, to give them 15 different scout camps that are all within a reasonable driving distance of your home location. That's a lot, I mean, because not only is it 15 different camps but you have to balance.

What is their program, how are we going to get there? Every one of the camps have 15 things that you have to take into account. That becomes a really complex decision.

What we did is work with the SPL and just made a spreadsheet that said: Here's where the camp is, Here's how far it is, Here's the weeks that they have. Opening Schedule was another one that you know which week are we going to go.

That just adds more complexity to the whole thing And so working with the SPL to kind of go through it to begin with and say, you know, look, here's a list of five or six viable options. But boy, look at these two, They really kind of stand out.

And then turn it over to the SPL to go talk to the, to the troop. It's not like we just give them a free, for all of you know, we can go wherever you want, We can do whatever you want and we can spend.

You know, go any week that you want, and all that. You will never make a decision.

See, that's, I think, a really important thing for people to get. How do you make this work where there's a decision making process going on and what you describe you know, in looking at the options and even doing a spreadsheet of them and working with the senior patrol leader on that? Because what you've done in that process is you've given him the benefit of your experience and, at the same time, the moment to be able to teach him. Okay.

So if you have this big, wide field of options, this is how you begin triaging it and figuring out what is actually workable. That's a pretty important thing for Scoutmasters to be able to do. We think sometimes that the way we're going to work with youth leadership is kind of the way we work with a light switch: We're either going to turn it on and let them make any decision that they think they should make or we're going to turn it off and make their decisions for them. What I'm hearing from you is it's more of a collaborative enterprise than it is just one way or the other. Yeah, absolutely, And it was initiated from their side to start with.

The PLC came to me and the committee chair and we really want to go to summer camp this year and we kind of said, well, let's see what's out there And then we'll come back and we'll we'll get you some of the options. You know.

Next year, you know, with more time, it's possible that we would have, you know, SPL involved in that process of gathering information on the different camps and things like that- Another aspect of this whole planning and decision making process. So let's say that you're looking at next summer and they say we want to do exactly what we did last summer.

Do you have a problem with that? No, I would like to see him go somewhere else.

You know, we were sitting around the campfire and our campsite and said: you know, what did you like about this camp? What didn't you like?

What would you like to see us do next time? You know, if they wanted to do it, I like one of the last camps.

So you know you wouldn't create a rule for them. You can't do anything that you did last year.

If the SPL felt that strong about it, you know he could get it through- the PLC, I imagine, but I don't. You know, every time that I've ever felt the need to decree something, I've really had to step back and say: is that really something that needs to be, you know, decreed?

Do I need to step in and say you will and you won't, and all of that? Well, the other thing is the kind of flexibility that you had in being able to say, oh, they want to go to summer camp.

Well, we should really try and make that happen. That must have been pretty energizing when you heard that from them. It was, but it was. There were some big hurdles from the adult side that we had to get through.

So there was some scrambling that happened on our side. But you know, if it had been impossible, then I suppose we'd probably have to have a part of conversations about it, But it wasn't impossible.

Things that you know you normally have spread out over a few months. We were doing like on top of each other And then you had a Petrollers Council weekend and the kind of like a training and planning weekend In broad strokes. The Weather Troop is organized on schedule is that- and the new troop leadership takes over in August.

And the month of August we don't actually have troop meetings but we have a PLC camp out where the new, new elected leaders and their- you know the appointed positions and all of that that they go on a camp out just for them And we'd go through the troop leader training. But we went through that training with them.

And then also they planned out the year in broad strokes, as far as this is what we're going to do on this weekend, in these months, And they put together the schedule for the next 12 months up to and including the next PLC camp out, which will be next August. And what are you looking at right now for numbers? Yeah, we're 19 scouts.

Do you have your meeting place? We do. You'll start meeting pretty much concurrently with the school year.

Yeah, So the idea is that you know, summer camp is. In the summer camp you elect new troop leaders and sometime in August you have this PLC training annual planning camp out. We kicked off this next year with a court of honor Worked out great, They did a great job with it- Tried, as we've gone through and talked to these several times, to have the same three questions for you And I don't. I don't think we've succeeded in having exactly the same three questions.

But in the spirit of the three questions, since we last spoke, what have you seen that you didn't expect to see or you found kind of interesting or maybe even challenging about being a new scoutmaster and having a brand new troop? The thing that I didn't expect to see that has happened is how readily they take on the roles of leadership.

I sat down with the SPL like: so what's the plan for the court of honor? And I looked at him and I said: well, you know, you can set it up however you want, You know, and he looks at me, goes.

Well, am I doing it or are you doing it? I said, well, it's your court of honor, You do it, You know, I said.

I said you just leave me with a couple of minutes at the end, You know, and check in hands, And that's really all I got to do. I said other than that you can, you can put it together however you want.

And you know his guys, they huddled together and they're like, well, you know, I can put together a program. And those other persons said, OK, you know, are we going to eat first, Are we going to do the court of honor first?

And what about? You know the pictures that we have from the stuff that we've done since since April till now? Maybe we could do a slideshow.

And you know, it came together, just you know, in the course of about 15 minutes, of them having a plan for what was going to go on. You know, my part was to remind them.

You know where the court of honor was on Monday and it was Thursday And I hadn't seen anything communicated to, you know, troop-wide to anybody Reminded the SPL. I said a lot of these email addresses that you have are parents at work And if you don't tell them by Friday, they're not going to see it until Monday And it's going to be too late, you know, and just kind of prodding and making sure that the communication part happened.

But you know, they planned it, they executed it, They emceed the whole thing. You know they did a great job and talked through that, not only who got what rank, but also kind of explained to the parents that were in the room what sort of things you have to do for that rank. And I didn't prompt them to do that, I didn't say that you had to.

And they did a great job with it, Even did some recognition for the adults that had started the troop and things that weren't, you know, on my radar at all. And then I did my Scoutmasters men at the end that they berated me endlessly for not being a minute long and a whole advancement thing.

That's another thing that really surprised me. What surprised you about it?

That they took it on? You and I have talked in the past about, you know, having parents come up.

How do you handle advancement? And you know I'm not going to sit down with a checklist and say, okay, everybody that goes on this camp is going to do this and this and this and this.

You know there's been some parents that were concerned. They're like, how are we going to make sure that they advance?

I said, well, you know, let them take it on and see where it goes. And Summer Camp was amazing for that.

I watched practically every night some Scout dig out his book and he would walk over to his patrol leader and say: I did this, Can you sign it off? It was like Prairie Dogs.

Everybody kind of looks at him and goes what? Oh, advancement, Yeah, You know.

And and then you know all of a sudden all the books are out. You know you've got patrols huddled around each other.

You know they're all not only going through stuff and getting stuff signed off that they did, but making plans for the rest of it. Well, we need to identify 10 plants. The SPL goes well.

You know there's a Nature Lodge right down there And I bet during free time tomorrow that they would be more than happy to work with you guys on how to identify 10 plants. And then they went and did it.

I mean, my role in all of this was just watching it happen from, you know, 25 feet away. It was a bit of a hard sell to the parents. We're going to rely on their own interest to define how fast they advance or what they choose to do towards an advancement. But then the Scouts sounded like the Scouts made you look pretty good. It was surprising to me how, how much they owned it.

But you know, it's like somebody lit a fire in summer camp. You know I, in the future, any parent that comes to be concerned about advancement, you know my advice is going to be make sure they go to summer camp, Because it's not about the merit badges, classes or anything like that, It's just being in a troop for a week with other Scouts and figuring it out.

You know, looking around and see how other Scouts are handling it, and that it's not this insurmountable problem. It's just something to for you to happen to back your mind while you're doing all these other great things. The.

The other question is is: what would you have done differently? Um, well, it's all right, You don't have to have one of those, but maybe there's something in retrospect that maybe you would have. You would have done a little bit on the. The whole fluidity of the schedule thing for the first few months was was a bit of an issue.

You know, I think the communication piece certainly be better. The SPL still has not appointed a scribe, you know, and I told them.

You know, as long as you don't do that, that job is going to fall to you And at some point you need to appoint somebody to that position or you just continue to do all the communicating. If it was me, I would have done it a long time ago. But yeah, he'll, he'll hit his, he'll hit his saturation point.

The third question is: what do you hope to see happen over the next couple of months or in the determinant future? It doesn't have to be just the next couple of months. I would like to see them get in the groove of the whole idea of having meetings to prepare for the outings and really owning that as as patrols, having patrol leaders teaching the skills to their patrols. A lot of that teaching happened, or it has over the last few months, has been at the troop level, because we had some rather inexperienced patrol leaders, you know.

So I'd like to see those patrol leaders teaching their patrols more than the SPL teaching the entire troop. You know where patrol leader or somebody that that patrol leader tags for it, is teaching their patrol that skill.

Now you're talking five to eight guys and that's a much easier to do. You look at the number of boys that are in the troop now, the number of second-year weeblers that are looking to this troop to to join.

You know we could be at 40 by March. You know at which point it really does become a problem to try to do this at the troop level And if we can instill that we are a collection of patrols more than we are a troop, if you can instill that early, the less of what problem we'll have.

Of growing pains, I think. Well, growing pains are good pains to have, So sure, Yeah. The thing I wanted to mention was the annual planning. The SPL kind of took the scouts and said: OK, we're going to go over here and we're going to come up with an annual plan. It was like: oh, you don't want me involved, I'll sit over here. It's like you know.

Fine, If you want to own it, you can own it. That's great, Say I was flabbergasted. Schedule that they put together is more rigorous in scouting stuff than I would have done had I done it. There's some preparation that has to go into every one of these, But that's great because that gives them the challenge and it gives them questions that they have to ponder. And one of the things that you have that maybe a lot of people would not have is a couple of older, experienced scouts right from the get go. Oh, yes, Yeah, and that helps immensely having these two guys that are life scouts- One is 17 and one is may have just turned 17..

They're really only around for this first year, But having the benefit of having them set the tone, having their previous scouting experience, that's been a huge help. You know, next summer, when we're electing new senior patrol leaders, we're going to go from having a 17 year old senior patrol leader to a 14 year old senior patrol leader, So it'll be different, but the tone will have been sad.

Thanks so much for sharing with us once again And we'll be in touch again. We'll see how things are going, So hopefully there'll be some great stuff to talk about. Thanks a lot, Arlen, You bet.