Scoutmaster Podcast 2

And now for you, Scoutmaster.

Hi, welcome to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green. Somebody once said, there's no such thing as a bad boy. And I agree, I do agree, but some of them can be a real pain every once in a while.

Hey, this is podcast number two.

Scoutmaster Ship in seven minutes. Here are five ways to make the best of your opportunity as a scout leader. The first one is to trust the program. We have a program with 100 years of history and practice behind it, and it seems to work pretty well.

Unfortunately, what we do sometimes is we try to reinvent it or we find it difficult to understand. But take everything in the program at face value and then put that to work for you.

The program is not the same as it was when it was first rolled out in 1910. No, it's been changing and developing, and we have found better ways of doing things, and we have met the different cultural changes over the past 100 years. So when these changes come up, embrace the changes.

Stick with them. Stay current. Don't shortcut things in the program. Don't try and make shortcuts or changes to the program. Don't try and make things harder. Don't try and make things easier.

Because when you do these, what you're doing is you're diminishing the experience for your scouts. So trust the program. The next is to conduct activities that are age-appropriate. If you have a tiger cub den, you're conducting activities that are appropriate to boys in the first grade. If you have a venture crew, you are conducting activities that are appropriate to boys and girls from 14 to 21.

You would not put a venture crew activity in a tiger cub den or vice versa. You wouldn't have a den of Webelos do things that Boy Scouts are supposed to do, and you wouldn't have Boy Scouts do things that specifically a den of Webelos are supposed to do. Sometimes we kind of jump the fence into the next pasture, and that doesn't work very well. So we need to concentrate on the age-appropriateness of our program. It takes an ego to be a scout leader.

You've got to step, hey, and to do a podcast and a blog and, yeah. Yeah, but you've got to step up and be ready to take the reins and lead and be in front of people and things like that. So it takes a bit of an ego.

So my next hint is to be ready to work with other adults, and that can be a bit of a problem for some of us because we're working with different family standards and expectations. We're working with people who might not see eye to eye with us as far as policy and the exact way that things should be done.

So that makes it hard to accept help sometimes. We need to do those things, and we need to exercise a little professionalism. I'm not talking about being aloof and cold and distant. I'm talking about accepting the fact that we're all in this movement together and we all need to work together.

Next is to maintain perspective and proportion. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. All scouting, remember, is an individual standard based on a scout's effort. It's not the excellence of the program.

It's the heart in it and the experience that your scouts are having. Keep your commitments to scouting and don't overextend them, and it's easy to do in scouting.

I mean, we talk about the wearing of hats and the wearing of multiple hats, but keep the hat wearing to a minimum. You're not likely to encounter a new problem or difficulty. There's a world of solutions and resolutions and good ideas out there.

For 100 years, we've been running, you know, basically a program that has had a pretty fixed set of goals and activities, and we've had the same problems. If you go back and you can find an old scouting magazine, go back as far as you can and look at what people were talking about, and they were talking about exactly the same things that we are dealing with today. You know, the same central issues around, well, we don't want to run a babysitting service, and the scouts don't seem to be very serious about some things, and

Yeah, that was the same thing we were talking about 100 years ago, and the solutions are very simple. It's not about your boy, if you're a parent, but it's all the scouts that you're working with, right? And that is something that can be difficult, because for an hour a week or whatever the length of the activity of your program is, you're a scout leader first, and you're a parent second. And that's going to bear a whole lot more discussion one of these days. Finally, focus on the goal, and the goal in scouting is always, always, always the success of your scouts.

To prepare them for the next step in the program, to focus on the experience they're having rather than the process, and to strive to understand your role and maintain your scouting education.

If you're a scoutmaster, you need to be a trained scoutmaster. If you're a scoutmaster with 10 years of tenure behind you, you need to think about going back and training again, availing yourself of every opportunity to learn more about your position.

This goes for den leaders and cubmasters and venture crew advisors. We all need to keep current and to do our best to maintain a very good understanding of the role that we have in scouting. So those are five ways for you to take advantage and make the best opportunity of your time as a scout leader. Trust the program.

Conduct activities that are age appropriate. Be ready to work with other adults. Try to maintain perspective and proportion. And focus on the goal.

This has to be the truth, folks, because there is no way. Anyway, anyone could make this up. Herman was an older fella who, I think his wife kicked him out of the house every summer, and told him to go find something to do.

He used to show up at our scout camp. He had been a scouter, and he was retired, and so we would make Herman the chaplain. And he served in this capacity for a number of years, and he was a pretty good chaplain at times.

And he was quite a character. And I remember him very well because one morning he showed up at the Nature Lodge with a pillowcase.

Now, you know, we in our part of the world have lots of interesting reptiles and amphibians, and probably the one that causes the greatest interest is the copperhead snake because it is a poisonous snake. Not deadly poisonous, but certainly an unpleasant thing to run into and to be bitten by.

So anyway, Herman hands the pillowcase over to the fellas in the Nature Lodge and proclaims that he has brought them a snake. And they said, well, Herman, where did you find it? He says, well, it was out on the rocks this morning, sunning itself. Well, I was out walking around this morning, and so I went back to my cabin and grabbed my pillowcase and got a stick and grabbed the snake and brought it over to you.

And they said, well, Herman, what kind is it? He says, well, I was hoping you would tell me. Can you guess what happens next? Yep, you're right. It was a copperhead, and I think Herman almost had a heart attack right there. But somehow he managed to survive and went on to be our chaplain for a number of years. Thank you.

So this is installment number two in our series about instructional methods for scouts. What we're going to discuss here is guided discovery. Guided discovery.

So here's a good practical application of it. I'm going to instruct guys in some totenship skills about the safe handling of a knife and how to maintain it, keep it clean. So I'm going to have all the stuff I need to, you know, maintain a knife and safely use it laid out on a table in front of me. And the scouts are going to come and stand in front of that table, and I'm going to start asking them questions. I'm going to say, hey, what have I got on the table here?

Well, you've got a knife and a sharpening stone or whatever that is, and a rag and a little oil and, you know, a piece of wood. And I said, now, what do you think we're going to do here? Well, we're going to learn how to use knives, right? So, well, where can you learn the skills about and rules about handling a knife safely? Well, you're going to tell us, right? Yeah. But is there any other place that you can learn? Well, yeah, it's in the Scout handbook. Oh, what part of the Scout handbook?

Oh, geez, I don't know. I saw it once. And, you know, a couple of boys would start madly flipping through the handbook hoping to find it. They'd say, look, does the book have an index?

Yeah, it does. Oh, okay. Can you find the area that deals with how to use a pocket knife? And somebody will find that. And I said, so can you read the first paragraph about sharpening a pocket knife out loud?

So, yeah, now they're reading the paragraph and, you know, things progress on from there. So do you understand what guided discovery is now? It's pretty simple. It's a set of questions, okay? I mean, what we're doing is we're embracing the principle that Scouts learn best, that we all learn best, when they are more in control of the process.

And we respect their natural inquisitiveness. And we inspire it and we challenge it to work things out for themselves. Now, let's imagine that the guys came and stood around the table and I started to give them a lecture about the safety of knives and the rules and things like that, along with a handout, okay? I would have about, what do you figure, folks, about three to five minutes before I had totally lost them and they're staring out into space. And their hand is wandering, you know, over the table for the pocket knife. And, you know, I have to look at them and say, hey, fellas, now you need to pay attention, okay? So do you see the difference between the lecture type of instruction and the guided discovery type? And which do you think is going to be more effective with the guys? And am I using guided discovery right now?

It becomes a habit. Now, I have in the PDF file that I referred to in our first post on this, which is available at scoutmaster.typepad.com. Again, go to the right-hand column.

Use the Google search box on the blog for instructional and you'll be able to find these posts and the PDF. But, you know, there's a list, a couple of lists of different types of questions that help you use this guided discovery method. You know, what would be an example of that?

How do you know? Why do you think that's true? Do you have any evidence that it's true? What difference does that make? What are your reasons for saying that?

What other information do you need? If you're a student of philosophy, you know that what we're talking about is the Socratic method. In other words, we describe a thing by asking questions about it. It's pretty simple, but it's not a gimmick.

It's a way for you to respect and encourage the natural curiosity that scouts have and allow them to discover some things for themselves. Now, the other thing I will tell you is that the little reading trick there where we found the section of the Scout Handbook and I asked for one Scout to read the first paragraph out loud. Well, then it would go to the next Scout and he would read the next paragraph out loud. I could just lecture that. I could just read it out loud myself.

I'm perfectly capable. But why not have them involved in it, reading it? They're going to be on their toes. They're going to be considering what it is. And you're not going to be able to insert a lot of extraneous information that nobody really needs.

So it's going to be sweet and smart and to the point. So we're going to pick up on this again in our next podcast, talking about instructional methods for Scouts.

Cliff Young was 62 years old in 1984. 62 is no spring chicken, you would imagine. And Cliff lived in Australia. He got interested in one of the world's most grueling ultramarathons. This is Australia's 543 mile endurance race that takes its participants from Sydney to Melbourne.

And it usually lasts about five days. Winter usually takes about five days to complete just an incredibly punishing course. And this is one of those runs that's attempted by intensely trained world-class athletes that are, you know, some of the oldest ones are half of Cliff's age.

Cliff placed 7th in 1984 at the age of 62. He placed 7th in that race. Mostly because he had a displaced hip that he got during the race. That was in 1984. In 1983, when he was 61 years old, Cliff Young took first place.

Yeah, believe it or not. He showed up in overalls and work boots. And he looked pretty much like a spectator. But then he went and registered and picked up a race number and headed for the starting line. And some of the other curious athletes said, are you serious? You're going to run this race?

And they said, you know, seriously? No offense, but you can't even finish this race, much less, you know, try and run it. But Cliff knew better. He was raised on a farm. And it was a farm too poor to afford horses or tractors.

This is in the outback of Australia. So growing up, it was his responsibility whenever storms would roll in to round up about 2,000 sheep spread across about the same number of acres. 2,000 sheep spread across 2,000 acres.

And sometimes Cliff had to run for two or three days straight just to round up all the sheep. Cliff's secret was that he really didn't run, not like we think of running. He had this kind of weird shuffling gait. And when the race started, Cliff got left behind.

As the more experienced athletes took off, he just kind of shuffled off the finish line or the starting line there and started moving. And he was left behind. Now, most of the participants in this Sydney to Melbourne race ran 18 hours a day.

And they slept for six hours a day. And on the morning of the second day, Cliff was still in the race. But not only that, he had been jogging all night.

And somebody asked him, and they said, well, when are you going to sleep? And he said, well, I'm not going to sleep. I'm going to run straight through.

543 miles. By the final night, Cliff had passed all the young world-class athletes. And he was the first competitor to cross the finish line. And he even set a new course record.

He was genuinely surprised when somebody approached him to give him $10,000 for his first place finish. He didn't even know about the prize. What he did is he took his $10,000 and gave his winnings to several other runners. And this was something that endured him to all of Australia and made him a true hero. So Cliff went on to run that race several times. And in 1997, at the age of 76, Cliff was attempting to raise money for homeless children by running around the border of Australia. He didn't finish. He didn't finish.

Nope. He only completed 4,051 miles before he was pretty much forced to stop because his single crew member became ill. This guy shuffled in his little shuffling run for 4,051 miles and probably would have finished.

But his single crew member fell ill. Cliff Young passed away in 2003 at the age of 81. At least three champions of the Sydney to Melbourne Marathon have won using the energy-saving Young Shuffle.

Competitors no longer sleep during the race. Just like Cliff, that most unlikely champion. One can imagine him resenting the hard work that he did when he was rounding up sheep when he was a boy. But instead, he just kind of lived with it. And he applied what he learned. And he changed the way people do things.

I don't know that any of us will ever imitate the scale and just jaw-dropping awesomeness of Cliff's accomplishments. But some unlikely experience will have prepared us to achieve in some unlikely manner.