Scoutmaster Podcast 220

I'm Ray Britton and I'm the Scoutmaster with Troop 42 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This edition of Scoutmaster Podcast is sponsored by backers like me. Keep up the good work, Clark.

And now for you, Scoutmaster. So we're headed off to the aquarium. We're doing a trip to the aquarium and the Scouts are very excited about this And I told them.

I said you're going to see the world's largest fish tank, And one of the tenderfoot Scouts looked at me and he said: how in the world do fish drive a tank Who? Hey, thanks, I think, to Bill McFarland for that one. If you've got a better one, send it in And maybe you'll hear it on an upcoming podcast.

Well, everybody, this is podcast number 220.. Hey, Hey,

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. I'm Clarke Green. Let's take a look in the mailbag. Oh, a nice five-star review for the podcast over on iTunes. From it's a screen name: Draws Older Print Play. I've been a fan of Clark's blog for years and the podcast adds some scouting to my morning commute.

His topics are applicable to me on the other side of the world And the frequent interview guests bring perspective to the worldwide brotherhood and sisterhood of scouting. Well, thank you so much for that nice review. I sure do appreciate it. Heard from Steve who said I really enjoyed the podcast. It's been a great motivational tool to keep me pushing on. I'm glad that we're able to help you out there, Steve.

In the blog this past week one of the articles that got some response was one on how scouts can deal with disappointment. Tom Rosser said: I'm sure there have been times when I've dropped the ball after taking out more than I can handle.

Well, welcome to the club. And not being aggressive enough or willing to delegate- Yeah, welcome to the club. On that one too. When working with other scouts I'm always appreciative because I know they're volunteering their time, emotion and funds and we all know that right. But, Tom, you're exactly right, And sometimes we find ourselves in the throes of disappointment.

But you know we keep on working on read that article. And the scouts deal with disappointment. See, if you agree. Three books from Eric Sloan.

Now I decided that I would go ahead and post this. It's only tangentially involved with scouting, to tell you the honest truth.

So you don't have to read this one if you don't want to. But I've always been a big fan- since I was a boy- of author and illustrator Eric Sloan. He wrote and illustrated a ton of books about American history and old tools and wood. Steve Jarvis read that post and said: I've used the Weather Book for years And he's talking about Eric Sloan's Weather Book, which I really highly recommend. It helped me become weather-wise. It really explains the systems and everything like that very clearly.

It's probably he probably wrote it about 50 years ago, but it still works- See comment on that post. That brings back memories. Eric Sloan's had an Eric Sloan book on the coffee table in the living room when I was a boy. I'll definitely have to get the Weather Book. Yeah, definitely get the Weather Book. I forget exactly.

I think the other two that I mentioned in that post was the titles are Reverence for Wood and The Diary of an Early American Boy, both which are non-fiction and they're great little books And they're great for you and to share with your scouts. Let's see, We did an infographic this week.

It's been a while since we've had an infographic, so we put one together on Atomic Scouting Ideals And you know, check it out. It's not as easy to talk about. The reason that it's an infographic is it's not something that it's easy to talk about. But check that one out and see what you think. As I promised last week on the podcast, John Wiebke, who is the scoutmaster of Troop 358 in Zionsville, Indiana, shared his summer plans with us about an Ontario scouting adventure. You definitely want to check that one out.

Robert Stout did, And he said: we've done this trip several times with our Troop, which is Troop 946 in Hamilton, Ohio, Halliburton Scout Reservation. That's a Canadian scout reservation And thanks for the spelling correction there, Robert. It's an awesome place in the true sense of the word And the Algonquin experience is really great. The video that you included brought tears to my eyes. It's a really wonderful place and it brings back great memories. I urge anyone interested to simply go.

James Chaplin said great information from John on the idea of mixing an international scouting experience at Camp Halliburton with a high adventure program, giving all ages of scouts in the Troop a great experience. And John Albertine wrote in: let's go, John, let's go, Let's get out, Let's get camping, Let's get canoeing. I'm really looking forward to this summer. Last week's podcast we talked a little bit about scout accounts and everything And Frank Maynard, our good pal, who has a blog as well- And it's Bob White Blather. If you Google that you'll find Frank, But he added a comment to the information that we shared with you last week. A unit can maintain scout accounts in trust for its members to pay for scouting expenses.

As long as the member provides the money that's deposited in the account, there's really no issue. There are no rules against it and it can be a convenience for families And that's a really good idea.

Maybe just pay in X amount into that and then that can be withdrawn from as a scout does activities and then you know you re-up. But Frank went on to say the safest and probably most equitable approach, as Clark recommends in the podcast, is to continue fundraising but use the proceeds to benefit the entire unit Rather than allocating those funds to individuals. And that's my plan. That's what we're doing. I appreciate you chiming in there, Frank, and helping me out with that advice.

Now, before we go any further, I want to remind you if the resources we offer at ScoutMasterCGcom have helped you, you can return the favor by becoming a backer. Funds from backers help make it possible to publish all these resources and keep them freely available to scouts all over the world And over this past week I want to thank Susan Paul, Ralph Johnson and Steve Sutter who became backers over the past week.

Thank you so very much for your generosity and support. We really do appreciate it.

In this podcast, in Scout MasterChip in seven minutes or less, I am going to continue on with the High Adventure theme And I want to talk about some myths and legends about High Adventure and encourage you to have a High Adventure program for your scouts. We've got some email to answer too, and we've got a Scoutmaster's minute to share with you, Courtesy of our friend Tom Gillard down in Tolohoma, Tennessee, who sent the idea to me this past week, And that's going to take up the rest of the podcast.

So let's get started, shall we Scout MasterChip in seven minutes or less.

So, as you heard last week and when we were talking in the mailbag here, I've been having an ongoing conversation with a buddy down in Virginia, James Chaplin, about their High Adventure plans. I want to take a moment to encourage you to get your own High Adventure program off the ground Now. Usually when we're talking High Adventure, we capitalize the H and we capitalize the A and we think of the BSA's most popular and heavily promoted Big Three High Adventure bases: Fillmont, the Florida Sea Base and Northern Tier up in Minnesota.

Council-level High Adventure programs usually focus on putting crews together for trips to those three destinations, And there's a lot of council-level High Adventure experiences out there. But I want to tell you something: there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other places for Scouts to experience a High Adventure trip. With a little ingenuity, a little planning and a little vision, Every Scout should be able to participate in some kind of High Adventure trip at least once while he's a Boy Scout.

I want to challenge you here to stretch your understanding of what High Adventure is and to go beyond your comfort zone and to ultimately make it happen for your Scouts. So the first myth we wanted to spell is: High Adventure trips don't have to happen at a High Adventure base or as a part of a quote- official, unquote- program. You can put together your own High Adventure trip. You really really can. It can happen anywhere. There are state and national parks in the country that offer great places for hiking and backpacking, climbing, canoeing and kayaking.

You don't have to travel far or go to exotic locations, and that's another myth. High Adventure only happens in these distant, exotic places. No, no, High Adventure is not a place, It's a state of mind, A challenge beyond our normal weekend camping trips. High Adventure is about doing more than where you go. Fillman is a great location, but it's not High Adventure without the right mindset and the right participants. Four or five days of backpacking a couple hours drive from home, rather than getting on a plane and flying to some exotic location, can be as exciting, adventurous and rewarding as any trip.

The most important location for High Adventure begins between your two ears. It's your attitude. That's what makes it High Adventure. The next myth we wanted to spell is: to lead a High Adventure trip, you have to be a highly trained High Adventure expert.

Well, you do not have to be an expert to lead a High Adventure trip, and I can tell you this authoritatively because I'm no expert and I've led plenty of them. You'll need some important training: weather and safety and first aid training- all very important. You'll also need to plan your trip to be slightly below your estimated skill level, and your High Adventure does not need to be dangerous to be challenging. Rely on the experience that others have had and educate yourself about these things. Read books and practice your skills and you're going to be plenty expert enough to pull off a High Adventure trip. Remember that our scouting organization requires certain certifications when we're dealing with high risk activities like swimming and boating and climbing and things like that.

So you may have to get certified in some of those things if you're going to make them a component of your High Adventure trip, but there is no reason that you should wait until you are an expert to take your scouts on a High Adventure trip. Find something that you are confident with and go, Just go. The next myth is to deal with money. We think that High Adventure trips are going to require some kind of really expensive equipment or specialized stuff that's going to cost a mint of money, While some trips, like canoeing or kayaking, for instance, they do require expensive equipment. But you don't have to buy that equipment. It's commonly offered for rent in the locations where it's likely to be used.

When we go up to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada, we could choose from any one of almost a dozen different to rent our equipment. Backpacking is a great low cost option, because not every High Adventure trip is going to cost everybody a mint of money.

If you're smart, if you use your common sense and you do a little shopping, you can outfit somebody for a 5 or 6 day backpacking trip with very simple gear right on the tail of that, we have a general idea, a general myth, in our minds that High Adventure is terribly expensive. Well, it is. If you need to get on a plane and you need to fly halfway across the country or halfway around the world, it's going to be kind of expensive. But if you stay closer to home and you plan a challenging but attainable outing, a nice High Adventure trip within a couple of hours drive of where you are and you make reasonable choices about gear, you can have a great High Adventure trip for hardly anything. You may find that a trip like this could be the catalyst that motivates your scouts to work towards planning, financing a really big, expensive ambris-ish trip sometime. If you look around, you're going to find that there is some place where you can go hiking and backpacking or cycling or canoeing for 5 or 6 days without spending hardly any money.

It will come out to a couple hundred dollars ahead at the very most and it could be cheaper than that depending on how you set it up and you'll be out there and you'll have this great High Adventure trip. That really starts scouts thinking when they've had the experience you say you know we could go to New Mexico, we could go to Colorado, we could go to Wyoming, we could go to Alaska, we could go to Switzerland. It all depends on if you guys want to go. But the first big thing is: you got to go. If you don't go, if you're waiting for the perfect moment, if you're waiting until everybody can afford this big, expensive trip somewhere, don't do that.

That backpacking trip, that canoe trip, that cycling adventure, that's 5 or 6 days, that's only a couple hours drive from home- and make it happen and then take it from there. The biggest thing about it is getting out of our you know scout or chair, getting on our feet and making this happen. That's what's going to do it. If you can't do it this year, start planning for next year and make sure your scouts have the opportunity to take part in some kind of great experience. That is, folks-

And here's an answer to one of your emails- well, let's see, we got several great emails last week. Picked out a couple to answer here on the podcast. Major Richard K Luckett is an assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 97. I've been a fan of the website for some time. I've printed out many articles and taken them to meetings to help spread the knowledge. I'm looking for some advice about our program at this point.

Our patrols get few opportunities to work independently. For example, the menus for camping trips are usually planned at a meeting and then all the foods brought by the Scoutmaster, and he seems to get a little over involved in these things sometimes.

Recently I planned and executed a successful camp out where the patrols had to work and cook independently and everything went very well, it did seem. The patrol leaders ended up doing the majority of the work themselves. The Scoutmaster also has a tendency to worry that things won't get done and I've tried convincing them that if we give the scout some instruction and we allow them the latitude to execute, that's how they'll learn. The Scoutmaster's afraid they will fail, but I tried to tell him, even in failing the boys are learning something and that's what's important. As long as nothing catastrophic happens, it will be a good learning experience. Scouting is not like a job or the military, where everybody has to show up.

If your team is constantly changing in assets and deficiencies, then the role of leadership becomes even a greater challenge. If a whole patrol doesn't show up for an outing and you're counting on some people, then it becomes a bit of a leadership problem. Major luck it. Thank you for getting in touch. I really do appreciate it and I appreciate your service. You aren't experiencing anything that hasn't been repeated infinitely over a century of scouting.

I'm pretty sure you know that already. You know, go back as far as you want and you'll read of scouters encountering this- exactly the same kind of problems that you describe in your email- and you've identified a number of things clearly and I think you're doing all you can to help move things forward and reach some resolution with them. But perhaps the most useful advice I can share with you and you in turn can share with the Scoutmaster is defining our mission. Maybe that'll help unlock a few doors. I can identify with the one man show approach when it comes to being a Scoutmaster. I did it for a number of years myself until I sat down because I was tired and I thought things through and I modified my approach.

I used to think our mission was an orderly and efficient program, but far from it. Our mission is helping scouts to discover and develop in themselves those ideals and ideas that come from the basis of the scout oath and scout law, and this is an inherently messy and indefinite process. One helpful thing that came to me was differentiating between logistical success and mission success. Your Scoutmaster sounds like he's doing what I did, and that is, equating logistics failure or success with mission failure or success. The problem with that sort of thing is it's just not what we are supposed to be doing.

We have to have a high tolerance for adversity and uncertainty, and it's the most difficult thing for most scouts to get about our work. Every time we institute some measure to smooth things over and prevent logistical failure- like going out and buying all the food so we make sure it's there- we're likely denying our scouts the mission critical experiences of making mistakes and learning from them.

Any serious student of leadership development would have to agree that both leadership and character developed through a process of trial and error, and I think we only have to recall our own experiences to know that this is the case. It sounds like you've got a good relationship with the Scoutmaster, so I'm going to suggest an experiment to you.

Set up another event where it's going to be all the scouts, where you're counting on the patrols to function well, the scouts to plan and execute the entire thing. Get two lawn chairs, set them up side by side, once for you and once for the Scoutmaster, and you're creating an observers post.

Sit down in one chair, put the Scoutmaster in the other and agree that the only way you will both interact with the scouts will be if they enter the observation post or you have to intervene in something dangerous or improper, and then sit and watch. Sit and observe, look at what's actually happening.

Now you two can talk, just don't talk to the scouts. Look for the processes that work. Look for the successes within the perceived failures. Take some notes. Think of an ornithologist hidden in a blind observing birds in the wild.

Okay, and when the opportunity presents itself, after the meeting, after the camp out or after whatever the evolution of the activity was, sit and debrief the scouts in positions of responsibility, using your notes, by only asking open-ended questions. Listen for their answers, draw them out a little bit. Don't attempt to teach, don't attempt to judge, don't attempt to mentor. In those cases, just ask questions. My bet is that the end of that process, if you do it a few times, your Scoutmaster will see the same thing that you do, and that is that the scouts are actually capable of doing things. What, what's happens when you end up with a scouter in a one man show scenario is they're caring about too much about many things.

If you can divide up what is logistical success from mission success, then it's going to help you begin to see this in a whole new light. For obvious reasons, I'm withholding the name and the location of the next email. My son is 11 and this is his first year in scouts. Like any other 11 year old, he is an extrovert and he can be a little annoying at times. Really, 11 year olds are that way. At a meeting recently he got verbally attacked by an older, bigger scout, using some really foul language.

When my wife and I found out what was said, we were just about came unglued. The next Monday night the Scoutmasters and the other adults met with the older scout who had gone after my son in this way and they gave him a service project to report, to write on the scout law, and he had to make a public apology. Until this is done, he was not allowed to participate with the troop. My wife and I kind of feel like this is a slap on the wrist. We think this kind of verbal bullying creates an unsafe environment.

We don't think anybody's filed any kind of incident report with the council and we have asked to meet with everyone involved again. If this meeting doesn't go well and they don't do what we think should be done, we're going to pull our son out of this troop.

My question is: are we overreacting? Well, since you asked, yes, you are definitely overreacting a little. Certainly, scouting should be a safe place in every sense of the word, but this doesn't mean we're going to be able to make it an absolutely safe place that prevents every single bad thing from occurring. That's impossible.

Now, this is going to sound a little strange, so listen carefully and hear me out. I know how upsetting it can be.

I know that your son is 11 and there was a much bigger boy. It's tough and difficult with him and I know that that can just be not only terrifying and shocking. It can really set parents off. We not only can't prevent bad things like this from occurring.

I think, when it does, we should welcome the opportunity that had happened in a scout troop and we have the wherewithal to resolve situations like this. It's going to help the younger boy out and the older boy too.

I think it's probably more damaging to the future of our children to raise them in some bubble of absolute safety than to let them learn from occasional difficulties. It's our hope that scouting is always going to be a positive and safe place and that scouts will always conduct themselves in the highest level of behavior and courtesy.

Now, when they don't, it can be shocking and unsettling, and I don't minimize that at all. Okay, it's very natural to feel that way, but you have to realize too that it's an opportunity to reach out and help all the scouts involved in the situation that you describe. I've had this sort of thing happen before many times over in three decades as a Scoutmaster, and I don't really find it all that shocking anymore. To tell you the truth, it's a relatively rare occurrence, but it's familiar enough. I would first sit down with the scout who was doing the bullying and the attacking of what happened. I'd ask to tell me how his actions either corresponded with the scout oath and law or fell short of them.

We'd go on to discuss what would need to happen next. I would probably guide him towards making an apology to the scout and a commitment to not repeating that kind of behavior, and once we had figured out exactly how we'd be moving forward. I would meet with that scout and his parents and we would all have a discussion. I would be leading the discussion, but the scout is the one who needs to talk.

I would have him describe the situation to his parents, the discussion that we had had about it, and then to tell his parents what we decided needed to happen. Next. I would make sure that the parents understood what went on and I would tell them that they would have to assure me that this sort of thing would never be repeated and that, if it was, it would probably require me to ask their son to leave our troop.

And then the parents can take whatever actions they see fit, so far as corrective punishment is involved, with their son. I would never, ever impose corrective punishment like writing apology letters or doing service projects or reports or whatever, and I don't suggest that this is a good idea for anyone else.

As a matter of fact, I think taking actions like that is a very serious mistake. Scouters don't use corrective punishment. We do not punish, we do not discipline. That's a parent's job. What we do is we deal in proportionate consequences. We are partners with parents in raising their children and we let parents know what's going on and it's their option to employ corrective discipline or punishment, not ours.

Let's say, you know, if a scout misbehaves in a way that causes some kind of mess, well the proportionate consequences of that is he has to clean up the mess. But as far as I'm concerned, his parent is going to know that he caused a mess and he had to clean it up and I will tell the parents: look, we don't have any kind of room for this kind of behavior.

So you need to correct it and send him back to us so he can participate in the troop. And if he repeats this kind of behavior, we're going to have problems and it's going to put his continued participation with our troop in jeopardy.

So there's a huge difference between those proportionate consequences and corrective punishment. Scouters don't need to corrective punishment or discipline, just use the proportionate consequences of the action. Then, in a partnership with parents, you let them deal with the any kind of corrective punishment or discipline that needs to happen with that behavior. Listen, I hope that helps. If you have a question or a problem and you want to get in touch with me, you're going to find out how to do that just after this Scoutmaster's minute

For a Scoutmaster's minute, Norman was walking on a beach in Florida and he was thinking about a problem and he bent down and he drew a few characters in the sand and he came up with his solution. Now Norman was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on September 6, 1921 and he graduated from Atlantic City High School and he became an engineering student at Drexel University. Right up the road from me in Philadelphia it was the Drexel Institute of Technology.

When he was there in 1947 a fellow grad student, Bernard Silver, overheard a supermarket executive asking the dean of students to figure out how to capture product information automatically at a checkout- I think a whole lot of the requests- and he turned it down. But Silver went on to mention that problem to Norman and after talking about it for a while and kind of working on some preliminary ideas, they were both persuaded that they could create the kind of technology needed to capture product information automatically at a supermarket checkout. While they were convinced that they could create this technology, they didn't really have the details worked out. And this takes us to the beach in Florida and Norman making some characters in the sand, because Norman had been a Boy Scout and back in the 1930s and 40s when you were a Boy Scout you had to learn something called Morse Code and most of you would be familiar with. Morse Code is a series of dots and dashes.

Norman was drawing dots and dashes in the sand, so he stuck his finger in the sand and made a dot and then he dragged that dot into a line. Then he made a dash and made that into a line and these lines that were really just long dots and dashes helped him crack the code on coming up with a two-dimensional linear Morse Code. And he went back and he shared it with his friend, Bernard Silver and they used a little movie soundtrack technology and they applied for a patent in 1949 and they got it.

So long story short, after two decades Norman and Bernard's patent had been sold to the International Business Machines Company where IBM. Norman was an employee of IBM at the time and he helped them develop the first scanning technology that everybody uses now whenever we go to a supermarket checkout or convenience store checkout anywhere. In 1971 the Universal Product Code came into being and by 1974 the first item was scanned in an Ohio supermarket. It happened to be a pack of chewing gum.

So anytime we go into a store right now, or any product you have to hand, has a Universal Product Code on it. If you look at it, it's a set of lines, and those lines were created by former Boy Scout Norman Woodward based on the fact that he learned Morse Code when he was in Boy Scouts.

So pay attention, Scouts, because you never know what you're going to pick up and it's a very important part of your life: