Scoutmaster Podcast 235

I'm Pat Lays and I'm a Scoutmaster with troop number 1093 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like us.

And now for you, Scoutmaster, The Girl Guides are learning how to read maps and find directions by using really amazing things like the flight of migratory birds. They can even use the stars to find a street address.

Believe it or not, They're learning this in case they ever find themselves out and around with a Boy Scout, so that they might be able to actually find their way. I'm going to lose a corner of my man card for that one, probably.

Hey, this is podcast number 235.. Hey, Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. Let's take a look at the mailbag. Oh, it's a little thin this week, but I did hear from Greg Beck, who is in Mission VAO, California, and he said I'm the district chairman for the Saddleback District of the Orange County Council.

I'd like to know if it's possible to purchase the scouting journey in bulk so I can make a gift of this book to each of our new Scoutmasters when they come on board. I'm thinking a dozen or so to begin with.

Well, Greg, thank you so much. I'm humbled that you think the book is worthy of that kind of thing.

And yes, I have things set up on the website so that you can buy multiple editions of either my book, The Scouting Journey, or Thoughts on Scouting, at a pretty good discount. So I'll make sure there's a link in the post that contains this podcast so everybody can find those. If you want to get a dozen copies of the book or five or ten to share with your fellow scouters, it's pretty easy to do and I'm able to offer a pretty good discount on them.

So thanks for getting in touch, Greg. Tim Giorgi wrote in to say I love the post about pioneering techniques and he corrected a little mistake I made in links there. Thank you, Tim, for doing that. If you haven't seen it, this past week we posted about two interesting pioneering techniques you may not have heard of. One is from Italy and it's called Cat Drill. Why it's called Cat Drill I have no idea, but it looks pretty cool.

The other one is called Frasetage and it's a scout pioneering technique named for its creator, Michel Frasier, a district commissioner in Scouts France at Fontainebleau in the 1930s, and he adapted a number of kind of colloquial woodworking techniques to build camping furniture and things like that and combine that Some of the more familiar aspects of pioneering anyway- Really interesting and little known aspects of pioneering that you may want to check out. And we also talked about the eagerness, energy and anticipation that the attitudes that scouts approach scouting with and being able to respond to that.

So check out those posts on the blog this past week Now. If you're a regular reader and listener, if the information and the ideas that we offer have helped you, you can return the favor by making a one-time contribution and become a scoutmastercgcom backer.

Now the funds we get from backers go towards all the expenses of producing and publishing the blog posts and the podcasts and videos that are accessible to scouts all over the world. It's pretty easy to do: Go to scoutmastercgcom, look for the support link at the top of the page and you can choose any level of support and some of them entitle you to premiums like autograph copies of my book and since our last podcast.

I want to take a moment to personally thank Scott Truax, who signed up as a backer. Thank you so much, Scott, for helping me make this happen. Remember I am interested in hosting your group in Kondersteg next summer, If you haven't heard about this. I've mentioned on the podcast a couple of times.

We're swiftly arriving at the deadline where we need commitments to be made. That's the first of October.

So go to scoutmastercgcom. You'll see a link at the top of the page that will take you to the information explaining exactly how that happens.

Well, this week we're going to begin with the first of four installments in a series about the basics of the patrol method. Hey, it's September, We're shifting gears out of our summertime mode And I know that everybody's got big plans for the fall and the winter and the spring for your scouts, And I think it's a great time to review and to talk about the patrol method.

And then I got one email. It's not necessarily an email question, but I had one really interesting email exchange that I'll share with you after that.

So that's going to take up the rest of the podcast. Let's get started, shall we?

So I had one. I had one interesting email exchange on that. I had one interest.

I had an interesting email exchange this week about the patrol method, And so I'm going to, I'm going to talk about that as well, And that's going to take up the rest of the podcast. So let's get started, shall we? Scouts, master ship in seven minutes or less.

To start talking about the patrol method, let's take a look at what our founder, Robert Baden Powell, had to say about it. He said a couple of very important things. One that is a very familiar quote is that the patrol system is not one method in which scouting for boys can be carried on. It is the only method. In reading Baden Powell's writings, you'll find that he uses the terms patrol system and patrol method pretty much interchangeably.

So don't let that, don't let that trip you up while we're talking about this. I'm calling it the patrol method And I'll probably call it the patrol system at times. Both same thing.

The other thing that Baden Powell had to say that bears on what I want to talk about today is: it is not the slightest use to preach the scout law or to give it out as orders to a crowd of boys. Each mind requires its special exposition of them and the ambition to carry them out.

So there are two things that drive character development in scouting: The example of role models and a scout's interaction with his peers. Why do we do the patrol method?

Well, that's a really good question. It's the same reason we do scouts: to form character.

That's what we're aimed at And once again there's the example of role models and there's the ideals of scouting that are involved. But we use the patrol method because a scout's interaction with his peers is a crucial part of character development, As we heard from Baden Powell. Being told how they ought to act or just having a good conduct modeled for them is only the first step for our scouts. The real work happens when scouts develop mutual respect for each other and they foster cooperation within a group of equals, and that's a patrol. This cooperation is where the really kind of radical ideas of scouting, which are self-government through the patrol method, take place. When scouts make their own plans and formulate their own rules and keep their own discipline.

They elect their own leadership charged with implementing the plans that they've made. They have the opportunity to learn through experience what it means to belong to a group and to accept personal responsibility Within the troop and patrol. Scouts act on the notion of reciprocity. Get out a couple of nine dollar college words for you. Cooperation and reciprocity, with all its troubles and triumphs, is going to enable our scouts to discover more about themselves and integrate the concepts of the scout, oath and law into their own character.

Now, when we apply the patrol method and have real self-government, the scout oath and law are no longer just a bunch of concepts preached by adults or something that a scout sees in somebody else. It finds meaning in the life of the patrol and the troop, and individual responsibilities become group responsibilities.

Baden Powell understood that role models have an important but, you know, I would say, kind of limited influence on scouts. Character really develops through all the small group interactions that happen in a patrol and that's why I think he was so adamant about the patrol system or patrol method.

He said the Scoutmaster has to be neither school master, no commanding officer, nor pastor, nor instructor and that all is needed is the capacity to enjoy the outdoors, to enter into the boys ambitions, to put yourself as a scouter on the level of an older brother or older sister and to see things from the scout's point of view and then to lead and guide and give enthusiasm in the right direction. So that's our role when we're talking about the patrol method. If we limited character development to role models or just telling them about the scout oath and law, the scouts would grow increasingly dependent on those.

What we want to do is we want to foster cooperative independence through the patrol method and, as Baden Powell said, that's the character school for the individual. The central importance of the patrol method really prioritizes everything else about scouting.

Now think about that. That's a little jarring at first because I know that most of us start off thinking that the content of our meetings, you know, the places that we go camping, are all really very important, but they're not as important as you think they are, They're just decorative. We think that metrics of attendance and membership and fundraising and advancement are important, but those are just indicators.

So as we go on and we talk about the patrol method in these four podcasts, we don't want to spend all of our time decorating the program with flashy things, right, and we don't want to spend all of our time focused merely on numbers and indicators. We want to concentrate on the real heart of the matter: the patrol method. And if we build the patrol method, the program features and all of that and the numbers are going to follow.

So that paints a picture of the patrol as the central unit, the central and the patrol method as the central system in scouting. In next week's podcast we're going to talk about the adult role in all of this and that'll be our second of four installments about the patrol method. If you have questions or comments about this, make sure to get in touch with me. You're going to find out how to do that at the end of the podcast. We good by no clean retreat from life's machinery and our mountain greenery. It's our mountain greenery.

Bless our mountain greenery home. Write me a letter, send it by name

Email. That is folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails. I had this interesting email exchange this week.

This isn't really necessarily a question, but I want to share some of it with you because I think it bears on what we're talking about so far as the patrol method is concerned over the next few weeks, and the person I received the email from asked to remain anonymous, and I think it'll be clear why. I want to give you a story about the past three or four years in our scout troop.

It was decided at some point that we were going to start engineering patrols and break up scouts, who were together since tiger cubs, and at the time that we made this decision they were 16 years old. We once had a large troop of 120 scouts, that's. That's a really big troop.

Almost four years ago the fellows- the Scoutmaster at the time saw that the older scouts were working so well with the younger patrols- he got together with the committee and they decided to re-engineer the patrols so that there was an 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 or 17 year old in each patrol. After they did that, our numbers dropped to about to about 80 scouts within a few weeks. A lot of scouts stopped showing up. The following week after this change to patrols was implemented.

Well, after a year the adults decided it wasn't working and they started re-engineering patrols again, this time making eight age-based patrols of eight and then pairing it with a younger patrol to have patrols of 16 boys. And within a few months we lost 15 or 20 more scouts. The logic behind this crazy 16 member patrol was they were tired of a patrol showing up with two or three boys for a camp out and having to pair up with another patrol.

So if you have 16 in a patrol, you know you should have at least four or five show up for a camp out, right? Well, it didn't seem to work at all.

So after another year of trying to make this re-engineered patrol thing work, they finally returned to where they were a few years before and let the scouts form their own patrols. The scouts that remained were back with their friends again and for the past year and a half things have been running well. But three years later, after we started engineering, all our patrols were down to from 120 to about 32 active scouts.

Well, I read that email and I I thought that if somebody asked me the best, fastest way to kill a troop, I'd tell them to do exactly that: get in there and start engineering patrols and mess around and ignore what the scouts want and try and re-engineer patrols that you think are ideally set to work. And I also, you know I have to question the committee role in this. Why committee has any reason to interfere with things like this is beyond me. And if they had suggested re-engineering patrols to me, I would have asked them how they would felt if somebody from the district or our council came in and said they were going to redistribute adult volunteers amongst all the troops in our district.

You know, just to level things out, level experience and things like that out, I mean, what kind of reaction would they have? And that might help them understand the way the scouts would react. And you know. Apparently the scouts reacted in a very predictable way. They left.

So as we talk about the patrol method in the next three weeks, one of the things that we're definitely going to talk about is who chooses patrols and how patrols are made up and arranged. I'm perfectly fine with scouts deciding about how their patrols are arranged. They can change them around anytime they like.

They can elect patrol leaders whenever they like, because you know what it's their troop. And to have an effective, vibrant patrol method that's doing what we want to do, that's developing character, they have to have actual responsibility in being able to do those things.

Now a smart senior patrol leader and patrol leaders council will stay on top of this sort of thing and they can discuss and plan these things better than any adult or committee. They're going to need a little guidance to do it, but their focus is going to be on what scouts want instead of what's going to look right or what we think is going to drive participation or attendance or whatever.

So that's kind of a cautionary tale to see a big, big troop like that contract way, way down because the adults started interfering in what the scouts wanted to do so far as their patrols were concerned. I think it demonstrates that there's really solid things behind the way that Baden Powell set up the patrol method and the way that he talked about it, and we'll be sharing that over the next few podcasts. If you have a question or a difficulty that I can help you out with, get in touch with me. You're going to find out how to do that in just a moment. So