Scoutmaster Podcast 284

I'm Terry Gerard and I'm Scoutmaster with Troop44 in Consville, Oklahoma. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me.

And now for you, Scoutmaster, I have here in front of me another report of a discovery made by the dedicated research Scouters at the Large Baden Collider out in Heisenberg, Arizona, Arizona. Huh, I thought I thought Heisenberg was in Germany, but I'm uncertain about that.

Well, look anyway, the Large Baden Collider accelerates camping gear to its terminal velocity and things collide, apparently, And they discover interesting properties of different bits of camping gear. And the discovery that this report announces has to do with water filters, And it's called the water filter temporal distortion. What they've discovered is that the stated operational time required to filter a quart of water, expressed in minutes, will actually take an equal number of hours.

So I guess if you've ever filtered water with a water filter, you know what I'm talking about.

Hey, this is podcast number 284.. Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green, back to our regular good old format. We had a vacation day last week And but here we are, we're back again. Fred Glover is an OH chapter advisor. He wrote in to say thanks for your continued support of the scouting movement.

I've only been listening to the podcast for a couple of years, but it always seemed that you were on a subject or issue I was encountering at the time. Thanks, Fred, I really appreciate that. And thanks for being a backer to. Fred did mention that in his message to me. Also, this message from Joe Prespari, who is the Cubmaster of Pac-23 in Burlington, Connecticut.

Hi, Clark, Well, you've inspired me to stay in Cub scouting next year and allow my son to move up into Boy Scouts. I really see a need in my town for seasoned leaders to remain in Cub Scouts and welcome the next generation of boys into the program. It's my hope I can sway some more experienced tenured leaders to do the same. Otherwise we're going to lose all that experience at the Cub level. Thanks for the good work.

Well, Joe, thank you. I'm glad that I had some small part in you're deciding to stay on with Cubs and to stay active there. This is something we've talked about in the past, right That that a lot of times we just expect to lose our most experienced Cub leaders when their own sons move up into a Boy Scout troop. But Joe's taken a little bit of a different tack.

I think that's both noble and really, really necessary. So once again, thanks for being in touch, Joe.

Hey, last week we were on with live chats and these happen usually on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, Eastern time, starting about eight o'clock. We go to about 11 o'clock. Keep an eye on my Facebook feed and my Twitter feed and come and join us at scoutmastercgcom for a live chat. And I wanted to say thank you to Scott Jones, who's a Scoutmaster for Troop 911 in San Antonio, Texas, and Jeremy Snyder, who's an assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 175 in North Ridgeville, Ohio.

Scott and Jeremy both signed on for the first time and joined the rest of the frequent flyers that show up when we have a live chat. Thanks for spending a little time with me. I appreciate it. Let me take time to ask you a favor, because I- because I do need your help. I started blogging and podcasting back in 2005 and I really didn't plan on what happened in the next 10 years. It just kind of grew and I hear from a lot of folks every week and it's really heartening to know I'm able to lend them a hand in their work as scouts.

So what I'm asking for is if you're finding the podcast and the blog posts and all the other things that we create at scoutmastercgcom useful to you. You can return the favor by becoming a backer, and it's pretty easy to do. Go to scoutmastercgcom, click the support link at the top of the page and you'll find a number of options on making a one-time kind of voluntary subscription payment to keep things up and running.

And I want to take a moment to personally thank Owen Wilson and Jamie Barnes, who became backers since the last podcast. Once again, go to scoutmastercgcom, Go to the support link at the top of the page, become a backer this week and I'll be sure to thank you on our next podcast. Now. Last week I posted my thoughts about offering alternative wording to the Scout Oath that would be more in line with the BSA's approval of non-theist religious groups for participation in the Religious Emblems Program. I'm not going to try and explain everything that was in that post here. On the podcast, If you go to scoutmastercgcom, look for the post that's titled A Scout's Duty to God, and I'll link to it in the post that contains this podcast too.

Now, whenever I mention debatable issues like this, I expect a strong response from both sides of the debate, And I'm not real comfortable talking about debatable issues most of the time, because it can be divisive, right? Discussing things like this with people is always a little tricky, isn't it? And discussing it online is even more complicated, But I wanted to say how much I appreciate everyone who took the time to join in the conversation and how much I appreciate the tone of almost everybody who joined in.

You know, some people get a little strident about things in an inappropriate manner online, and that's going to happen, But when we're talking about scouts, for the most part, people you know are very respectful of each other's opinions. What that really gets me thinking about, though, is whenever we end up talking about these issues- right- And these are usually issues affecting membership and how we interpret and present the principles that scouting is based on- You have to examine what you're doing as an organization.

I've spent the whole of my adult life being a scouter and being associated with the Boy Scouts of America, And you know the good old BSA has been through some difficult times in its century of existence, but perhaps none are more difficult than the times that we're in now, And when I think about organizations and changes and things like that, I think I think a useful allegory is that organizations are kind of like ships on the ocean. Now, if you're going to build a ship that carries a lot of people, you want to build something that's stable and safe, that reacts predictably to the winds and waves and currents and things, And so when you build an organization as big as the BSA, it's got to be stable.

But to get that stability sometimes you have to be kind of impenetrable and inflexible like a ship, right? I mean, if you're building a big ship, you don't want to build the whole out of cellophane, You want to build it out of something pretty impenetrable and inflexible like steel, right? And we build organizations that way. We build them to be very stable, And that makes things kind of difficult. When it comes to evolution and change. The best ship is still going to have a lot of drag associated with it, And when it's a really big ship, it's going to take a lot of time to turn.

And so, if you follow my allegory, the ocean that we're floating on is the culture, and culture is pretty wide and deep And it's more fluid and changeable than the organizational ships that we're traveling in. Big organizations like the BSA embrace cultural change pretty slowly, But to add to the complexity of the whole thing, our individual members and our young people they embrace change pretty quickly.

Yeah, you ever noticed something about scouts? Scouts have this kind of unsettling ability to take the values and ethics that scouting has developed in them and to apply them without much regard to what the broader organization has to say. Scouts take things literally. And a really good example of that: Go work on a camp staff with a lot of young people sometime and you'll you'll understand exactly what what I mean. They understand the values and the ethics of scouting And sometimes they get crosswise to organizational imperatives. They come to a different conclusion about exactly how these things ought to be carried out.

And I'll tell you something: anything like the BSA is going to find itself on the wrong side of history from time to time. Big national organizations are reluctant to face cultural changes, especially when championing a set of values and ethics that we say are unchanging and unalterable. But if you look at the history of the scouting movement and scouting organizations, there's been a lot of changes about how they interpret and express the values that we hold. We find new meanings, our world grows bigger, we become more diverse, and that diversity makes us stronger. You can look at diversity as being something that dilutes you, But I don't agree. OK.

I think diversity makes us very strong. Now I'm 55 years old and if you're a part of my generation or older, I've got something to share with you, And if you're younger, you can keep listening, That's OK.

But think about this: Our grandparents notice things that they didn't like in our parents' generation, And our parents noticed the same types of things they didn't like about our generation, And now it's basically our turn to be parents and grandparents and notice in our children's and our grandchildren's generation Things that we don't particularly approve of or things that seem to have changed, things that look scary to us. What you and I are noticing is basically the same thing that our parents and our grandparents were noticing.

It's not so much things changing around us as our own perspective changing as we are getting a little older. Yeah, things changed around us.

I understand that, but I think we older people fall into this comfortable trap of looking at anything that's changing and moaning and groaning about how things are different now, because we're a little bit afraid of what comes next. For us, It's harder to accept changes and to look at things from new perspectives the older you get- And also men.

We need to defer to the youthful energy and initiative of young people, of our scouts and younger scouts. We need to listen because there's a lot of wisdom in what they're having to say and they can help us navigate what's changing around us, because I'm afraid otherwise we'll have an organization with a few scouts and a lot of old geezers like me. Right, And I got to say it's the old geezers that kind of run the show.

As far as the PSA is concerned, If you go to a meeting, take a look around, You see the age, gender and race of the people who are making decisions is pretty much, you know, pretty much the same. And when we old geezers sit around we're not too sure what's going wrong. We think we just have to market ourselves better or repackage our message or add more programs that 50 plus year old men think boys would be interested in. But what scouts do is not the problem. That program is still relevant, exciting and engaging. We don't have to adorn it with bobbles or repackage it in shiny paper.

We've tried that many, many times before and it never works. Those aren't the kind of changes we need. I'm saying that most of the people who are making the decisions in the PSA are kind of old geezers like me, And I don't think they're bad people, far from it. I know that they're people of goodwill as concerned with and engaged in scouting as anybody.

I do think, though, that they're reluctant to make any big changes, and I can't blame them, because change is scary and uncertain And it can be tremendously difficult, It can be kind of exhausting and it can be divisive, And change can be seen as an admission that you were doing things wrong, and that's humbling, And so it becomes a very complex question, doesn't it? But I have to say I've watched the rest of the world scouting movement confront the changes the society makes over the past few decades and do the hard work required to serve as many youth as possible with the really wonderful program and the vast potential that scouting promises. And I don't think anybody from any of the different organizations in the world of scouting would tell you that change was easy, because it isn't.

But even so, these organizations have stabilized and even grown over the past 15 years, as our beloved, arthritic old PSA has shrunk by one third of its youth members, That's a million young people, If you sit and talk about it and you think about it. Of course there's a number of different reasons that membership is down, But I think what we have to ask ourselves seriously is what our organization will look like five years from now If we were to not make any changes at all, not to ask ourselves questions and innovate our programs and our approaches, because I think that future looks pretty grim. But if we listen to our young people, we'll find a lot of energy and inspiration in what they have to say And if we understand our aim is to give as many young people as possible the advantage of having the wonderful opportunities that scouting offers, we're going to make some changes and we're going to start to see things look up.

So there we go. I'll get down off my soapbox now and we'll move on, And in the remainder of this podcast I've got some email questions to answer.

So let's get started. Shall we Send it by name Email? That is, folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails. Brittany Henson is from PAC 691 in Longwood, Florida, And she wrote to say: I'm a scout mom. I've recently taken over the leadership of my son, My son's- Weeblows 1 den And I've been told I need to run the den like a Boy Scout patrol. I like the idea, but I'm a little confused.

Do you have any pointers on how I can do this And what are the main points of a Boy Scout patrol? How strict is the group size? I only have four Weeblows right now. I do have all the information on Weeblows requirements and the new program. I guess what I don't entirely understand is the purpose of a patrol Other than the boys and I meeting once a week.

Are there other considerations? Well, Brittany, that's an excellent question, And as for what scout patrols do and how you incorporate it into Weeblows, it's not all that difficult or mysterious to tell you the truth.

So don't let the idea of a patrol confuse you, because it's actually pretty much the way things work, naturally with scouts and with boys. To begin with, A patrol is just really a small group of scouts who work together under their own leadership.

Now in Weeblows, the boys are of an age where they can begin to take on more and more responsibility for themselves, And we want to encourage that. As a den leader, you'll want to explain that they're getting a little older. It's time for them to start learning how to work together as a patrol and how to lead each other through the things that they do.

So they can do things like choose a patrol name and elect a patrol leader, and the patrol leader can start helping you lead the den. I think it'd be a good idea to give all the Weeblows the chance to be patrol leader, So you may want to have a talk with them about exactly how you're going to make that happen, And talking to them is something that I really encourage you to do. Look at your work as a den leader as helping the Weeblows organize themselves and make things happen, rather than thinking you have to be the expert and know all the answers. I'm a big advocate of talking to our scouts about how they'd like to make things happen. You don't have to know at all or be an expert. You can learn right along with them.

If you take the materials that explain the program, if you take the Weeblows handbook and you start discussing with them how to make things happen and you use those resources to define the way you're going to do it, you'll be surprised at how much they can actually do and how excited they are when they're actually having something to do with leading themselves. I heard from William Castler in Wasilla, Alaska, and he said. 22 years ago my boys came home and they asked me if they could join scouting.

I said okay and I found myself as the PAC committee chairman. So I've been a den leader, assistant scout, master, unit commissioner, merit badge counselor and more besides, And when I first got started I found it difficult to find good information, especially when working with parents and other adults. Several years ago I started to put out a weekly newsletter and I've included your excellent posts and your material in my newsletter as often as I could, but I'm in the process of changing the format to a webpage and I'm writing to ask if you'd had any objections if I took your posts and used them on this new site. Before I answer, William, I also heard from Pierre, who said I'm working on a little camp book for my scouts with useful tips and things for them to use. I'd like to use some of the material that you've produced and translated into French, and I can send the finished book and all the translated documents that you add to your website.

I wanted to find out if that's okay with you, and that's from Pierre Courdiere, who is with the FSS, the Fraternal Salut Scouts in France. So William and Pierre and everybody else is listening. Anything that I've made, anything I've written or produced, the infographics and all that stuff is freely offered to support scouting, no matter where you are. The only thing that I ask is that if you use anything that I've created in your materials, all you do is let people know where you found it, Give them a link back to the website or to say that you found it at scoutmastercgcom.

So if you're working on a project and you want to incorporate some of the material or some of the writing that I've done, please take this as a blanket approval to do so, so long as you, like I said, give proper attribution to where you found it and who created it. Heard from Joel Irway. He said this: I'm an assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 637 in Onsted, Michigan. As an assistant Scoutmaster, I'm not part of the committee, nor do I sit on boards of review and, in an effort to keep the Troop youth led, I'm really not supposed to have an influence on patrol leaders council meetings.

So with all the stuff I am not supposed to do, I'm a little lost as to what I should be doing. I asked another assistant Scoutmaster from our Troop and he didn't have an answer for me either. We both felt like this was a good question for you and that it's pretty likely we're not the only assistant Scoutmasters who are a little puzzled.

Well, Joel, that is an excellent question. You're puzzled because, unfortunately, the way the vast majority of Troops handle the assistant Scoutmaster position, I don't know, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Sometimes There are frankly- oh I'm gonna get myself in trouble by saying this, but listen, frankly, there are just too many adult volunteers who have little or no idea of what scouting is or their role in making it happen.

Somewhere along the way, I think we got the idea that the more volunteers we have, the better, but this is not necessarily the case. Okay, If you have a troop with 30 scouts and 12 assistant Scoutmasters, what you really end up with is either the assistant Scoutmasters kind of doing the things that the scouts are supposed to do, or you have a parents club within the troop, and that can cause problems too, And it's great fun for all the people who are volunteering, but maybe not so much for the scouts who are involved.

Now, to tell you the truth, there really shouldn't be very much for assistant Scoutmasters- or the Scoutmaster for that matter- to do. I mean, when there's an engaged youth leadership running their program.

You know, if you think about it, there's not a whole lot of use for more than two or three scouters on an outing. There's almost nothing for them to do at meetings that involve the program and the meeting directly. But I frequently see troops with 10 or more, and sometimes many more, assistant Scoutmasters. I have to wonder what they actually do.

Now, my ideal setup is a Scoutmaster with two assistant Scoutmasters for any reasonably sized troop. One of the assistant Scoutmasters is nominally the first assistant And he's the guy who's on deck to take over when the Scoutmasters ready to hand things over. And ideally there'd be a date certain for that transition.

We'd know, you know, that the current Scoutmaster is gonna serve for the next two or three years and we know the date where there's gonna be a transition. So our first assistant is getting prepared And there's a second assistant Scoutmaster who becomes the first assistant Scoutmaster when there's that transition.

So at each transition of who's the Scoutmaster and assistant Scoutmaster, post comes open and the committee appoints someone who's fully committed to developing the skills required, And I think personally there should be some very high expectations of the adults who are chosen to be Scoutmaster and assistant Scoutmaster. Now, any responsible committee should be sure of who the next Scoutmaster will be, And ideally they'll have a couple of people ready to take the job on.

Now, some years back we trimmed our assistant Scoutmaster list down to three or four And we asked all the other adults registered as assistant Scoutmasters to change their registration to be members of the committee, And at that time we had a lot of assistant Scoutmasters, probably close to 10.. They were mostly doing committee work anyway And the committee was kind of thin.

So changing the positions made a lot of sense And as a result we've had a pretty substantial advancement team of four or five people. So setting up boards of review and tracking advancement and things like that is pretty light lifting for a group that size.

We have a gear guy- and presently that's me- who keeps an eye on all the gear and works with the quarter master and a number of other folks doing committee work of one kind or another. Now that's what works for me And that may help you and your troops sort out what happens next If you have a Scoutmaster who doesn't know when they're going to be stepping down.

I think it's an important discussion to have with the committee. I suggest most Scoutmasters would serve for maybe a maximum of five years. I went on for 30. And that's kind of an anomaly And I know there's a lot of long-tenured Scoutmasters out there.

But realistically I think five years, three to five years, is a pretty realistic commitment for most people. Then you have a date out there.

It's not that we appoint a Scoutmaster and they serve on in perpetuity with no end in sight, because usually there's an end in sight And putting a date on that is gonna be helpful, because then the troop can appoint a first and second assistant Scoutmaster And then the assistant Scoutmasters will have some real direction in what they're doing. So I think that any troops should decide how many assistant Scoutmasters they actually need, what expectations they should meet, and only appoint that many. Anyone else interested in volunteering, they can serve on the committee And if they're really interested in being an assistant Scoutmaster and all the spots are filled serving on the committee, they'll be there when one of those spots comes open.

Now Joel got back to me and said: well, in our troop only two of us are assistant Scoutmasters and everyone else is on the committee. I think the troop is about halfway to being completely functional as a patrol method troop.

We have some strong youth leaders and the patrols are there, but they're mostly just on paper at this point. What did your assistant Scoutmasters do to help you over the years?

Well, another great question, because my assistant Scoutmasters were there in the role of a pretty basic function of an assistant to take over things when I wasn't able to be there. They were also more sets of eyes and ears observing what was going on and we could discuss then what was happening with scouts. As for working with the youth leadership, there's always a lot of strength and a number of opinions and voices, but that all should be coordinated and it's best for the ideas and comments to come through the Scoutmaster, because it's just less confusing for the scouts and a lot more effective that way. And the way that that would happen is myself and my assistants- we would talk all the time. We would talk a lot and we would share our observations with each other And if we came up with ideas or suggestions for the patrol leaders, counselor or the youth leaders, then it was my job to take that to them.

Now I found it useful to have some assistants mentor specific youth leaders over time when there was a specific goal in mind. I didn't set up permanent relationships like that, because just working with a youth leader for a time- it might be a couple of weeks or a couple of months- to help them with one thing or another was often very useful.

My assistant Scoutmasters were also a great sounding board for my ideas and for the scout's ideas and to help me find solutions to problems or to work with me to counsel scouts in the midst of some dilemma, And there's a nominal chain of command involved here. But it's all more about coordination than control.

Now you note that your troop has some work to do towards fully getting the most out of the patrol system, And I gotta tell you, Joel, that's pretty much what everybody tells me And the way I always felt as Scoutmaster- we had never really arrived. We were always just traveling in that direction. But the real answer to your questions here is gonna come from the Scoutmaster. If you and your fellow assistants are uncertain of how to be supportive. I've asked the Scoutmaster to sit down with you to talk through what's happening and what his goals are and how you can coordinate efforts And, as I said before, I would plan on who the next Scoutmaster is gonna be and when that will happen. And the ongoing work that you're doing is pretty simple: to support and develop our youth leadership and to be part of that adult leadership team with the Scoutmaster, but to understand the importance of coordinating input for the scouts through the Scoutmaster.