Scoutmaster Podcast 288

I'm Doug Marks and I've been Scoutmaster of 2.451 and control our California for 18 years. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by hackers like us. Thanks, Mark, Appreciate all you do.

And now for you, Scoutmaster, Hang around long enough as a scouter and you're going to be on the scene when one of your scouts does something stupid. Oh my, it's that time of life for them, isn't it?

Do you remember being that age? Here's something to think about. Their heart was in the right place, It's just their brain wasn't there at the time.

Hey, this is podcast number 288.. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Oh, let's see here. Let's start out by taking a look at the mailbag. This week I heard from Calfany Mkalinga, who is the group Scoutmaster for the Mapimbano Scout group, And Mapimbano is in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in eastern Africa.

Calfany just checked in to say hello, Hello, Hello, back at you. Wilson Wei is a Cub Scout parent in Hong Kong And he said: I'm a scouting parent.

My child started scouting first as a grasshopper and is now a Cub Scout. While surfing the net searching for various scouting things, I came across ScoutmasterCGcom. I applied your efforts in your generosity and sharing all the useful resources with us. They are invaluable information and reminders to those of us who really need to think inside and outside the box to benefit our scouts.

Thanks, Wilson, I'm glad you're finding what we have out there useful. Jamie Pine wrote in on Facebook. Every Sunday we post something from a series that we call Baden Powell's blog.

Now, Baden Powell doesn't actually have a blog, but he wrote a lot of stuff, So every Sunday I take a bit of his writing and I post it on the website and it makes it over to Facebook. And Jamie Pine said thanks for these posts each Sunday. I really love reading them.

Well, Jamie, I'm glad that you do And they do. You know they get a pretty good response.

I mean Baden Powell, he knew what he was talking about, right? Frank Maynard, My old pal Frank, is the author of the blog at Bob White Blather And I'll make sure to have a link to Frank's blog in the post that contains this podcast. And Frank wrote to say this. He said: just wanted to nudge you in the right direction on the pronunciation of my hometown, which you mentioned in last week's podcast. It's pronounced Ipsilanti, not Ypsilanti, And that's Ipsilanti, Michigan.

So thanks, Frank. I appreciate that. I do my best, you know. But if you're serving on a troop committee or PAC committee somewhere and you want some really great information on how committees work in scouting, go check out Bob White Blather. He's really got some good advice for you And is my go-to person when there's a committee question that I can't answer myself, which is pretty regularly.

So go over and check out Bob White Blather, Let's see. We did have a couple of live chat sessions this past week. It's been Tuesday mornings and Wednesday mornings from about eight o'clock till noon eastern time. If you keep an eye on our Facebook feed and an eye on our Twitter feed, you'll see that we are on live at scoutmastercgcom with a live chat And this week, in addition to all those frequent flyers who show up when we are chatting online, Brad, who's an assistant Weeblers den leader from North Florida, checked in for the first time. Dan White, who is a second year Weeblers den leader and assistant scoutmaster in Birmingham, Alabama.

So come and join us in the chat. Sometimes they're very deep subjects being discussed and sometimes we're just kind of hanging out, But it's always a good time. People from all over the world find scoutmastercgcom and they find the resources that we create useful. I mean, this week we heard from Cal Fannie over in Tanzania, in East Africa, who would have thought, and Wilson, who is in Hong Kong, And we hear from people in different parts of the world and different parts of the United States every single week.

So, to keep everything freely available, I depend on people like you, who are listening to the podcast right now, to become backers, And it's it's a little bit of an unusual idea. So let me explain something. Let's say I was publishing a magazine or newspaper or something like that.

Well, I'd have to pay people to write and I'd have to pay to get it printed out. I'd have to pay postage to get it to you.

If you found the content of that publication useful, well, you'd be happy to pay for it. And publishing things online is kind of similar. There are costs involved, Somebody has to take the time to create the content and distribute it, And if you find it useful, you can help me do just that and keep these resources free and accessible to anybody with an internet connection. What I'm asking you to do is kind of make a one time voluntary subscription payment And the money that you send will cover the expense of producing and publishing everything that you find on scoutmastercgcom and the podcast that you're listening to right now.

So it's very easy to do. Go to scoutmastercgcom, Look at the top of the page, at the very top, and you'll see a link there that says support.

Click on that and you'll find a number of options so you can become a scoutmastercgcom backer. And before we move on, I want to take a moment to personally thank Joe Capuano, who became a backer since our last podcast. Once again, go to scoutmastercgcom, Become a backer this week, and I'll be sure to thank you personally during our next podcast.

Well, in this week's podcast we're going to talk about yardsticks. That's right, And I apologize in advance if it gets a little preachy, but it's something I've been thinking about lately And that will be in scoutmastership in seven minutes or less, which is rarely seven minutes and rarely less, But you know we're kind of stuck with it, Oh my goodness.

Well, enough of this foolishness, Let's get started, shall we?

Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. Here's something Baden Powell wrote in January of 1931 in a recurring feature that was in the Scouter magazine in the Scouts Association of Great Britain. He wrote this: Yes, scouting is a game, but I sometimes wonder whether, with all of our pamphlets, rules, conferences and training classes. We may not appear to be making it too serious a game. Our phalanx of instructional aids appear terribly formidable from the outside, And when you come to look at something formidable then you miss the whole spirit and the whole joy of it. Your boys catch the depression from you and scouting, having lost its spirit, is no longer a game for them.

Scouting is not a science to be solemnly studied, nor is it a collection of doctrines and texts, nor again is it a military code for drilling discipline into boys and repressing their individuality and initiative. No, it is a jolly game in the out of doors where boy, men and boys can go adventuring together as older and younger brother, picking up health, happiness, handicraft and helpfulness.

If you follow Baden Powell's blog that I publish every Sunday, or you take the time to read some of the things that he wrote, you'll recognize what I just quoted Baden Powell as writing as being a pretty consistent theme in what Baden Powell had to say about scouting, And I think, if I was to paraphrase it, he was basically saying: you know, chill out, take it easy. All right, This is not a science, it's a game, It's a lot of fun. Take a step back and get some perspective and help your scouts grow through enjoying playing this jolly game, as he said.

Now I got to say, in the 10 or so years that I've been blogging and podcasting, most of the questions and comments I receive concern very practical, pragmatic matters, such as how we measure progress, or how we measure the indications that our programs are successful, or how many inches this patch goes from that path, or when something should be worn or not be worn on the uniform and how many campaign hats dance on this particular pinhead. You know what I'm saying.

There's a lot of procedural things, There's a lot of logistical, practical questions, and I'm happy to answer them, But, as I do, I joined Baden Powell- and here I quote him again- in saying: sometimes I wonder whether, with all our pamphlets, rules, conferences and training classes, we may not appear to be making scouting a little too serious again. Now, the work that we're doing is, in one respect, very serious, because we are entrusted with working with a very precious resource in the young people that we work with, And our aim is to help them shape their character and to help them shape themselves into really good, useful human beings, And there are lots and lots of ways to get that right, And there's lots of ways to get it wrong. There's lots of ways of missing the big picture. And as I was thinking about this, I got to thinking about systems of measurement.

The picture that came to my mind was a yardstick, And what I want to say is: scouting really is not a yardstick, It's not a system of measurement. But wait a minute. You might say I just went to training and they handed me a whole bundle of yardstick. Every time I look in a Scoutmaster handbook or I look in a Scout handbook or I look at anything, it seems like there are an awful lot of yardsticks there. This is the season where we're doing the journey to excellence, evaluations for our units- That's a big old yardstick too.

And if you look at the advancement program, well, that's just yardsticks everywhere, right, Measurements and standards and rules, regulations, policies and procedures, And these things are useful. Okay, I am not saying that they are in of themselves objectively bad.

It's just that often we get so distracted by them that we forget about the spirit of this simple jolly game that Baden Powell started. I mean, we have yardsticks for participation, We have yardsticks for Scout spirit, which is really strange, isn't it? I mean, we actually try to measure spirit, which is kind of an absurd contradiction in terms.

The risk of this being too obscure a reference: those of you who are fans of the movie Office Space: okay, You'll remember that one of the characters in that movie worked in a restaurant and had to wear buttons and badges and things like that on their server's uniform that were called Pieces of Flare. And there was this big thing about: well, you know, you can have so many Pieces of Flare as a minimum, but we'd really like to see you have more Pieces of Flare. And it's actually a pretty funny sequence in the film because they're trying to get her to have some spirit and vivacity and interest in her job with a number.

And I think a lot of times we'll find ourselves trying to encourage or to excite Scouts by using yardsticks, not to beat them with. But you know, measurements and things like that And, as I said, these things that were given the policies, procedures, rules, the yardsticks. They are not objectively bad. They're useful to us Because obviously in any game you have to have some system of measurement to see whether or not you're advancing right. I mean, in football. It's marked right on the field.

But allegories like the fact that scouting is a game are not meant to carry the full weight of understanding every single thing about scouting, because allegories break down eventually. They can help describe certain aspects of things, but eventually, if you try and describe everything about a particular pursuit using an allegory, you're going to break down at one point or another.

So let's leave the allegory aside for a moment and talk about how we work with those measurements in scouting. I heard from somebody this week who was touting their effectiveness as a scouter by saying that they really cracked down on their scouts and they made them.

They made sure that they learned all the skills and they did that by testing and retesting them during Boards of Review and they basically had a system set up so all their scouts became first class by a certain age and they pushed them to become Eagle Scouts by a certain age and they had a fantastic spirited bunch and, by gosh, they were making men out of boys. It was a very aggressive style of scouting and I pointed out that the attitude and some of the way that they were very much inconsistent with some clearly expressed policies and they said, yeah, well, we know better. We know better, we don't need those yardsticks, we don't need those measurements because we know better how to measure these things.

So that's one extreme of a poor use of these systems of measurement. Right, By taking every single scout, matching them up against the yardstick, by applying it ruthlessly, We're going to have a standardized way of approaching this.

You're all going to get first class at this point in time, you're all going to get Eagle this point in time and by golly, you're going to know exactly how to do everything in a way that we can objectively measure. And, by the way, that particular individual was very proud of the fact that they didn't hand out participation ribbons. They had clear winners and losers, you know.

So, hey, I'm sure they're probably not doing objective harm to young people, but they're missing the point of scouting. As far as I'm concerned.

And you know, it's very possible to swing to the other extreme of not having any measurement system at all. Okay, And just kind of say: well, you know, this is a youth led operation and whatever they decide to do is what we're going to do. And they don't seem to be particularly interested in playing the game according to the rules.

So you know, it's their decision. Right, We're just going to kind of go along and do that and we'll go to the amusement park and we'll have movie night and we'll play basketball, and you know that's equally outside of the game of scouting. That reaches the aims of scouting.

So where are we so far? Okay, Yes, we're presented with systems of measurement. We're presented with yardsticks in the scouting program and the ways of rules, regulations, requirements, procedures, methods and other systems of measurement.

We can go to one extreme and consider that there are objective right measurements for every single thing. We can go to the other extreme and say, well, you know, there's really no objective right measurement for every single thing.

There's really no reason to use any of these systems of measurement because our scouts are going to do whatever they want to do anyway and we want to make sure they're entertained and that they do entertaining things. But, as you may imagine, between those two extremes is a much more effective way of doing things To step away from the allegories for a moment and understand scouting for what it is. Because scouting happens one scout at a time. It does not happen to a troop, It does not happen to a patrol. What scouting is meant to achieve happens for one scout at a time. Since I began by reading something that Ben Powell wrote- I'll mention this to.

Another big theme in his body of writings is that scouting is for an individual scout. It's meant to help them grow individually and to develop their character and sense of service on an individual basis. The most important yardstick is the one that we create with our scouts on an individual basis, And this is hard to get.

I started with the allegory of yardsticks and now it's going to fall apart, because now what I'm suggesting is that from an objective thing like an inch is an inch, of foot is a foot and a yard is a yard, is that there's a very subjective standard and let's call it progress, And that subjective standard is measured one scout at a time. Because what we ask ourselves is: where did they begin?

Where did they begin on this continuum of development we call scouting, and where are they now? Have they advanced, Have they improved, Have they moved forward? Then we're successful and we're not going to be able to measure the distance in inches and feet and yards and miles. We're only going to be able to measure that by looking at them individually, having a conversation with them and seeing what they understand. And on that one thing: on this concept of individual progress, not just in advancement, not just in participation, not just in spirit, but in character. The development of character is not something you're going to be able to assess with an objective, external measurement.

It's going to be one that's a lot more tricky to assess because you're going to have to sit and talk to a scout about it. And for me personally, this idea has been the key that's unlocked many, many doors and shed light on tremendous opportunities as a scouter, to help my scouts better understand themselves and the way that they relate to the world around them and to encourage them to grow in character and a sense of service and usefulness to others, because they're not competing against every other scout, to develop the best character they're competing against where they began and where they finally will end up. And to figure out that measurement. Like I said, it takes sitting down and talking to a scout and working along with them and finding out what they understand.

How do you understand the scout, oath and law? Tell me a little bit about that, and then we're going to do that again in months or years to come and we're going to ask the same question and we're going to note that, yeah, the activities of playing this wonderful jolly game of scouting has given them more understanding about these things, has helped them build their character and their sense of usefulness and their self-esteem, all at the same time.

So yardsticks and systems of measurement in scouting are there for a good reason. They help us define the program, but they can't really objectively define the progress that an individual makes in scouting.

To do that, we can't apply a yardstick. We can't measure that in feet and inches, in yards.

We have to talk to our scouts and bring them to a shared understanding of the things that they're developing through their participation in scouting: music, music.