Scoutmaster Podcast 289

I'm Mark Van Lund and I'm an assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 125 in Comac, New York. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me. Have a great day and thanks for the podcast.

And now see you, Scoutmaster. This is a pretty good one from Jim Hilliard. He wrote to say this actually happened at Scoutmaster training this weekend. I thought it might be a fun thing to include at the start of your podcast. The trainer said the scouting program has inherent risks, like any activity, but still, if a scout gets hurt on an outing, the hardest phone call to make is when you have to call mom and one of the trainees at the scout leader training piped up. Yeah, especially if you are dad.

Oh man, there has never been a true word spoken. Honey, I was right there, but he got. Oh,

Wow, Hey, this is podcast number 289.. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Oh, as always, let's start with the mailbag. Jack Navill, who is a Scoutmaster of Troop 506 in Lola, California, wrote in to say I'm having some technical difficulties listening to the podcast on my iPhone six. I've been getting a number of complaints about that, Jack, And a lot of people are having playback problems on their Apple devices And, as far as I can tell, this is kind of a widespread thing after the iOS nine update.

I am not an Apple guru- not by any stretch of the imagination- And I've done everything I can do on my end and everything seems to be working fine. The iTunes listing seems to be updating properly And no one is reporting any trouble on Android devices or with apps other than the native podcast app from Apple And, like I said, I did a little checking around and it seems like there's people are having a number of problems after the iOS update.

So the best- although frustratingly inadequate- answer I have is: there's not a whole lot I'm going to be able to do about it. Unfortunately, I did see where people have switched to a different podcast app on their Apple device and things seem to be working fine for podcasts. I know it's been causing a lot of frustration for folks and I apologize. I really wish there was a way for me to fix it, but I've done everything I can do on this end and nothing seems to be working at this point. I'm going to keep up with it, though. Wish me luck, Okay.

Joe Mertens is from Oakland, New Jersey and he wrote to say: Hey, I'm a DE out of the Northern New Jersey Council And I have been put in charge of our social media platforms. Would it be okay if I shared some links to your site on our council Facebook page?

You have lots of information that's well organized and would be a fantastic help to our Scouters. Thanks you so much, Joe. Thanks for getting in touch And yes, please- and by extension, everyone who's listening- feel free to share anything I've created on your Facebook feed or wherever. The only thing that I ask is that you let people know where you found it.

So if you're listening and you were wondering whether or not you could share the stuff that I've created, absolutely go right ahead. Consider this your permission to do so, And all I ask is that you let people know exactly where you found it. Link it back to scoutmastercgcom.

A couple of things we did this past week got a lot of attention over on Facebook. We did a post on the role of scouting parents.

David Eker from Rockwell, Texas, said if we could uniformly refer to adults in scouting as Scouters or adults and reserve the term leader for our Scouts in leadership roles, I think we could start a major change that parents and other adults outside the program could begin to understand the concept of youth leadership. Well, David, great minds travel on the same track. Scouters is a pretty good name for adult volunteers.

Adult leader not so much. Right, I know you do a lot of leadership and you do a lot of things, but when parents call you a leader it can confuse the message that we're actually led by. Our youth membership Also reposted an infographic that we created a while back to Facebook this week that shows you how to make a Turks head woggle- Tie the Turks head knot. If you haven't seen that, go check it out. Brian Stockton from Des Moines, Iowa, said a fellow Scouter and friend of mine recently took wood badge and during the course they are asked to complete their own necrative slide or woggle using the Turks head knot.

Well, she's left-handed and had a pretty rough go at using the right-handed instructions that were provided for her. So I decided to use Photoshop and flip your Turks head infographic that I found at your website, and Brian was kind enough to send me his adaptation of that infographic and it works just great for lefties.

So if you're a lefty, out there now at scoutmastercgcom, we have instructions on how to tie a Turks head knot for the left-handed tribe and the right-handed tribe. So there you go.

Thanks so much, Brian, for taking the time to do that. Last week I posted about an event called a Scouterama that Scouter Joe Riccatelli shared with me, and Joe was on one of the live chats and mentioned that their troop in Providence, Rhode Island, set up and presented what they called a Scouterama. It really is worth taking a look at. It's a great idea, a combination of a recruiting event and some community service.

And well, go read about it. Joe shared what they did, how they did it and the results that they got, and that was- it was really pretty impressive. Over on Facebook, Daniel Gunther from Macomb, Michigan, said: that sounds like a blast. I'm going to utilize it. I'm going to utilize this Scouterama idea in our community too. I mentioned the live chat and a couple mornings a week, usually Tuesday and Wednesday mornings- We're on live at scoutmastercgcom just to chat.

You'll see a notice on our Facebook feed and in our Twitter feed when the chat is live and it usually goes two, three, four hours on a Tuesday and a Wednesday morning. So stop in and say hello, In addition to the many frequent fliers who stopped in to share some time with us this past week. We also heard from Steve Whalen, who's the Scoutmaster of Troop 11 in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, and Greg, who's an assistant Scoutmaster in Dayton Ohio. They both checked in on the chat for their first time this past week.

Hey, before I go any further, I want to ask a favor of you. Go to scoutmastercgcom, click the support link at the top of the page and consider becoming a scoutmastercgcom backer. The funds I get from backers go to cover the expenses of producing and publishing everything we do at scoutmastercgcom, including the podcast that you're listening to right now. What you do, like I said, is click the support link at the top of the page and you'll see a number of options, which include getting autographed editions of my books that you can use to lend a little financial support to what we're doing.

I want to take a moment to personally thank Douglas Ackroyd, Jeff Kessler, Joe Mertens and James Eaton for becoming backers since our last podcast. Go to scoutmastercgcom, click that support link, become a backer this week and I'll be sure to thank you personally during our next podcast.

Well, in the remainder of this week's podcast, get your choir robe. Okay, Get your choir robe and put it on. I'm going to do a little preaching. Yeah, we've talked about this before, but it is an ongoing concern.

How do we evaluate if a scout is a active scout or not? It's pretty easy to do, really, but it still causes a lot of needless heartache and difficulty, and so I have a little sermon about it coming up and that's going to take up the remainder of the podcast.

So let's get started, shall we? So what I would like to talk about today- and, by the way, I'm glad to have the choir here and I'm ready to preach a little bit, so- but what I want to talk about is a question that came to me by email, Fairly easy question to answer, fairly simple, and it's about what it means to be an active scout. That's what it really comes down to, and what we're talking about are the requirements for every rank in scouting that says be active- Two very simple words: be active. But those two words have caused immense amount of needless heartache and difficulty and oh, come on, people, I mean really, let's get it together, okay.

So let's take a look at this, shall we? The question that I got was a fairly simple one: Can a troop impose a participation requirement and then can a scout be held back from advancing because he does not meet that requirement? And this came to me from a parent whose son had completed all the life rank requirements but had a Scoutmaster who will not sign off Requirement number one- be active- because they said his attendance was below 70%, which is the metric the troops set for being active.

Now, I'm not going to spend a great deal of time with this, but if you look at the Guide to Advancement, ready, Here we go. Pencil is ready. It's in the Guide to Advancement, section 4.2.3.1, titled Active Participation. If you'll look at that, it parses everything about active participation.

Okay, It's not all that lengthy, It's two or three hundred words maybe. So, yes, A troop can decide to have a metric requirement: 70%, 50%, 80%, you know, 63.2% of everything that the troop does, The scout has to attend to be considered active. Yes, you can do that. I don't think it's a particularly good idea, but yes, you can do that. But if you decide to do that according to the Guide to Advancement, you have to follow some rules. You can't simply set that and not consider anything else.

If you really want to set up this kind of metric thing fine. Like I said, I don't think it's a very good idea, but you can go to the Guide to Advancement and in that section you can learn how you do that properly.

So my answer to this parent was: yes, a troop may impose a participation requirement, but it's not quite so simple as just setting a percentage. And if I sound a little aggravated, I am a little aggravated because I hear about this type of thing on a pretty regular basis And the thing that I find really, really aggravating about it is: is this so totally unnecessary?

I mean, think about this: You got a scout that comes to you, a Scoutmaster's conference, and has got everything completed for rank, and then you get out your calculator and you go: nope, you're below 70%, Can't do anything for you. I mean, how does anybody think that that kind of an approach has anything to do with scouting at all?

How can that kind of approach be justified in any way, shape or form? And let's start: how do you get to that point?

How do you really get to that point as a scouter, where you know you're going to grab your slide rule to figure out whether a scout is active or not? And I say this because I know that I went through a period of time where we were trying to figure this out too And we made a couple of bad decisions and we- thankfully- we corrected them pretty quickly.

So you get a scout who is ready to advance and you go: okay, so how active have you been? I mean, we're looking at this first requirement here. It says: be active.

How active have you been? Well, I made about one or two camp outs within the past six or eight months And I haven't been able to get to many meetings.

And now we're kind of like, oh, that doesn't really sound very active, does it? And then we sit down and talk amongst ourselves as adults And we say: how are we going to make a judgment about this?

I mean, woo, it doesn't seem fair to everybody else unless we have some kind of a standard. So let's make a standard, All right.

Well, let's come up with a number. Well, 75% sounds about right, doesn't it? Yeah, fellas, that sounds about right, Okay.

So it's going to be 75%. Now we have a standard, right.

So the next time we end up in a Scoutmaster's conference with a scout, we say: well, have you been 75% active? Because that's what we told everybody you'd need to do to be considered active. No, I haven't really been. I guess maybe 75% active. Out of the last 10 camping trips, I was able to make five of them, And out of the last X number of meetings, I was able to make about 50 or 60% of them.

And then we say, well, oh, too bad, you didn't meet the number. When you meet the number, come back and talk to me.

So how is that scouting? It doesn't sound a lot like scouting to me.

Now, that's exactly what we did years and years and years ago. We did that And I've got to tell you something: A lot of it was based on the frustration that scouts were not as active as we thought they ought to be.

You're kind of angry with them, aren't you? You're frustrated. Frustration turns into anger.

Anger gets kind of bitter and resentful And you're going like: look, you know I put a lot of time into this. You don't want to do it to the extent that I think you should do it.

So I'm going to set up a number. You meet that number, mister, or forget about it.

Now, being demanding, having high expectations, is not bad, But we have to shape our expectations to an individual scout, not to a troop of 12 or 25 or 35 or 105. We are working with one individual scout at a time.

Because what is our principal aim? The development of character. Correct Character development is the principal aim of our work.

How many scouts do you develop character in at one time? Not 25,, not 12,, not 75,, not 105. It doesn't work that way. You develop character in one scout at a time. Each one of those scouts is different. Each one of those scouts comes from a different family with different advantages and challenges.

Each one has their own personal advantages and challenges and we have to look at them as individuals. If you go back and refer to that part of the Guide to Advancement, that's exactly what's happening. It demands that we deal with scouts individually, even if we set a metric for active participation.

You ask: how do you do that? I mean, how do you deal with scouts individually?

Well, it's pretty easy to do, because you sit down and you talk to them. Here we are at a Scoutmasters Conference. You don't have the first requirement, the active participation requirement, signed off for this rank.

So let's talk about that a little bit. Tell me what you believe active means in this context. Then the scout's going to tell me I don't know. I mean, it means being around, being at camping trips, meetings and stuff like that.

Okay, We agree about that. If you were sitting where I am with a pen in your hand getting ready to sign this requirement for yourself, would you do it?

And that's where they get a real confused look and they kind of look at you and they go what? And you say look, judge yourself on this.

Do you think you've been active in a way that satisfies this requirement? Yeah, I think so Is usually the answer. I'm not really quite certain what you're asking me here, because people don't normally ask this kind of question. They just usually give me a grade or a number or something like that.

And then you've opened the door to a pretty good conversation, haven't you? So my next question might be: well, tell me, out of the last 10 meetings, how many meetings you've been to.

Tell me, out of the last three or four camping trips, how many camping trips you've been on Now, do you think that the amount that you were able to attend makes you active in a way that satisfies this requirement? And then we have a big discussion, because you know well, out of the pass, through four camping trips, I was only able to make one.

Well, why is it that you're only able to make one? Then we're finding out individually what the particular advantages or challenges this particular scout met.

Well, you know the first one: I had a football game. Okay, So you were playing football, So that's good. The second, the second one that I missed: we had that. That was the weekend where we had the PSATs and I had to go do my PSAT, or my family went traveling, or I was really sick that weekend, or any number of other things that may have caused the scout to miss that weekend.

How about meetings? Well, you know, I'm a junior this year and they're really loading me down with a lot of homework and I've been having trouble keeping up with that and everything. And I say okay.

So let's get back to the original question: Do you think you've satisfied that requirement? Well, I was here.

Every time I could get here, I say, okay, I understand that There were a lot of things on your plate. Some of those things you could control and some of them you couldn't.

But when you can control them, what priority do you give to being an active participant here with scouts? Oh, yeah, Well, no, I definitely love to go camping and I love to be at scout meetings and stuff like that.

Okay, so let's come to an agreement. Do you think that I should sign this requirement right now?

You think that you've been active enough in the past for me to sign this requirement? Yeah, you know, I really do.

And I said: well, okay, I agree with you. I'm a little skeptical, to tell you the truth, about being here maybe a third or half of the time being active.

So let's talk about what your standard is going to be for the next time we sit down and we discuss this for your next rank And let's make a deal. Okay, let's set an expectation that you think is realistic and that I think is realistic, And then the next time we sit down at a Scoutmaster conference, it'll be pretty clear, right, And so we do that. You have to accumulate six months of tenure to get the next rank.

So within that six months, tell me how many camping trips you're going to be at and how many meetings you're going to be at. Well, I'm going to get to every single one I can.

I said: yeah, I understand that, But let's set a number that we can use as a benchmark. It's not going to be an absolute pass or fail number, But let's just set up a number we can use as a benchmark.

Okay, Well, in the next six months, I should be able to get to at least half of all the camping trips. Okay, well, that sounds reasonable. You're pretty busy with a lot of things And you're actually taking what you learn in scouts to things like playing on a football team, doing FBLA or your church group or whatever.

Okay, So I don't have a problem with you participating in a lot of other activities. How many meetings do you think you're going to make?

Well, well, like I said, you know homework's really piling up and it's really been difficult. Well, look, everybody's got challenges like that.

How about you and I make a deal here that you get to as many meetings as you can possibly make, And let's not ever make the excuse that you didn't finish your homework, because, come on, let's be real. If you really buckle down, you can probably get it finished and get to a scout meeting, Right, Yeah, Well, yeah, I could.

All right, Look, I know school is very demanding right now and there's a lot of stuff to do, but let's make a deal here, Okay, So when I come and talk to you and I say, geez, we didn't see it the past couple of weeks at the troop meeting. We're going to both know what I'm talking about, right, Because what I want you to tell me is that you're going to really work at getting to these meetings.

Well, you know, I come to the meeting and there's really nothing for me to do. Let's talk about that.

You know, if you showed up on a reliable basis, probably people would count on you and you would have a bigger role. But I think there were a couple of times there where you had agreed that you would take part of a troop meeting and it didn't work out very well.

And so you see what I'm saying. Yeah, I guess I see what you're saying.

All right, So you and I aren't going to wait six months to talk about this. We're going to talk about it pretty much every time you show up, And I'm not your boss, I'm not your drill sergeant, I'm your Scoutmaster.

Okay, So let's get that straight and let's make sure that we keep the doors of communication open here and that we're very, very clear about what my expectations are, what your expectations are and how we get this taken care of the next time we sit down to look at one of these requirements. Okay, So that's a very off the cuff example of how one of those conversations would go.

Now back to the original email conversation I had with a parent over this issue. I basically told them that they had two options open to them.

Because if you're a parent in that situation right now, you basically have two options open to you too: You can fight or you can switch. If a scout, master and a troop is misapplying the very clear policies outlined in the guide to advancement, you can go to them and you can say: look, I look this up, I studied a little bit and I think you're off base here and I want to talk about it.

So I'm not talking about, like, rolling up your sleeves fighting. I'm talking about you can go and reason with with the adult volunteers and a troop and see if you can get anywhere.

But you know, when I advise people to do that, I also try and tell them you're probably not going to get anywhere, And I always feel horrible when I have to tell them that, because that is almost always the case in every situation where I've been advising a parent about something like this, And that is what we call a straight up pity, because scouts out there are doing one of two things. They're getting things mixed up, They're not thinking about what they're doing, They're setting a numerical standard and then they're just sticking with that standard.

Now somebody's going to come along and show them: hey, actually, what you're doing is not really cricket. You know it's not fair And it's outlined here right in one of the BSA's resources about how it should be done And unfortunately, nine times out of 10, the reaction from that scouter is: well, this is the way we do it here And we've already talked about it. We voted on it in the committee and this is how we do it.

And if you don't like it, you know you can take your son and you can go elsewhere. It's remarkable how many times parents meet with that attitude.

And let's really hope, folks, that if you're within the sound of my voice right now, you're going to be humble enough to understand that you may not know everything, You may not be that smart, And if you're confronted with something that is a clear policy statement that points out that you've got the wrong end of the stick, well, let's just fix it. Okay, Let's you know, let's get back to scouting and let's just fix it.

So I said, parents have two options. The other option is switch And that option is usually a lot easier and a lot less fraught with anxiety and difficulty. You go around, you visit a couple of other troops, you find one that gets it and that's where you go do scouts. It's called voting with your feet, And if you do that, you don't shout over your shoulder at the at the other bunch, You don't thumb your nose at them, You don't do anything really, You just leave.

You just say: well, you know, we've decided we're going over to this other troop. Well, why is that?

Well, you know there were some difficulties and we talked about it and you didn't want to change, And so we just think that our family's going to be better served if we work with this other troop and go to the other troop. You know it's that easy.

I understand that I'm making that really really simple and I understand that that making that kind of decision may not be quite so simple as I'm representing that it is, But you know what, In the end, it really kind of is that simple. So I've been preaching for a little bit, So let's go back and review.

Okay, this is a specific thing that I'm talking about with determining if a scout meets the active requirement for a badge of rank. What I'm trying to get at is a much more general thing And that is about the attitude of our volunteer scouters and the way that you work with scouts.

So the answer always is dealing with the individual scout, with their advantages, their challenges and talking to them. Not setting the bar and saying: jump over the bar. If you can't jump over the bar, too bad for you, but sitting and talking with them and figuring out how scouting is going to best serve them and being able to be friendly and kind and courteous and agree and come up with an agreement about how things are going to move forward.

We can only build one character at a time. We can't do that for an entire herd.

We can only do this one scout at a time. And if you're a parent that finds yourself in this situation, you got two options: You can talk to the adult volunteers in the troop And, like I said in my experience, unfortunately you've got a very small chance of coming to a successful resolution to an issue that way, But give it a shot.

And the other one is: you know, find a troop that gets it and that will serve your child in the best way possible. So this is pretty much like anything right: Obsume goodwill, have reverence and respect for your scouts and the families that you serve, and be faithful and obedient to the directions that we're given. We all work to get along and do our best to make scouting a positive experience for all the young people in our communities.

So if we just keep our eye on that goal, things are going to go well.