Scoutmaster Podcast 297

I'm James Longo and I am a troop committee chairman with Troop 228 in Rockford, Michigan. This edition of the Scoutmaster Podcast is sponsored by backers like me.

And now the old Scoutmaster. Hey, I have a theory I want to share with you.

I think Santa is a scouter. Yeah, because he has a beard, wears a uniform, drives an ancient vehicle and his clothes are all tarnished with ashes and soot.

What do you think?

Hey, this is podcast number 297.. Hey, Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look in the mailbag We heard from Scouter James, who's with the 4th Chatham Scout Troop in Chatham, Ontario, Canada. He said lots of good stuff in the PDF package I just got. I've posted a few around the Scout Hall for our parents' visit.

My general theme is: ask not what you can do for your Scouts, Ask what your Scouts can do for themselves. Things like: it's not your backpack, it's theirs, Let them pack it. It's good to know, James, that our brothers to the North encounter the same difficulties that we do. And James goes on to say: also, the parents have finally stopped asking me what the Scouts are doing, because my response has been: I don't know.

Have you asked your Scout? And they say: but he doesn't know.

And I say, well, has he asked his patrol leader? Ah yes, Simple yet effective answers. Thanks for getting in touch, James. John Ruth is wearing several hats. He's volunteering for the Seneca District of the Great Trail Council in Akron, Ohio. And John wrote in to say I returned to Scouting this year after 40 years.

In the quote wilderness unquote. I earned my Eagle and aged out in 1975..

I found your website a month or so ago and I finished my first run through your podcast archive in 19 days. Wow, John, that's got to be a record.

Anybody else? Have you gotten through the back log of podcasts in anything less than 19 days? I doubt it. I found this auditory track, or death march perhaps, was very rewarding. I agree with your emphasis on asking questions on the patrol method and the Scout-led troop, which is really Baden Powell's original vision for Scouting. I also appreciate your emphasis on advancement by doing what Scouts do and on judging a Scout's progress by asking how far he's come, not how far he has left to go.

As I listened to each podcast I thought back over my time in Scouting. I'd have to say that my Scout troop, troop 170 in Fremont, California, probably was more adult than youth-led, but with enough left to the patrols that a good amount of creative chaos remained.

It is clear that Scout-led Scouting is a valuable antidote to many of today's schools, and directing Scouts energy and natural curiosity so they learn for themselves is superior to imposing artificial constraints and requiring only the repetition of assigned course material. Put another way, Scout-led Discovery beats adult-led efficiency. That's a great thought, John. I really like that. Scout-led Discovery beats adult-led efficiency. John went on to say thanks for all you do.

The only thing more remarkable than your dedication to Scouting is the stantyma you display in keeping ScoutmasterCGcom humming. May it continue to be blessed in both regards.

Well, thank you so much. And John also sent me a number of reflections on the technical end of the podcast and I really do appreciate that. Our old pal, Frank Maynard, is a unit commissioner in the mighty Ottawa district in Novi Michigan and he wrote to say I like the way you talked about cooperative volunteering in podcast 294 and how lots of adults in troops aren't really that good of a thing. I was looking back through some of our troops, old rosters, and drew a casual correlation between the quality of the program, whether it was youth run and Scouts actually responsible for things and the ratio of adults to Scouts.

I mean it makes sense, doesn't it, Frank? If there's a lot of adults involved, Scouts don't really have that much of a fighting chance, because adults, you know they want to do something. Frank went on to say: isn't it curious that we usually have a shortage of adult help at the Cub Scout level but then suddenly volunteers come out of the woodwork when their son crosses into the troop.

Yeah, it is kind of curious And I think it's a really good idea for experienced Scoutsers to go offer their help to the Cub Scout pack, because you'll form a bridge right between the Cub Scout pack and the Scout troop and the Venture crew and everything else. I think it's a great idea for you to do. Thanks for being in touch, Frank. Most weeks we try and have a couple of live chat sessions over at ScoutMasterCGcom. Watch the Facebook feed and the Twitter feed for announcements when those happen. The standard times are Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.

Come on over and join us at the chat, Like all of our frequent flyers. And we had a few new people show up this week: Rob, who's with PAC-135 and is a committee chair, and Weebelow's den leader, James Longo, who's in Rockford, Michigan, and he's with Troop 228.. Mike Doemer, in Overland Park, Kansas, and he's a member of the committee for his troop and a summer camp coordinator, And he'll be the committee chair for his PAC starting at the beginning of the year. Thanks to all of you for checking in. Once again, a live chat over at ScoutMasterCGcom Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Most weeks it's going to be a little dicey around the holidays.

I think everybody's going to be busy, But keep an eye on the Facebook feed and the Twitter feed and we'll let you know that we're there. So this week's podcast- number 297, is going to be the last live podcast for this year, for 2015.. I'm going to set up some encore presentations for the next three weeks during the holidays And I'll be back with podcast 298 on January 11th And that will set us up for the 300th edition of the ScoutMaster podcast to be published on January 25th. And that's exactly six years from the day I published podcast number one And I've got a few new things ready for 2016 that I'll announce during that podcast.

So I get to hear from a lot of folks every week and it's really heartening to hear from you And it's very gratifying to know I can lend you a hand once in a while. What I'm asking for in return is that you support all of this by becoming a ScoutMasterCGcom backer. It's pretty easy to do: Go to ScoutMasterCGcom and click the support link at the top of the page. You'll find a number of options on making a voluntary one-time subscription payment to keep things up and running. And, as promised, I'd like to take a moment this week to personally thank Gary Bezal and Aaron Kohler, who've become backers since our last podcast. Go to ScoutMasterCGcom, click the support link at the top of the page, Become a backer and I will thank you during our next podcast.

Well, in this week's podcast, I got one simple thing for you. It's in ScoutMasterCG in seven minutes or less. I'm kind of excited about it And that's going to take up the remainder of this brief podcast.

So let's get started. Shall we

Scout MasterCG in seven minutes or less. For nearly six years, as I've recorded the podcast- and it's more like 10 or 11 years that the blog has been going- I've been writing and thinking about scouting And one of my little pet projects has been trying to reduce everything that we do down to a couple of sentences. But I've got news for you.

I think I came up with one sentence that works, And I'm going to explain why. Because it's a lot easier to memorize one sentence than like a whole bunch of gobbledygook, And if I can impress upon you the import of that, then you have something that's useful for you, right? That's actually has some utility for you as a scouter.

So I want to take a little time and explain exactly what I'm talking about. If you follow my reasoning, scouters have one aim and one method. That's a little radical, but bear with me for a moment. See if this makes sense. Now. Aim is a particularly well-chosen word to describe our focus as adult volunteers in scouting.

It's the word that we inherit from Baden Powell: the aim of scouting- What is scouting supposed to do? And a lot of times we hear that scouting has three specific objectives that are commonly referred to as the aims of scouting, And they are character development, citizenship training and personal fitness.

Now I'm going to take a little leap here and reduce that list to one aim, And here's why An ideal person of good character is going to be a good citizen and is going to keep themselves fit. I think that we can reasonably say we have one aim, and that is to shape individuals of good character.

Now, I'm not saying that citizenship and personal fitness aren't important, but you understand what I'm saying, right. I'm not saying that we erase those or we don't think about them. If we're going to make this easy to remember and we're going to make it something that is a tool that you can use, that you can actually apply, let's get it down to one aim And talk about aim for a moment.

Okay, Because an aim is a purpose or intention towards which one's efforts are directed. As a shooting sports director at our camp years ago, I learned a lot about aiming. It's not as simple as leveling a bow or a rifle at a target and hoping for the best. The goal of a good shooter is developing consistency in their aim and the execution of the shot.

Now, when an arrow leaves the bow and travel towards a target, it's subject to a number of forces that affect its flight and where it hits the target, And it's really kind of interesting to study. If you come down to the archery range at camp and you're of scout age, you are not at first really interested in finding out like all of these fascinating things about what happens to an arrow after it leaves the bow and how what you do affects that. What you're interested in doing is shooting as many arrows towards a target as you possibly can, And that's the way we all start right When we're volunteering for scouts.

We want to go, man, We want to do stuff. Please don't make me sit under the tarp here and listen to you talk about the physics of archery or how scouting works. Please, let me get out there and do some stuff.

Well, and that's fine. You go out and you do some stuff and you gain some experience. And that experience reveals that you need to know more stuff, That you need to spend some time perfecting your aim.

When guys came down to the archery range at camp, it was the idea was: okay, I know you want to shoot, Let's go out and shoot. Here's the simple safety rules, Here's the way to get you started.

Let's get out and start shooting And then, once they had some experience with it, then you could actually explain things right And you could actually get somewhere, because you could say, okay, well, here's the different steps in aiming And this is how to work it, and that will get you a better result. And I think it's exactly the same way with scouting, You have to go out and you have to try some things out and you get a little bit of experience and you go: wow, that worked really well.

But the other thing that I did didn't work all that well. I better study up a little bit and see if there's anything that I'm doing wrong or things that I can do better.

So back to my metaphor: An arrow's flight depends wholly on how it's aimed and released, And a scout's progress and our effectiveness is largely dependent on how well we know and focus on the aim And then we apply the methods. We know what the aim is. It's the center of the target.

We got that, but now we need some methods to get the arrow into that target. If, for some reason, you had never seen a bow and an arrow before, you've never seen anybody shoot it, and I handed you a bow and an arrow and I said, go ahead, put that in a target, Well, you would have to do an awful lot of experimenting, probably before you got even close to the target And in the end, given the time, you'd find out the method of making that happen.

So what are the methods of scouting? If you do a quick Google search, you'll find lots of lists of them And most of them are in common. Most of them are like standard BSA methods and you can find them repeated in other scouting organizations and things like that Slightly different wording.

But I think we can reduce the whole list down to one method And if this isn't the first podcast you've listened to, you know what that method is. Right, It's the patrol method.

Well, what about all the other method? I thought we were supposed to balance everything, right. I thought we had like eight methods that were supposed to balance all equally.

Well, no, No, there's one method out of which all the other methods flow. That is the way that we gain the other results, and that's the patrol method.

It's kind of like I was saying at the beginning: we can take the three aims of scouting and reduce them down to one. We can take all the methods of scouting which, if you want the list, okay, it's: ideals, patrols, outdoor programs, advancement, association with adults, personal growth, leadership development and the uniform. If we take all eight of those, the one method that assures we're going to get all eight of those things is the patrol method, And I guess I could spend a lot of time going over each one of them and explaining exactly what I mean by that.

But I think you get it right. So now I found my one-sentence job description, you know one-sentence mission statement for every scouter everywhere.

Here it is: Are you ready to shape character by applying the patrol method? Ta-da, So you can memorize that My job as a scouter is to shape character by applying the patrol method. It's pretty easy to understand. That's really the starting line and the finish line. The whole McGillow, the whole Bollowax, the one single test of what we are doing.

Can we draw a line back to shaping character using the patrol method? Then that's scouting.

If we can't, it isn't. I know that's a bold statement, isn't it?

But I like bold statements, don't you? No, but I really be curious to hear your reflections on that. And if you are not working with a scout troop, if you're working with a cub pack or a venturing crew, you're working in rovers or weeblows or beavers or any of those types of groups. All those groups work by an age-appropriate application of the patrol method. Don't let the word patrol throw you.

A beaver colony is going to use the patrol method at an age-appropriate level, right? A cub scout den is going to use the patrol method at an age-appropriate level. Rovers are going to use the patrol method at an age-appropriate level as our venturers, as our scouts.

So our job as scouters is to shape character by applying the patrol method. It's that simple, That's the key, And every key that unlocks a door and every simple statement of course, opens into a whole world of other things to study and to understand.

So you know, don't think that we're done once we have that down, But that's the starting line. That's where we begin to open the understanding of this wonderful game called scouting. Your job as a scouter is to develop character by applying the patrol method.

Pretty cool, huh?