Scoutmaster Podcast 302

I'm Paul Teal and I'm a Scoutmaster with Troop 825 in Houston, Texas. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me. Thank you, Clark, for all you do.

And now for you: Scoutmaster. So here's one for you.

Okay, How many Scouts does it take to start a campfire? Hmm, only two or three, but they are very, very difficult to light.

Hey, this is podcast number 303.. Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Alrighty, let's take a look at the mailbag Heard from James Chaplin about last week's podcast number 302.. Another great podcast for the books. He said.

Thank you so much. I especially like Chris M's Scout Law And if you haven't listened to that, I like that too. That was pretty cool.

You did a great job with it, didn't you? I used that for my Scoutmaster Minute during our last Troop meeting, But before I could use it, I had to research the term he used in law number four. A Scout is Bay. Yeah, that one. I had to look that one up too, James. I found one interpretation of Bay, as before anyone else- B-A-E- And I also found out that it means poop in Danish.

The Scouts love that added footnote in my research. Oh, thanks for getting in touch, James. I'm glad you enjoyed that. Hey, every week I try to have a couple of live chat sessions at scoutmastercgcom. These are usually Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, And if you keep an eye on our Facebook feed or our Twitter feed, I'll announce when we're going to be live and chatting. And we had lots and lots of folks stop in to say hello this past week, including Shane Sherwin, who is a brand new Scoutmaster for Troop 312 in Green River, Wyoming.

So thanks for stopping in, Shane, And congratulations on being a new Scoutmaster. Hey, if you're a regular reader and listener and the resources we've created have helped you, here's how you can help return the favor. You can support the podcast by becoming a scoutmastercgcom backer, and that involves just a one-time thing. Or you can make a subscription payment through Patreon by pledging $5 or more a month. There are special premiums available to anyone who becomes a patron through Patreon or becomes a backer at scoutmastercgcom.

So to become a backer, go to scoutmastercgcom, click the support link at the top of the page and you'll find a number of options that will make you a backer. And I want to take a moment this week to personally thank Chris Dietz, Tim Sherrill, Larry Hansen, Jeff Shoppe, Mary Ann Crumb and John Beattie, who've all became backers since our last podcast. If you're interested in becoming a patron, click the link to my Patreon page in the podcast notes or go directly to wwwpatreoncom backslash scoutmastercg. One more time: patreoncom- backslash scoutmastercg.

And I want to take a moment to thank Frank Vincent-Harnley, Ed Bruce, Mike Marty, TJ Farrell, Chris Small, John Clements and Michael Dormer, who've all become patrons since last week's podcast. Well, we're doing pretty good so far on the idea of sharing stories that I can play on the podcast. Check the podcast notes and that'll give you a link to how to share your story with me, and I've got a new one to share with you this week And I've also got an email question to answer and that's going to take up the remainder of the podcast.

So let's get started, shall we?

So here's an aha moment. It's an aha moment for one of our scouts and for one of our scouters. These are great moments and I know you've had a few of them and I hope you have many, many more.

Here's a friend of the blog and the podcast, Mike Marty Hey Clark. This is Mike Marty, with Troop 4318 in Adamtown, Pennsylvania, and I would like to share a scouting story with you. This week, my SPL came to me asking me how he could better connect with one of the younger scouts in our troop. At first I thought the SPL was simply complaining, because all of the things he was talking about were negatives On how the boy can't sit still to save his life, on how he rarely focuses and on how he often interrupts other scouts when they're trying to complete tasks. The longer I listened to my SPL, though, the more I realized that he was truly being sincere. He was trying to figure out a way to connect with the scout.

When I mentioned to the SPL that this scout is 11 years old and he's autistic, the SPL immediately fired back at me. But we have other autistic boys in the troop. My boys are autistic, But then I asked my SPL to consider: every one of our autistic boys is unique. He comes to us with his own gifts, his own opportunities and his own challenges. Give me three things that you like about this scout. Immediately, my SPL fired back Again.

He likes to camp- He's always the first one there- and asked to go camping more often. He loves to hike and he loves to play games.

So then I asked the SPL: where in there do you find commonality? And then the SPL said, hey, I like to play games too.

And then all of a sudden, a light clicked off in his head And I said: yeah, I said that's the place that you want to meet him. It's truly inspiring to see these young men grow up. My SPL has been in the troop for the last six years and he has truly overcome some of his own challenges to turn into a fine young scout. But the thing that admires me the most about him is his sincerity when given the opportunity to really try to fix a problem on his own. Thank you for what you do, Clark, and for helping me become a better leader. You can send me your story too.

It's not hard to do. There's a link in the podcast notes that'll help you make that happen. Write me a letter. Send it by name Email. That is folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails. Andy Davis is the Scoutmaster of Troop 43, and he wrote to ask me this question: Our troop is preparing to grow from 18 to 28 scouts in the next couple of weeks.

Well, that's a pretty good problem to have. The dilemma is, we're not too sure how we should handle the 10 new scouts joining.

Should we split them into separate new scout patrols or keep them as one unit until they've been in the troop for about four to six months? If their participation level is low, it would seem one patrol would make more sense. However, if participation is high, having two patrols might be a better option. Of course, with two patrols we'd also need an additional new scout patrol, assistant Scoutmaster and troop guide.

What wisdom or best practice can you provide that may help us weigh our decision? Again, much appreciation for all the fantastic advice and commentary you bring to the scouting community.

Well, thank you, Andy, for your kind words. This is a pretty common question I get in one form or another, And my general advice when it comes to thinking about patrols has two basic points.

Number one: what you think and what I think and what most scouts think is important about patrols isn't. So to begin with, try forgetting everything you know about patrols. No troop guides, no patrol assistant Scoutmasters- These things are pretty meaningless to the scouts who are going to be in the patrol. The second bit of advice is get your patrol leaders counsel together and ask what they'd like to see happen and how they'd like to arrange things with these 10 new scouts. No preconceived. This is the way we've always done it.

Ask them some questions. They get them thinking about this and have them come up with a strategy.

Ask what a patrol is, why we have patrols and what they see as being the best way to handle the current situation. What are they going to ask the new scouts? That will help them decide what to do.

What's interesting here is a very basic principle that I think applies to just about everything we do in scouting, And that's the difference between leveraging those kind of natural things that scouting is based on or setting them up artificially. One of the more interesting experiences that really taught me a lot about that was attending a national jamboree, And this was ages ago. People really love those big events.

It's not really something that I'm all that into, But it taught me a couple of things that I think were important, Because when you talk about putting together a jamboree troop, it's a totally artificial construct. The adult volunteers are selected according to whatever criteria they're selected, The scouts are apportioned off into jamboree troops in whatever way that that happens, And then it's left up to the adults to try and establish those scouts into patrols And my experience with that was really problematic.

We did our best to try. We went on a couple of shakedown campouts and we got to kind of look at what these guys were doing And I remember lots and lots of papers.

I remember forms filled out by the scouters who were in the scouts home unit. We were supposed to use that information in our observations during the couple of shakedown campouts to set up patrols into appoint patrol leaders.

We had four patrols in our jamboree troop And I think probably one of them kind of functioned. The other three were always a bit of a mess- And I'm all about being a bit of a mess and things like that, But they were a bit of a mess for the wrong reasons. They were a bit of a mess because you had eight scouts in those patrols who were assigned to those patrols in a very artificial way. Right, It was probably the best way that it could have happened, for given the circumstances It was still very artificial.

They never really clicked And they never really got along very well for the first two-thirds of the entire jamboree experience. And that was because we had this kind of artificial setup where the adults knew better And we were going to make all those decisions, And we were going to make all the decisions about this and set everything up that way. It just proved not to be a very good idea, And that'll prove out in your own unit too. You don't want to look at the paperwork and do an artificial construct on things, Because the real secret is is that you don't really have to make patrols at all. The scouts are making patrols for themselves. You don't have to game their lineup.

They have their friendships. And if you look at this from the perspective of your new scout- the new scouts that we're talking about here- they have one thing on their minds and that's the only thing that's actually important to them: they want to be in a patrol with their friends, Because scouting is all about getting to go camping and do cool stuff with your friends. That's what the whole thing is when you're 10 and a half or 11 years old.

Now, if you decide that you're smarter than them and you're going to make up their patrols, you will learn. You'll learn that scouts generally ignore your decisions and gravitate towards spending time with their friends anyway, And what's kind of frustrating about that is that newer scouts might sit down and figure we'll make up our patrols and we'll figure all this out.

And then they see that they've figured all this out and the scouts kind of ignore the fact that they're in a given patrol and they just hang out with their friends anyway every chance that they get during a meeting or during a camp out. And so we figure, oh, this patrol thing doesn't work because the scouts just aren't interested in them, because they just ignore them. If you go back and you look at the way scouting began and the way it was set up, they- and Powell- leveraged the idea that young people typically choose their own little group And that gang was really the basis of the way that they would form their opinions, how they were going to cooperate and act and built their character.

And you know, some gangs can be very negative in that respect and some can be very positive in that respect. And he knew that scouting could leverage that very powerful desire for association in young people and give it a very positive outcome. That's a very long answer to a relatively simple question. But because this particular aspect of scouting is, as Baden Powell said, the single thing that sets it apart from everything else, that's the patrol method. It really does behoove us to talk about it a little bit and to make sure that we understand what it is. I've been going on for quite a bit here, but let me review.

The idea of patrols is based on the natural associations that scouts have. Based on that natural gang that young people form. A wise scouter is going to observe what those associations are and make sure that those are reflected in the patrols in their unit. And they're going to do that not themselves by sitting there and apportioning it out on a piece of paper themselves.

No, they're going to do that through the youth leadership involved and by engaging them in a process of thinking about: well, why do we have patrols in the first place? What sense is there to having patrols?

So if we understand that, then we understand how we ought to be thinking about: who goes in what patrol and how those patrols function. Thanks for that question, Andy. If you have a question for me, you can get in touch and it's pretty simple to do, And I'm going to tell you how to do that in just a moment.