Scoutmaster Podcast 348

Hi, I'm Steve Micah and I'm a Cubmaster with PAC 43 in Appalachia, New York. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me. Thanks, Clark.

And now see you, Scoutmaster. This is interesting. This just came on the wire from the Scouting Science Center in Zern, Switzerland, where they have the Large Baden Collider. This is just a study about the Tutankhamen effect. I don't know if you're familiar with it or not. The Tutankhamen effect states that people sleeping in a mummy bag experience urinary urgency.

Yes, that's what I said. They experience this urgency in inverse proportion to the temperature and the degree of difficulty in operating the bags. Zipper up. Sounds about right.

Hey, this is podcast number 348.. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green.

For one reason or another, the first thing we do is look in the mailbag. So let's take a look. Oh yes, There we are. There's virtual mail in the virtual mailbag. We heard from Matt Weiss, who's an assistant Scoutmaster of Troop 38 in New Berlin, Wisconsin, who shared a really interesting idea with me. One really great conservation service project you can do is to go out and clear an area of invasive species of plants.

He said, instead of announcing to our Cub Scouts that we were going to go out and clear garlic mustard, which is an invasive. We announced that we were going to protect our parks from an alien invasion and made posters with scary aliens. I like that idea. Thanks, Matt. Last week's podcast: we talked about Scouting's iterative process and Bruce commented over on Facebook. Great podcast this week.

I hope all of my program adults listen to it. I hope so too, Bruce. I heard from Laura Murkut, who is with Troop 139 in Sherman Oaks, California, who got in touch to say I would like permission to print and use the how to build campfire info graphic for our Scouts to use. And Laura absolutely do that And I really appreciate you asking.

But anyone who's listening, I am just so pleased when people find whatever I'm doing useful and they want to use it to advance the cause of Scouting. They want to share it with their Scouts, their parents, their families, their district, whatever. It's all good, Please do. There's just two caveats to this. One is is that you let people know where you found the information And second, of course, is the sharing is in a non-commercial context. That's all.

Otherwise, share away. Well, last Tuesday we had a live chat session and we will most likely have one this Tuesday, unless I have a summons for jury duty And I will know if I have to report for it until later on today.

But usually what we do is we have a live chat session over at ScoutMasterCGcom, Usually Tuesday mornings around 8 am Eastern Standard Time. Come and check in and say hello, Like Adam Roth, who is a Cub Master with PAC 423, and Steve Majka, who's a Cub Master and Weeblows Den Leader in the Baden Powell Council in upstate New York did. Both Steve and Adam checked in last week for the first time And I may have missed a couple of people there. Boy, we had a crowd on last week. Live chat Tuesday mornings around 8 am. If I'm not on jury duty tomorrow, come to ScoutMasterCGcom, Sign in, join us.

We talk about serious stuff and not so serious stuff. You know how it goes.

Before I go any further, I want to pause here to thank all the folks who make ScoutMasterCGcom possible. There's two ways to do this. You can be a backer or you can be a subscriber through Patreon.

If you go to ScoutMasterCGcom- just about any page on the website- look up on the right-hand top and you'll see links on how to make this happen, how to become a backer or a patron, But I want to thank Timothy Haberman and James Casper, who both have added their names to the list of ScoutMasterCGcom backers since our last podcast, And thanks to everyone who supports the blog and the podcast through Patreon, including Walter Scott Sweitzer, who became a patron subscriber since our last podcast. If you're interested in supporting what we're doing here, go ahead this week, figure out which option is going to work best for you And I will thank you personally during next week's podcast.

Well, let's see, I think we got everything taken care of there And I have some email questions to answer. So let's get started, shall we? I know, deep down, you can't, I cannot help but wonder why you do the things you do. I hope you will remember that it's our plight to do cause. I am a Sasquatch and I live among the trees and I am proud to be a Sasquatch. I live in peace and harmony, in harmony, in harmony.

Email, that is, folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails. Okay, I have one, two, three email questions to answer this week and, because of the extraordinary sensitivity of the subject matter, each will remain anonymous. Here is the first one. Our Scoutmaster says it's his job to decide who goes to national youth leadership training each year from the troop and which of the training courses they should go to. Our committee says they decide who goes and where they can go, since they're the ones that cover the costs for the scouts attending.

Do you know of any official materials that can help us figure out who decides who goes to the training, where they go and who pays? Well, probably not going to be able to help you find anything that specific in policy, but we can certainly talk about some generalities that may help inform the situation And just to broaden the scope of the whole thing.

You know, when decisions like this devolve into a turf battle between adults, it indicates that something's kind of out of whack in their basic understanding and attitudes. We're not commanding officers or bosses and scouts aren't soldiers or employees that we order around.

So if a scout wants to go to national youth leadership training and they come to me and they say, hey, yeah, I want to do this training, I would say, well, more power to you. Do you know where you're going? And everything like that.

Yep, Yep, Okay, Great, Go for it, And I suppose I could recommend a course. It's really none of my business, And if you were fortunate enough to be in an area that had several choices of courses, locations and times, and they asked me to recommend one.

I suppose I could, And whether or not they took my recommendation on that is totally up to them, and their parents doesn't really make a difference to me Now, because the troop is paying for the course. It would seem to me, in the event of difference of opinion the committee would take precedence over the Scoutmaster, because that's just the way troops are ran. Just the committee chair can appoint or remove a Scoutmaster as they see fit, with the consent of the chartered organization representative.

So if we want to have a turf war, the committee chair is going to win. Let's not have a turf war, because turf war always result in a negative effect on scouts and on the program as a whole. Boy, it just saps everybody's energy right away from them.

So resolving this particular question probably goes a little deeper than who's in charge or who gets to decide what. I think there's just like a basic misunderstanding of what scouting is about. I'm not really interested in that level of control, to tell you the truth.

So this second email begins this way: My son was a Cub Scout. I helped as a den leader and I followed him into the Boy Scout troop and became an assistant Scoutmaster. My son's moving along. He's earned first class. After a couple of years I didn't realize how much I had missed scouting.

I was a scout myself and I think I'll likely stay on doing this work. I would even say that I would stay on with this troop after he ages out. That's how much I enjoy being a volunteer.

We're a small troop right now, but we're growing. And here's my question: As much as my son and I enjoy it, our troop is as disorganized as one can be. The Scoutmaster and his assistants have been around for a couple of decades, yet they seem to do everything by the seat of their pants. The adults do create an annual schedule, but many times the locations of the trips aren't finalized as late as a week or two before the trip, and this kind of thing drives me crazy. The troop is definitely not youth led and I really didn't realize this until I went to training to be an assistant Scoutmaster. The Scoutmaster makes all the patrols, assigns the patrol leaders and even created the patrol names.

The scouts are young, so there's no senior patrol leader. I suspect the Scoutmaster would probably choose who was senior patrol leader if we did have one. Make no mistake, the Scoutmaster and the other scouters involved with the troop are good men. They're easy to get along with, They care for the scouts. They just prefer to lead the troop themselves. I've suggested changes before.

They seem to be willing to listen, but I sense they're not willing to actually implement any significant changes. We anticipate a large group of Webelos joining soon, so I'm interested in at least discussing changes that would be more faithful to the patrol method.

How do you think I should approach the Scoutmaster with this, since it would be a significant change? If they sounded agreeable, what would we do next? I've listened to several podcasts about this, but they're more conceptual than directive. I was hoping for more detail, Kind of like an order of events.

Well, first, I'm glad you're finding the podcast useful and I'm glad you got in touch with me, because what's happened to you has happened to a lot of assistant Scoutmasters who've sent me similar questions. You've run across this guy online who has a podcast and a particular vision of scouting that doesn't correspond to what you see in your troop and you want to change things around.

So my standard advice when I get a question like this is I usually tell people to find another troop that more closely corresponds to what they'd like to have for their son. But that doesn't seem to be an option here, and I understand.

My second piece of advice- I don't think is an option here either, which is, you know, start a troop. If you can't find a troop that isn't operating the way that you think it ought to operate, well, look into starting one, and that's never really a very popular option.

So if neither of these things appeal to you, the next thing I have to do is ask you why you want to change things Now. There's no indication that any young people are actually being harmed by the adults involved, no undercurrent of general dissatisfaction or, and perhaps more importantly, a shared notion that things need changing.

Now you'd note that things aren't quite as organized as you like, and I gotta tell you that's not unusual. Besides, if you change things around, you'll be trading one form of frustrating disorganization for another. There is no such thing as frustration.

Free scouting- You may quote me So from what you've told me about your, the troop and your experiences- is: the troop is having regular meetings, they're going camping and scouts are advancing, so it's functioning and serving the interests of scouts at least in some measure correct. Obviously, if an adult does all the leading, it denies a number of opportunities to the scouts.

But you know this is far more common than youth led troops, at least in my experience. While the adult led model is not optimal, it does not do objective harm, It just denies scouts are more expansive and I guess some would say authentic scouting experience.

I guess if I wanted to be really hard-nosed I would say that you know, without the patrol method in operating it's not really scouting. But the real heart of the matter here is the single most important issue is, as an assistant Scoutmaster, you're not in a position to lead a series of changes and I'm going to emphasize that. I'm going to repeat it: as an assistant Scoutmaster, you're really not in a position to implement a series of changes. You've come into this, you've looked at it, you go: I'm not really satisfied with the way things are going.

I want to change everything around. Well, that's kind of like saying: give me the wheel, I want to drive the car when you're in the backseat, Since I'm talking with somebody who's working within the BSA. The way the BSA defines things is the troops committee chair is more or less the decision maker and director, but in reality, most of the- a lot of the times, the Scoutmaster has pretty broad authority, makes all the decisions and the committee chair is more in the background.

So the Scoutmaster is usually going to be the person who decides whether they're going to make changes or not. And absent a shared notion that change is needed and a shared vision of what the changes ought to be, I don't see a whole lot of potential for change in this or any other situation. But nevertheless, nothing ventured, nothing gained right, go ahead, make some suggestions, have a discussion with the Scoutmaster, see what kind of, see what kind of headway you can make. I don't understand any of the personal dynamics involved and I can't really effectively advise you on how those suggestions should be made. But if, but, if the Scoutmaster is a receptive person and they're easy to get along with.

You know, if I were just doing it myself, I'd probably just tell him what I was thinking. I'm not a particularly subtle person. That's the way I would handle it.

I would just say: you know, I went to training. They talk about this patrol method. I'd like to discuss that with you and I wonder if you've ever thought about making some changes to bring things more in line with the patrol method.

So the only other open issue is: okay, so let's say that you go to the Scoutmaster or the committee chair or whoever and you make some suggestions about changes and they say, yeah, great, let's do that. What do you do next?

And I'm often asked what kind of you know concrete steps you should take to change from being adult led to being youth led, and I don't know. I've never really been able to come up with a step-by-step list, although I've tried. But of course, the crucial first thing that would have to happen is all the adults involved have to be on the same page. They have to agree what this is going to look like. After that, there's really no secret formula. You talk to your scouts, you tell them what the changes are going to be, you stop doing things one way and you start doing things another way, and scouts are reasonably flexible with this kind of thing.

But you know you're going to go through a longish period of transition before you get to the point where you have exchanged one set of frustrations for another one- and you know I do get this kind of question on a fairly regular basis. I am in a troop. I'm not happy with the way it's going. I would like to change things to the way you say they should be going, because you sound very smart. If you're not in a position in the organizational structure of a troop to implement changes like this, suggesting them to those that are in those positions is one way to go. But you have to realize you could just end up being very frustrated about the whole thing because your suggestions may fall on deaf ears.

That's why I say: you know, either find a troop that corresponds more closely to the way you think things ought to be done or start one yourself, because the chance your frustrations are going to go away because of some suggestions that you make, I don't know- doesn't seem to be like a high probability strategy to me. So this last email answer is actually an answer to an email question, but there's no real reason to read the whole email.

Here's the story I heard from a Scoutmaster who said that they were kind of frustrated. They're relatively new to the work and they were encountering the usual things that we encounter: parents who were perhaps used to being a little over involved in things, a troop that wasn't functioning as he wanted.

You know the the kind of thing that we pretty much live with all the time. They sent me a very long email.

They had written to the troops families, kind of laying things out in a once for all kind of fashion, making some big statements, and- and you know what I mean. Right, the most of us have written, have written that email at least once before. They wanted me to review the email, comment on how it could be improved.

And here is the way that I replied. Since you asked, I'm going to be very plain and direct. Don't mistake this for criticism. It's because it's intended in the best spirit possible. I would never suggest sending an email like this. It has much more potential for harm than good.

So whoever's on your side in these issues will look it over and soon forget what you've said. The opposition will find plenty of leverage to argue about what you've written. They'll reread and dissect it and discuss it amongst themselves, and the neutral faction will not read it very much at all. They may scan it a little bit and you're going to find that all three of those reactions, rather than helping you sort out, your frustrations are just going to be more frustrating.

So look, in my experience, parents do not read things like this. They don't really read things like you know- a troop policy manual- if you have one and you don't really want to have one- they don't really read much of anything in order to attempt to understand what is going on. That's not necessarily a criticism, that's just an observation based on my experience.

A lot of times parents are not all that interested in delving down into the specifics of stuff like that, but when something happens that challenges what they assume ought to happen, that's when they start to get vocal and then you explain why you're doing what you're doing and you have to deal with these issues over and over and over again individually, one parent at a time, because often husbands and wives don't even end up discussing what you have told one or another. So this never goes away. It's a feature of our work. It's not a flaw that can be fixed by writing email or putting out a troop policy manual or having extensive introductory meetings. This is just one of the costs of doing business as a scouter. This never goes away, never, ever.

Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't make sure to offer information to families so that they can understand things. All I'm saying is I wouldn't look at the offer of that information as a high percentage solution to solving your frustrations.

Now, if you do want some advice on how to get things more energized and rolling in a better direction, I'll repeat what I said in an earlier email answer. The way troops are constituted in the in the BSA, the committee chair is the central decision maker bound to carry out the policies and procedures of the BSA that shape the program. This is not a democratic process. It's not subject to the opinion of parents or other volunteers, and I would never introduce the idea that it is. We don't sit down and litigate the elements of the program. They're presented to us.

We carry them out. And I'm not saying that scouting is autocratic because it is a team sport. It's just, like Baden Powell said, a jolly game, right, and that depends on family scouts and scouts working together in a collaborative process. When people understand their roles in that process or their positions on the team that plays this jolly game, then things get energized.

So if I were in your shoes and I felt like things weren't going quite according to plan and I was frustrated. I would sit down with my committee chair and assure that you both have each other's unquestioning support and shared understanding of how things move forward.

If you can't achieve this kind of understanding, well, reconsider. If this is a group of people you want to continue to work with, if you can arrive at a good working agreement with your committee chair, then move on. When someone challenges what you're doing, tell them the basis of your actions, ask them to follow your lead. You and the committee chair are the leader of the other adult volunteers. They take direction from you, not the other way around.

So when there's a decision to be made, they're looking for your leadership. Although it is a collaborative process, although we do our best to seek consensus, there has to be people who make decisions and who are leading the other adult volunteers.

So the author of that email got back to me and said: I value your honesty and straightforward advice. I'm going to start writing letters like this more often and keep them to myself. It was very cathartic and it helped me sort out my thoughts and frustrations.

Well, I would encourage everyone to do that. Write as much as you want about why you're doing what you're doing and the frustrations that you encounter. Write them as a letter to yourself that no one will ever see.

It is a useful cathartic as well as a way to refine your approach and to deal with the common frustrations that we all deal with. I started doing that a long, long time ago and then I started the blog, and the rest is history, I suppose, is what they say right. This scouter was dealing with frustrations he was having with parents, misunderstanding or being a little over involved in what was going on.

So now this is going to sound kind of cranky, but I think it's reasonably accurate. 95% of the problems we encounter as scouts are going to originate with our scouts families, their parents specifically, the 5% of the problems that we have that originate with scouts are usually exacerbated by the involvement of their parents. Scouts themselves are not all that hard to work with. Usually you can solve things with scouts, but parents it's a little more difficult.

Now, just in case that sounds bitter or cynical, I want to explain that it isn't. It's just the reality of working with young people. It's been that way since the whole thing started. It will continue to be that way for the foreseeable future. You can go back as far as you want in scouting literature anywhere at any time, and you're going to find that people encounter these same frustrations. The world isn't going to hell in a handbasket.

There's not been this massive sea change about the attitudes that parents have when it comes to volunteers who are dealing with their children. This is just the way things have been and the way that they will continue to be. It's an important part of your work as a scouter.

The real problem seems to be we don't prepare our volunteers to work with families as well as we prepare them to work with scouts. You know we do a pretty good job of familiarizing people with the policies and procedures of the organization, the important points of the goals and the methods of scouting and a lot of logistical information, but we usually leave the development of the soft skills that are needed to deal with the frustrations that you're going to have in dealing with scouts families. We kind of leave that up to you.

So i want to hear about your general or specific challenges when it comes to working with scouts, families and parents, what you've learned or what you need help with, and you can get in touch with me. It's very easy to do and i'm going to tell you how to do that in just a moment.