Scoutmaster Podcast 36

This is Clark, and I want to take a moment to thank the hundreds of scouters all over the world who sponsor the podcast by being ScoutmasterCGcom backers and patrons. You can join them by going to ScoutmasterCGcom and following the support or be a patron links at the top of the page.

And now to you, Scoutmaster, Here's a little known fact from history. Did you know that King Richard III of England ran a camping equipment store? Yeah, you would have heard about it in Shakespeare.

There was a sign in the window of King Richard's camping store and it read: Now is the winter of our discount tents. Oh boy, Wow, All right, if you know a better one, send it to me. Hey, this is podcast number 36.. Discount: Hey, this is Clarke Green. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast.

Now, just so, I mean, I hope everybody gets the joke at the beginning of the podcast this time: Discount tent: Now is the winter of our discount tents, You know. And there's the famous Shakespeare line: Now is the winter of our discontent. Got a lot of emails on one, that, the one with the penguins paddling through the Sahara Desert. I'm just trying to save a little time, And time is at a premium this week.

Lots of things going on Scout-wise and other, And I apologize, I don't have the time to acknowledge all the emails and comments and various messages through the internets that I have been receiving, But I will get around to them And you know, do be in touch And send me better jokes, Because, wow, I mean really, We do have a few things to talk about this time around In Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less, which is false advertising if there ever was, Especially this week, because I think it ran in more, like 15 minutes. But you understand, don't you?

Well, thank you, I need a little help every once in a while, So we're going to continue with the series about youth leadership and the patrol method. And then I have a brief recommendation for a book that you might like to read. Yeah, a book. Remember those with the pages and everything. They still make them. Yeah, And that'll be about it this time around.

You know, I do want to say thank you to several people who have mentioned that they're appreciative of the time that it takes to make the podcast. It does take a lot of time And it's time that I really don't have this time around, But I sure do appreciate the thought every week And, yeah, it does take a lot of time, It's a lot of fun.

Well, sometimes it's a lot of fun, But no, I appreciate the sentiment very much. I'm glad that you're finding it useful. And, speaking of useful, let's move on.

Yeah, Let's get started, shall we?

Scoutmastership in seven minutes Or less. This is the third in a series of talking about building a strong tradition of youth leadership within your troop and a strong patrol system, And they're one in the same.

You know, both of those things come together. Once you have good, strong youth leadership, you're going to see that the patrol system is going to start to grow.

Well, the first time we got together about this, we talked about reeducating ourselves and our fellow adult leaders as to what we're aiming at and what we really need to do, And that is to get our troop on a solid ground of youth leadership and also to exercise a really robust, functioning patrol system. So that was the first talk.

The second time we were together, we gave an example. We kind of ran through a troop meeting and an outing and gave an example of what this looks like, Just to get a picture in your head about what this looks like.

We talked about how this is going to be kind of messy and difficult, but we want it that way. And then, now that we're convinced, and now we have a picture in our mind of what this looks like, we're going to talk about how to work with your scouts to make this happen.

And the first kind of simple answer is: how are you going to make your scouts buy into this? How are you going to have it happen?

Well, you're going to train them, And our adult role in scouting is mostly training and mentoring our scouts, And it's the most exciting and rewarding part of our job. It really is.

Now we've grown accustomed to looking at training as an event. We have a training weekend, We have a training evening, We send the scouts off to a council training event or a district training event or even a national training event, And I think that the material shared in these- I think it's great. But I question as to whether these things work really well.

I've used the patrol leaders training thing and the troop leader training deal and gone through these as kind of events and programs And I find that we get not so great returns. Here's the reason why: Let's take your average scout, okay, and sit him down and teach him how to tie 20 knots, 20 knots.

So here's his chair and here's my chair and we're sitting down. He has a piece of rope and I have a piece of rope, and then we start.

Well, by the third knot that poor scout is trying to find a way to escape, I mean, unless he's really interested in knots and he's really excited about it. But by the third knot or so he's starting to look at us like we're kind of torturing him and he's trying to find a way out.

By the fifth knot he's already figured that you're really going to try to teach him 20 knots, And so he's kind of defeated And he'll sit there and he'll go through the motions, But he's resigned to sitting there and looking interested. By knot number 10, he'll be able to tell you exactly how many ceiling tiles are in the room that you're sitting in. But he's still trying, man, He's trying to pay attention, He's trying to work with you.

By knot number 18, he's going to be a little re-energized because now he sees the light at the end of the tunnel and he's going to get out. And at knot number 20, he'll bolt for the light and avoid you like the plague for the rest of his born days. If you go back to that scout in a month's time and you sit down and you say, hey, I'd like you to show me the 20 knots I taught you.

Well, after his horrified look, he'll maybe remember the name of five or six of them and he might remember how to tie two or three of them, But the others are just kind of a bad dream. Compare that with showing him how to tie a knot he needs at the very moment.

So he's got to put up a tarp, We're out camping. He's got to put up a tarp And he's got the line in his hand. He's got the tarp And you stop through And in a moment you show him a taut line hitch And he's very appreciative. He says, oh, that's really kind of cool. Show me how to do that.

And you tie the knot And you let him practice it a couple of times And there he is. And so long as we resist the temptation of telling him the history of the taut line hitch and how the particular rope he's using was made, and going on and on and on, You know he's going to get something from that experience.

So my contention is is that scouts will internalize things they find immediately practical. It will become a part of them. When learning and training is divorced from practicality, they're much less interested.

And who could blame them? I mean, really, Why would we want to give away the most interesting, engaging and really gratifying part of our job as leaders to some kind of program or some kind of event? No, Our most gratifying work is done by developing leadership, by mentoring it, And it's not an event, It's not a training event. It is an ongoing process that will start when a boy enters the troop and will end when he ages out. This is an important thing to think about. Look at this training and mentoring as a process.

Interestingly enough, I got a great email from someone who asked the exact questions that we are addressing right now. So you know I have. Basically, his question was: my scouts aren't really motivated to lead.

We go camping and they see other people, like you know, hiking the Appalachian Trail and doing stuff. They see other scout troops doing this and they say, yeah, we'd kind of like to do that, But then, when the rubber meets the road, they kind of sit around their patrol leader's council table and stare at each other and they don't really know what to do. I'm going to say that they are motivated to lead because they see what they would like to do from afar And they have a model of what they'd like to do.

I mean, you see these other guys out on a backpacking trip or something like that, while they're just sitting around playing cards, And so they have a goal. They don't know it, but they have a goal.

Now, once we've gotten ourselves out of the way and we're no longer planning and doing and presenting a program for the scouts, and when they have some kind of a goal or some kind of a vision, they will begin to respond. And what we have to do first of all is spend a little time putting ourselves in their shoes.

I mean, do they have any frame of reference for active, getting things done kind of a troop that we have as our goal? Do they understand anything about making things happen? I've got to tell you, most scout age boys don't have this frame of reference. They tend to be a bit passive as far as leadership goes, a bit reluctant to step into any kind of leadership role, and they're always willing to follow the path of least resistance.

I mean, I can remember being that way, Can you? I mean, and often our frustration lies in that we've told them what to do, we've sent them to training events and they still seem to be relatively clueless. I mean, they just don't pick up the ball and run with it. They need some kind of response to any promising initiative they may show and something to catalyze their interest and to catalyze their leadership skills. Our job, in way of supporting their efforts, is to find that little spark of initiative and fan it with lots of encouragement and direction. Find that asking questions is a pretty good way to catalyze initiative.

These are questions they don't ask themselves simply because they don't know how to ask them. And when we ask questions, instead of telling scouts what to do, we're helping them discover answers.

So, using the example: okay, here's some guys and they see this other troop going off on a backpacking trip and they think, wow, that would be great to do. You can ask them a question.

Well, how do you figure? The other guys put together this backpacking trip? I don't know. I don't know how they did it.

Well, do you want to go hiking right Now? How would you make that happen?

Well, I don't know, Maybe we'd need to get a map or something. Okay, well, that'd be a good start.

Now, where do you figure you can find a map? Well, I don't know, I'm not really sure.

Well, what if I got you a map and we could sit down and look at it and plan a hiking trip? So we start with that little spark of initiative and we try to catalyze it, We try and bring it into flame just by asking some questions and offering some assistance.

So we get the map and we've got a bit going on there, and then we have a planning session, A real simple planning session that lasts for a few minutes, And I mean a few minutes. We don't want to drown them in the 17 steps to planning a hiking trip.

We don't want to get out a PowerPoint presentation and a syllabus and start, you know, beating them over the head with it. We want to move them along by very small degrees and help them discover what to do next.

All right now, at this stage of things, we're doing more leading and we're doing more directing than we ultimately want to when our youth leaders take over in the future. But this is all about assuring the success of their first efforts. We're absolutely taking them by the hand and leading them step by step, We're giving them directions and we're doing a lot more leading than we would ultimately like to do. But if we give them a frame of reference for the job of leadership and show them what it looks like, they're going to accept it and they're going to figure it out. Think about learning to ride a bike. You can't teach someone how to ride a bike with diagrams and classroom instruction.

You have to put their tail in the seat. Then you walk along with them and talk them through the idea of balancing and you remind them to pedal, You show them how the brakes work.

Soon you're, you know, running along with a hand on the bike and soon thereafter you let go. But you're still kind of running along beside them And soon thereafter they're off riding on their own and we step back and let them at it.

So that's the kind of process we're talking about: Degrees of development, Degrees of gaining some expertise in leadership. You know this is a delicate process. Scout age boys are often extremely sensitive to criticism from us and from their peers. They get wounded pretty easily. They are full of bravado that masks a real basic uncertainty that a lot of them have. They add a lot of reassurance and encouragement And that's why it's vital that we put ourselves in their shoes and do our best to see the world from their perspective.

The first successes in this are going to be small. They're on a boy's scale.

Small successes are going to build into larger ones and then things get rolling. Once a group of scouts have shared in some successful attempts at making things happen, they'll develop the confidence and the skills and the vision to carry on.

And then they're going to start passing them on to the younger scouts, So catalyzing their very small, you know, perhaps very dim, perhaps almost non-existent initiative. And, like I say, my favorite way to do that is just to ask some questions and then build on very small successes, Build on, you know, barely positive answers and kind of guide them into this idea of becoming a leader, of having some vision, having some skills. And this is, as I said at the outset, one of the most gratifying things we get to do as scout leaders.

Now, these are broad, underlying concepts. Again, hey, it's our favorite subject, It's our favorite stock and trade here at the Scoutmaster podcast.

You know these are things that we have to think about and consider over and, over and over again. So here's, you know, the four-step program to getting your troop on a solid tradition of youth leadership. One is to understand that this is an education that is happening for adults more than scouts. It's happening for adults more than scouts.

We have to rethink things and we have to make sure our adult leaders are on board and that we're all sharing this goal.

Then we need to understand what this is going to look like. We need to have some picture in our mind of what this is going to look like- And we went through that the last time we were together- And then we want to start building on very small victories.

Then we need to look at this training as an ongoing process. It's never going to stop.

You're going to be, you know, working with guys at different levels of development all the time, But once you've had a good, solid year or so of you know, a good, solid tradition of youth leadership within your troop, it'll begin to perpetuate itself. It's mostly work on our conceptions and the way that we approach things, But it does work. It really does work And I really encourage you to do it Well. I'd love to answer any questions you have around this, Hear your stories, Listen to your suggestions. Email me at ClarkGreen C-L-A-R-K-E-G-R-E-E-N at gmailcom. The sun goes down and with it goes the light.

So I fire up my lantern and put my jacket and thermals on. They keep me from freezing. In a minute I'll be warm inside my sleeping bag. There I'll hide until the light of dawn has come. But here there's no TV, no hum of machines, No sitting too close to computer screens. No, I've got a flashlight and by that I can read And you hear that running water.

Well, that's all that I need. Yeah, every day is like camping for me. Since they shut off my power.

The life of George W Sears is now more than a century away from us. He was born in 1821. And he lived until 1890.. George was a sports writer for Forest and Stream magazine in the 1880s and an early conservationist. He was one of the first people to write about camping and how to go camping and what to do and what not to do, And his pen name is Nesmuk N-E-S-S-M-U-K. He was the eldest of ten children and he was born in Webster, Massachusetts.

He took his pen name from an American Indian who had befriended him in childhood And he was always fascinated with American Indian culture And he had an abiding interest in forest life and adventure. He was a factory laborer while he was still a child And he, at age 12, started working in the commercial fishing fleet out of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. At 19, he signed on for a three-year voyage on a whaler, headed for the South Pacific. It was the same year- actually 1841, that Herman Melville shipped out of the same port, bound for the same whaling grounds.

You remember Herman, don't you? He ended up moving to Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, where he was to live for the rest of his life, And he continued traveling for adventure in the upper Midwest and Ontario and even down to the Amazon in Brazil. He wrote a book that is still in print today. There's not a whole lot of books from the 1880s that are still in print today and are still being sold, But it's one I recommend to you heartily. It's called Woodcraft and Camping And it is a great read still Now. Of course, some of his equipment, ideas and methods and things like that are outdated, But his philosophy on approaching the outdoors is just as solid as the day that he wrote it.

There's a quote from him in Woodcraft and Camping that I think is one that I read about 20 years ago And I've just about committed it to memory and I refer to it every once in a while He says: we do not go to the green woods and crystal waters to rough it, We go to smooth it. You know, we get it rough enough at home. Camping isn't about roughing it. In his eyes, It's about escaping from society and getting off into the woods and getting back into touch with something that's at the basis of our hearts and souls.

I think you'll enjoy reading George W Sears and Woodcraft and Camping. Now. It's easily available on a PDF version And I'll have a link to that on the post for podcast number 36.. But I'll tell you what.

Why don't you do this instead? Why don't you just get a good, old-fashioned copy of the actual book that you can hold in your hands? It's a small book. It doesn't take too long to read. I imagine anybody could sit down and read it in an hour and an hour and a half.

I think it'll give you a chuckle, It'll make you stop and think, And there are still some pretty good ideas about camping in there.