Scoutmaster Podcast 369

And now to you, Scoutmaster. I better start with a warning. Those of you who've listened to the podcast for a long time will recognize the name: Bill McFarland. He's the Scoutmaster of Troop 8 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Bill sent me a joke, So that's the warning. And if you haven't listened long enough to understand why a warning is necessary about this, you will understand in just a minute. Here it is for what it's worth. You can't run through a campsite. You can only run through a campsite.

Okay, You can't run. You can only run because of course it's past tense. Bill McFarland, I can forward emails to him.

Oh no, seriously, thank you, Bill, I think.

Hey, this is podcast number 369.. Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast.

This is Clarke Green and we had a spring break last week without the benefit of any, you know, contiguous stretch of spring weather, unless two or three hours is what works for you. It's been an odd spring.

I think I've said that just about every spring. So I'll be right back.

I think I've said that just about every spring. So well, last podcast we came to the end of our fundamentals series.

I think it went for six, maybe seven podcasts And over that time I've been answering your emails and I'm going to share some of those answers with you. Today I heard from Jennifer Wente from Troop 31 in Springfield, Illinois, who said I wonder if we should look at the program as much as we do and start looking more at our Scouts. If we try to get all the answers from the program, we may be missing the true best interests of our Scouts. That's a great observation, Jennifer, and I agree with you.

Remember what the program exists for: for the interest of the individual Scout, right? It's not the other way around. The Scouts aren't there to support the program.

Now I'll tell you this: When you start listening to your Scouts and their interests, you will ultimately find that it does correspond to the heart of the program. Maybe not all the window dressing that is involved in the program, but the heart of it is really what they're looking for. I do want to take the opportunity to say thank you to everybody who has signed on as a ScoutmasterCGcom backer and who continues as a patron through Patreon. Your support is very, very valuable and the real value in it is knowing that you're there and that you derive some good from what we've been doing. Over many months.

The podcast schedule's been a little erratic and you know what? I'm a little erratic and things will probably continue to be that way, as I am pursuing some projects and other work that really is not scouting related. But I am fully intent on soldiering on and keeping together with the podcast and the blog, Although I haven't been dedicating as much time to either as I have in the past. Stick with me, We'll keep going and hopefully I'll be able to present content that is valuable to you And speaking of which I did promise we had some email questions to answer.

So let's get started, shall we, Music? Write me a letter, Send it by name Email, that is, folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails: Music. So I have a couple of messages from Buss Price, who's the Scoutmaster of Troop 349 in Verona, Wisconsin. First one has to do with planning, And Buss writes. I just listened to your podcast on leadership, which I could have listened to this. Three years ago, We went through the blank stares stages of event planning for multiple cycles, Even ended up with plans that didn't really work- canoe trips on the calendar during cold months, for example.

Finally, someone- it was probably you in one of your podcasts- pointed out that we had fewer choices when we were youth. So we ended up creating a framework for the Scouts to plan their events- Big events listed by categories such as canoeing, hiking, biking, camping, spelunking. Each of those areas had two or three choices of location and some target months of when the weather would best work out for them. This framework made our annual planning conference enjoyable.

Well, Buss, I think what happened somewhere along the way was someone decided they would try to apply an administrative fix to the long-standing problem. Many Scout Troops have a poor record of camping and really go back as far as you want in Scouting Literature and you'll find this is a perennial problem. There are a lot of Troops that, for whatever reason, don't end up getting out camping very much.

So my guess is that the whole idea of an annual planning conference was seen as one way to encourage troops to actually set a calendar and make plans and long-range plans to get out and go camping. Now, if adults sit down and they make those plans, well you know the Scouts may find that they're interested in those activities or not.

So including youth leadership into the plan and getting them to buy in and to create as much of the plan as possible is important, not only because they would buy in to the ideas that they came up with. But that's a good process for them to go through.

So making the choices that come out of an annual planning conference democratic, that's kind of a next step type of thing. Right, If we're going to have this conference and the Scouts are supposed to have a part in it, well, we'll make it a democratic thing. Everybody will vote on what we're going to do.

So, with all of those elements combined, now we have what we call the annual planning conference. It's a highly touted thing. It's something that is kind of like an expectation that's baked into the BSA program. But I'll tell you this: I stopped doing annual planning conferences in that way a long time ago. Now. When you hear that, it may sound like that running its counter to my general thing about having real responsibility and being able to make real decisions and that.

But what we've done, I fear, is we've set way too high a premium on planning. I hear about this sort of thing on a regular basis.

You know, planning conferences are hard because the Scouts don't come up with ideas and they're very reluctant to do that, And then when they're given the ability to do that, yeah, they're not real excited about it and it takes them a long time And they come up with poor plans that we don't like very much. So how do you work your way through all of this?

Well, first of all, put the whole idea of the annual planning conference aside for a moment. You know we still have an annual meeting where we sit down and we look at our plans for the coming year. It's just that we don't necessarily have to invent a 12-month calendar at that meeting. If you were following along in recent past podcasts we presented the allegory of scouting as a game, and it's a pretty good allegory. It breaks down in some places, But if you think about it in those lines of logic, we play a specific game on a specific field of play. That means there's not an endless number of choices to make when we are planning our year.

A basketball team doesn't get together for an annual planning conference to say, well, we're going to play these three games on a basketball court and those two will play on a football field. These three games we will play on a basketball court, but using the rules of baseball. You understand what I'm saying. There is a frame of reference for scouting, in the same way that there's a frame of reference for a sports team.

So if you want to avoid getting kind of wrapped around your own axle about this whole annual planning conundrum and the whole idea of a patrol leader's council sitting down and planning, remember that most of the plans are taken care of already. Because what do we do?

We go camping, and just going camping is more important than the location and the activity. Just going camping is more important than the location and the activity.

If you have a basketball team that never plays a game, why? Or if you just want to cherry pick the best games out of your season, No, you have to keep playing the game for this whole thing to work.

So go out camping as frequently as possible. Not every single camping trip is going to be a whiz bang. I'm having the best time of my life experience in the same way that a basketball game. Some are great, very energizing, Some are not, And some just are terrible. Right, But you're playing the game. My scouts typically chose the same thing over and over and over again From year to year.

Different sets of scouts, 15, 20 years apart, would choose the same activities. And that was fine with me because, even though I might be bored to tears after going to exactly the same camping spot for the 15th, the 20th, the 30th time. It was all new to them And we didn't have to go to all these hero locations Going 45 minutes up the road to the county park.

It's a great spot, But what was most important is we were playing the game. So I said I had a couple of messages from Bus, and the second one has to do with patrols, And Bus said this: I've been having some issues with patrols over the last three years. We formed patrols by having each scout list two or three scouts they wanted in their patrol and this worked well. We had two years where we didn't end up recruiting many scouts and the patrols got smaller- Not enough scouts- and a patrol went camping to operate as a patrol.

We tried your method of shuffling patrols each quarter and that took care of the issue for camping, because the new problem during meetings we have three or four older scouts migrate to their friends during the meeting and that kind of breaks up the whole patrol idea. So let me ask you, how do you deal with the few scouts who just won't operate in a patrol? They tend to focus on their own needs and not on the needs of their patrol.

I think probably what most of us want is the idealized patrol that you would find in the 1940s era patrol leader's handbook. I still have the dog-eared copy of that book I had as a kid and it's illustrated with line drawings and cartoons of a bunch of cheery fellows doing things in an orderly fashion, and it depicts an idealized patrol.

That never was, and I chased that idealized patrol for a long time and I may have seen glimpses of it now and then, but I never attained the patrol that I saw in that book. Ultimately, what I concluded is this: It's important to have vision, It's important to have an idealized goal, but that idealized goal can drive you crazy.

If you're chasing something that never actually existed, You know it's great, You have to aim at something right, So you might as well aim at the best iteration possible, but that's never actually existed, Maybe for a couple of months, maybe for a camping trip. And the other thing that I think it's important to realize is something I talked about in a recent podcast, where I draw a difference between the patrol system- the way that patrols are defined in the literature- and the patrol method, which is just making sure that our scouts are together in patrols, reaping the benefits of character development that comes out of being in a patrol. And that patrol system, the way that it's presented, is embedded with things that are based on conditions that may have once existed but they're not necessarily viable anymore. Back to the issue.

We have patrols. They get too small if we don't recruit enough scouts.

So we tried the quarterly reshuffle idea and that works fine, except for we have a few older scouts. They're only interested in doing their thing and they only want to hang out together.

If that's who they want to hang out with, Let's just put them in the same patrol then, and put them in the same patrol, And I know that the answer I would get back is something along the lines of: no, we need the older guys in, with the younger guys in patrols. Well, it's not working. Some of this is a structural problem. We create a real problem with older scouts by letting them remain in a scout troop until they reach 18 and not really significantly changing their status since they joined when they were 11.. In most of the rest of the world, you must leave a scout troop by age 14 and move on to the next age division, which is Ventures.

And if you think about this, what happens when you turn 14?? Well, usually you leave intermediate or middle school and you move up to the high school.

Why did we decide that this was a good idea in the school system? Well, there's some significant differences about you between the ages of 14 to 18 than children who are 11 to 13..

Now, for whatever reason where we don't end up having an official recognition of that difference, I work my way through that by creating one. We have a Venture crew- and I'm not going to go into all the why's and wherefor's and how this works from a paperwork standpoint. And when you reach the age of 14 or enter high school, whichever comes first, you're a member of the Venture crew. It's a change in status that the older scouts appreciate.

Now, to complicate things further and to confuse you further, if you're in the Venture crew, you might end up in a patrol. It all depends. If that's what you want to do, that's fine. If you want to be in the Venture crew, which actually functions as a patrol within the troop, that's fine too. But I'm not going to take all of the scouts who are 14 and up and scatter them through patrols, because that seems like a great administrative idea, because it doesn't work, because what will happen is exactly what's happening. They will matriculate, They will find each other in every situation and they will hang out together because that's what they want.

Well, my gosh, how do the patrols of younger scouts function? They function fine, And there are plenty of older scouts in the Venture crew who are perfectly happy to help them over whatever obstacle they need to get over at a given time. They're perfectly willing to help them on a camp out. They're perfectly willing to help them with anything.

As long as they don't have to be stuck in that patrol, they're fine, And there's always a few scouts who are very happy to be members of that younger scout patrol. So there are ways, and there are ways here, And what really works is when you observe the scouts that are there with you and see how it's going to work for them and use the patrol method rather than trying to adhere to the systemic approach. It can often be kind of messy and chaotic. The rate of change and the way things get reshuffled may not be optimal in your mind, But what's really important is that scouts are obtaining the benefit of being a member of a patrol. That's really all that you need to worry about.

Heard from Rob Kerrigan with Troop 1 in Portland Maine, who said, as always, I'm enjoying the podcasts- Things have been going well with Troop 1.. The new Scoutmaster and I were brainstorming And we were thinking we should present to the Patrol Leaders Council the idea that patrols can have their own camping weekends, separate from everybody else, And we would further suggest that we would give each of the three patrols we have the choice of four predetermined camping places And we would give them a predetermined list of activities they could participate in.

And so I'm writing to ask if you think it's a good idea for adults to establish that kind of framework or it undermines the idea of youth leadership. Well, Rob, I think I understand what you'd like to see and the method you suggest is not in and of itself a bad idea. It may even work.

Your question, Rob, is complimentary to Bessa's question about patrols, because I sometimes wonder, looking at my Troop, if we have any patrols at all other than mealtimes and some isolated activities. I mean, when I encourage, when I have attempted to encourage patrol spirit in a traditional way, trying to heighten the separation between patrols, my scouts kind of look at me and wonder what I'm saying. I like to call it the dog with a new pan. Look, They just have no idea what I'm trying to achieve.

And I've talked with my older scouts about it and they look at me and they say: you know, that sounds kind of divisive and exclusive. That was the sense of what they told me. They kind of like being in a big giant group. They like their patrols and they flow back and forth between being identified with a patrol and everybody being in the troop.

So they're not being willful about not being with their patrol. It's just that they have a concept of group that is maybe a little bit different than what I have been led to understand it ought to be. I again invoke the idea of the difference between patrol system and method. I mean the system says this is how it ought to work. The method might be a little bit different. The point of the patrol method is being responsible for one another.

That's a core value of it, right? The idea of patrol spirit and brighter lines between the patrols may appeal to our scouts and it may not, But, that being said, there's still plenty of opportunities for patrols to work on a level that serves the purpose of character development and the idea that Rob has come up with here. Yeah, it could work, And I don't think you creating a framework is, or defining the choices is, in any way usurping.

You know the youth leadership I mentioned somewhere in this podcast. You know we have a specific field to play, so most of the choices are made anyway.

So, to kind of put a bow on this whole thing, right, When we're talking about patrols and we're talking about the way patrols operate and we're talking about what the benefits of character development are from the patrol method, right, Well, we have to. It's probably worth observing your scouts and then talking to them about these questions and seeing what they're deriving from the way that they're managing things. My experience has been over the past 10 or 12 years is: I've watched scouts, I've watched the group size affinity kind of shift a little bit. That doesn't make me want to abandon the patrol method. It just says that it would be a good idea for us to be responsive to whatever shift is going on- if indeed there is a shift going on- and keep our eyes on the ball, which is the character development opportunities that you get from being in a patrol.

So those email messages. Well, I think that will be enough for today. I would love to hear from you. I'd like to answer your questions here on the podcast. I'm going to tell you how you can get in touch with me in just a moment.