Scoutmaster Podcast 371

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. Two scout hats went out for a hike. Hats going out for a hike, that's right. One got worn out and the other went on ahead.

Yeah, well, you come up with a better one, okay? Hey, this is podcast 371..

Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green.

So let's take a look in the long, neglected mailbag. Here's some things that have come over the transom. In the past week Had an email from Scott Day, who is the Scoutmaster of troop 311 in Springfield, Ohio, who wrote in to say: I love your podcast. I'm only two years of being a Scoutmaster. Your podcasts have really helped And I'm waiting for a t-shirt that says: don't fix that.

Well, thanks Scott. Yeah, the don't fix that t-shirt.

I think I mentioned that in an attempt at humor several podcasts back. I'll tell you what: grab one of your old t-shirts and a Sharpie. There you go, pal, You got one. Don't wait on me. You could wait on me for a long time for that. But thanks, Scott for getting in touch.

Steven Moshka is the Scoutmaster of troop 43 in Appalachian, New York, And he run in to say: I recently became the Scoutmaster for my son's new troop. As he and I crossed over from Cub Scouts, I took the plunge into the volcano immediately and traded my Cub Master shirt for a Scoutmaster shirt.

I want to say thank you for all the great advice you've given out through the podcast and the blog. Having listened to all of the episodes now and having read a great deal of the blog, I feel confident in my ability as a scouter. Of course I feel a little sorry for the other scouts who have to deal with my excitement and energy to make things even better. Thank you for all you've done for scouts like me. Keep up the great work.

Well, thank you, Steven. It's always good to hear that people find what we're doing here useful. Craig Snodgrass is from Troop 1 in Altadena, California, where he is the Scoutmaster. Craig just checked in to kind of send me a report about the way that their troop is incorporating the quarterly troop plan. I've talked about that in a past podcast and a blog post and I'll refer to those in the podcast notes.

But anyway, Craig wrote to say this: I've been so happy with your 8-Part Fundamental Series that I've shared it widely with others. I've listened to each of the 8 podcasts at least twice and found new insights and understanding. Each time. They're a masterpiece.

Well, thank you, Craig. I'm humbled. Our parents love having a quarterly parents meeting. We've always had quarterly course of honor and we had the intention of holding some kind of parents meeting but never quite got around to it.

So having it just before the quarterly court of honor has worked out perfectly for us. Our Petroleum Leaders Council adopted the three month terms for positions of responsibility you described in the quarterly plan. We continue to make the change to quarterly planning with a Petroleum Leaders Council meaning devoted to that every three months, And this avoids having the annual planning marathon wrapped. Everybody a little burned out And we're in various stages of adopting the idea of the three month permission slip and payments.

But I just want to check in and let you know that, as a Scoutmaster, I'm really buying in and it's all appearing to work. So far, so good.

Well, thanks, Craig. I'm glad that that's working out for you. As I said, I'll reference the material about that plan in the podcast notes. Take a look at it And if you've been working with that, if you've been adapting that approach for your troop, I'd like to hear how it's working. Well. The remainder of the podcast, I'm going to share some answers to email questions I have recently received.

So let's get started. Shall we, Stepping to my forest, Feel the magic in the air? I know that you're not evil. I know deep down you care. I cannot help but wonder Why you do the things you do. I hope you will remember That it's applied it to, 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. Tim Nelson is with Cub Scout Pack 352 in Raleigh, North Carolina, And Tim wrote in to say: I'm the den leader of ten bears soon to be Webelos.

Well, I want to introduce the patrol method to my den. Do you think this is a good idea?

And should I have the scouts divide themselves into patrols, Or should I divide them up? Maybe initially ask who wants to be a patrol leader?

Well, Tim, some 30.. Well, it's more than 30 years ago now. I had 18, count them 18- Webelos in my den. Thankfully, this was before the second year of Webelos was instituted And I was much younger.

So I survived, As did almost all of the 18 Webelos, And I think, yes, definitely introduce the patrol method to your Webelos.

But remember, you've been applying the patrol method as a den. You've just been the leader.

So what you're really introducing to them is a little more autonomy and some responsibility for themselves and some decision making. So they will know exactly how a patrol works because you've been employing those methods as a den leader and they employ a lot of things in the patrol method all the time outside of scouts. They just don't know that that's what they're doing.

So when you approach this, I would suggest maybe you think of how you would coach a team of this age of young people in basketball. Would you get them into the gym and explain everything about a layup in detail as they sat on the bench listening attentively?

Or would you demonstrate a layup and then give them the ball so they could get at it right away? I'm going to guess you'd want them trying it out as soon as possible And I would use the same approach in introducing them to the idea of expanded independence and decision making and responsibility.

So far as patrols are concerned, Don't explain it to them so much as show them how it works. Give them a simple 10-minute game or tasks to play or work on as a patrol. Divide them up, point patrol leaders. Let them at it. Once they've gone through the evolution of the game or tasks, do a two minute. When I say two minute, I'm talking literally two minutes.

Use your watch. Do a two minute after action little session where you ask them how it works. Listen to their replies. Don't offer a whole lot in the way of advice. Just listen to what they have to say. Ask them more questions about how they think it could work better.

Let them come up with those ideas on their own And then try it again. Now, sticking with the whole basketball analogy now, would you have your brand new team play a league game the first time that they were out together? Think about that one.

Would you explain things about the game and show them the rule book and then throw them out to the court with the other team? I know I mean the answer is obvious. Right The same with patrols. Don't make a big deal out of establishing permanent, everlasting patrols and trying to explain every little detail about it before you start.

In other words, don't take your den and just push them off into the deep end and say: okay, now you're in patrols, have a good time. Try the approach that I explain, You know. Just set them up in two different groups, appoint a leader, give them a game or a task That's going to last a few minutes, Then ask them some questions afterwards and take your time with it. Go slow, Don't attempt to explain everything. Let them figure it out a little bit at a time. You'll see some positive things happening and some negative things.

I would do your best to ignore the negative things and follow all over yourself about the positive things. Every time you praise one of the positive things that you see happening, apply a point of the scout law to define the positive thing you have seen. An immutable rule of scouting at this age and really at all ages, is that you'll perpetuate what you pay attention to. Make a big deal out of negative behavior, and it will be repeated. But deal with it quickly and quietly, and it will be less likely to recur. Make a big deal out of positive behavior, and it too will be repeated.

I would say that in my experience, most Weeblows den leaders overestimate the abilities of their scouts, at least a little too much. They go a little too far with the sophistication of activities and, like most adults, they talk way too much. You have to have some game, to be a good Weeblows den leader and your challenge is leading them through a very active hour of time every week where you talk or stop the action as little as possible. That should be your goal, And one of the things that's really on your side, as I said, is they already know how this works, even though they don't know that. They know and they'll catch on very quickly. Don't make it a system, Make it a method.

I've pointed this out a few times recently. Talking about the system and the method, Don't worry about how the patrols are made up and don't get overzealous about those, about the systemic and administrative things. Look at how the scouts are behaving and how they're working together. Observe a lot, Listen a lot.

You'll see who works well together and who doesn't. And you know, if you've already been with these guys for a year, you got a pretty good idea of that.

Now stay away from having them make the choices of who's going to be and what patrol now, because there's just a whole lot of baggage that goes with that, especially at this age. And you know- and I need to qualify that advice by saying not every group is the same.

So you know, they may very well be able to form their own patrols equitably and make those good choices, but I don't know. I would probably recommend that you set it up and appoint the patrol leader for a meeting at a time and then, you know, switch things up, try various combinations and talk with your scouts about it a lot. What you want in the end is weeblows who understand how patrol works and their responsibility in making it work. They'll get some things right away. Some things will be small, incremental changes over the next couple of years. And remember, your position is called weeblows den leader for a reason.

Scouts this age are not quite ready to make complex leadership decisions and lead each other in a very sophisticated manner. Most of them- and that's your job for now. As their abilities develop over the next couple of years, you'll respond by giving them more responsibility for leading themselves, but you're the leader for now. You direct and you decide. Encourage them to think for themselves and discover things for themselves, because they catch on very quickly that way. You might want to study the Socratic method and learn how to apply that really well.

When you do this, they'll be pretty sure everything they learned was simply something they discovered on their own. Weeblows is challenging. It's great fun. Enjoy the moment. Don't be too obsessed with preparing them for scouts and don't treat the experiences junior boy scouts. Just go out and do the things that weeblows do and have a blast.

The next few years are going to fly by. Don't miss a minute. The sender of the next email has requested that they remain anonymous and, honoring that request, I will tell you that they wrote in saying thanks for podcast 370 on older scouts. Seeing that the older scouts in our troop were not as active or integrated into having responsibilities as I would have liked, I spoke with our committee and the upshot is that we formed a subcommittee of adults and I conducted a survey of older scouts. What I found was that when I talked to the adults involved, they wanted to up the ante and design fun, interesting programs for the older scouts. The older scouts expressed their willingness to help with younger scouts as long as they knew the game plan for the troop meeting and how they fit into it.

They also talked about being respected and feeling valued and they said that they may or may not participate in special older scout programs or events. So after all that actually not a whole lot changed. The committee didn't have much of a response to my findings. The Scoutmaster seemed to be kind of annoyed by what I had to say and in the end not much changed. The adult volunteers basically ignored the problem and the older scouts- if and when they show up, they sit at their own table talking while the adults do stuff most of the older scouts aren't going to participate in. Anyway, I'm a little frustrated.

I'm a trained, experienced leader. I'm older than most of the adult volunteers, I have a lot of energy, but I find that my experience and training don't seem to matter in your experience to younger adult volunteers just kind of follow their nose and do what they want, while older guys with some knowledge like us becoming relevant.

Well, there's a number of issues to deal with there. First, let's say this: you aren't irrelevant. You have a lot of valuable experience. You have a lot of valuable skill. If anybody understands that, you'll be helpful. But these younger volunteers- and we're talking people in their 30s and 40s- they aren't going to ask for help if they don't know that they need it.

And when you go and offer help that they don't think that they need, they may get a little aggravated with you. As far as the older scout thing goes. I can't tell you how many older scout problem solving sessions I've been part of over 30 years. Each has played out as if the participants were reading from the same script. The same problems are expressed, the same solutions are found and the same results are gained, which are at best mediocre to tepid.

You know, somebody discovers that older scouts are a little disengaged and all that interested as they were when they were younger and then they invent new programs for them and the new programs are short lived and not really well received. And then we kind of go back and begin that process over and over again and I talked a little bit more specifically about that in last weeks podcast as far as the attitude of younger volunteers towards older volunteers and whether younger volunteers really kind of get the program or see the problems that you might see.

Well, I think some of the main difficulties with this are kind of baked into the BSA structure and expectations of- oh, I don't know, I guess you could call it culture. Now, I alluded to this in last weeks podcast. I didn't go on about it because honestly, these things aren't going to change and I kind of feel like I'm beating a dead horse.

So these things I talk up to being a price of doing business in our organization. It's just something we have to work with.

And what I mean specifically is because we have packs and troops and crews as separate units and we expect volunteers to move along with their children. If you look at it, what happens in Cub Scouts? There are very few Cub Scouts who have more than 3 or 4 years tenure, and packs don't have any institutional mammary. They don't have the calming influence of an older, experienced scouter being involved.

When one group of volunteers moves on from a Cub Scout pack into a Boy Scout troop, the Cub Scout wheel gets reinvented locally- what every 5 or so years. So the new volunteers who come into Cub Scouting reinvent things drawing on their professional and family experiences and you have a Cub Scout program that's not really running along Scouting lines.

And when they leave the Cub pack after having done that for a few years, they take those same practices into a Scout troop and then you have a Scout troop that is not really running along the lines that Scouting is supposed to work. So when Cub Scout volunteers move into a Scout troop and you know they will matriculate and slowly take over, they'll apply a lot of the things they invented in Cub.

This works for Scouts pretty well until they're about 13 or 14, and then those older Scouts generally seek greener pastures somewhere else. Now you'd hope that having required volunteer training would intervene, but it doesn't, because we fragmented that training and it lacks mentoring or consistency. Most training sessions are kind of heavy on inoculating the BSA against liability claims. They're very heavy on the logistics of management and organizational imperatives and something called program delivery, whatever that is, and little training time is devoted to actually understanding the unique transformative process of Scouting itself.

So the training isn't really going to scratch that itch. It's not going to get at that problem. We don't have a way of qualifying volunteers for their roles, we don't have any oversight, we don't have a mentoring process or ongoing evaluation of their performance, and without examining any of those things and why we are doing what we're doing, there's not a whole lot of chance that things are going to change.

So it kind of gets perpetuated and our organizational bad habits become hallowed traditions and hallowed traditions become storied legends. Understanding and actually working with young people becomes something of kind of secondary importance because we've got all this cool stuff we can do.

So in the end, what you attempted to do was laudable, but I could predict it wasn't going to work, for a couple of reasons. First of all, you were up against the culture that I just explained, right? The second is is there's no use in asking adults what they think will remedy the situation with older Scouts, because the few adults who actually recognize the problem don't know how to fix it.

I mean, it stands to reason, doesn't it? If they knew how to fix the situation, they would. There's also no reason to ask Scouts what they want, because they don't need to tell us what they want.

We already know, and so do they, kind of, even if they can't figure it out, because we know what they want. It's called Scouting. That's why they're there. Unfortunately, what's

Happening at the meeting that they're at is probably not Scouting. Back to my tired old basketball analogy. If you show up at the door of the gym to play basketball, I really don't need to ask you what you want to do next or if maybe you'd rather play football instead. No, all I need to do is unlock the gym and toss you the basketball and you go ahead and the game begins. Same thing goes with Scouting. If you're showing up at a Scout meeting.

What do you want? Do you want somebody to ask you what you want or suggest that maybe there are other cool things that you could know?

You want to do the Scouting game, so let's go. The other reason that the approach that you took probably wasn't going to work is- this is a problem that the Scouts didn't really care to solve.

They had figured out how to hang out with their friends and probably do you know some advancement work now and again, and they calculated the level of attention they had to pay to what adults were doing around them, and they paid not one penny more. Right, because they're great efficiency experts. They found a table. They see the adults are doing things that the older Scouts ought to be doing and they figure that they're free to hang out and just shoot the breeze around their special older Scout table.

Now would they enjoy actually doing some Scouting? You bet they would, but the adults are probably using all the oxygen that would light a fire under those older Scouts.

They're oblivious to this or they just figured that that's how things work, because, after all, when we joined the troop a couple of years ago, wasn't that the way the older Scouts acted then now, even if you could convince these volunteers to give things up to work with the older Scouts and give them more responsibility, the resulting chaos that initially accompanies that would probably be so disturbing I doubt they would stick with it. And that's pretty cynical, isn't it?

But I think you know it's real. It's been my experience because we don't really have a good way of bringing them in as volunteers and we don't have a way of showing it to them. I don't think too many Scouters get to see the real potential of Scouting. The BSA tells them both directly and indirectly. It's a program of activities presented by adults to youth with measurable outcomes, which is almost the polar opposite of what Scouting actually is. Scouting is this chaotic yet kind of controlled process.

It's kind of a controlled burn. You know where you want to keep that field open.

So there's a controlled burn every five or six years. It's a little chaotic, right, it's a little.

Oh, you know that might get out of control. It's like Baden Powell said: it's a jolly game. It shapes the character of young people experientially. It's not an orderly or adult mediated. In fact, when Scouting is happening, adults play a very tangential role in the whole process. It's a transformative progression of experience for our young people to learn to do for themselves and to become good, solid people of good character.

So it's not about being irrelevant, or that no one is interested, or experience and training don't seem to matter. It's just that if you see a problem and you say, hey, I think this is a problem, and everybody else says, meh, you know, I don't see it as being a big problem, well, you wouldn't want to spin your wheels there and the other.

The other thing is is to is. You know there's a certain joy in figuring out how all this works. I spent 30 years figuring out by the seat of my pants on the fly how Scouting works.

You know, I took the training. I got some out of that. I read, I got some things out of that. I talked with people who I respected in Scouting. I got some out of that.

But you know, you figure things out on the fly, you learn the hard way and you eventually get better at being a Scouter, and that's almost three quarters of the fun of being part of it. Anyway, if you listen this far, you're in for a big treat or you're about to be traumatized. You can. You can choose which one, because after last week's podcast about older Scouts there was a very brief Facebook exchange. Dave Klein asked me to clarify the idea of having a Venture Patrol or crew as a change of status for our older Scouts and what I explained in last week's podcast- that when our Scouts enter into high school we sign them up to be members of our Venture Crew.

We have a chartered Venture Crew and Dave asked whether or not they changed to wearing the Venturing Uniform at that time. My answer is no. We discussed it but nobody seemed to be very interested in doing that.

And then somebody very helpfully clarified that there are Venture Crews and Venture Patrols and you know the whole thing kind of put a B in my bonnet. So the treat for you, if you've listened thus far, or the way you are about to be traumatized, is a little bit of a rant or a diatribe or a soapbox session about my opinion, my read of the present situation.

So if you would rather skip this, please do so. We've been discussing the whole subject of working with older Scouts and some years ago, when it was clear to me that we needed to have a distinct change in status for our older Scouts that would help them kind of wrap their heads around what was going on and would give them a line of demarcation that they could say that they were separate from the younger Scouts, which, counter intuitively, makes them more likely to help the younger Scouts.

I looked at the idea of having a Venture Patrol and I guess we kind of had a Venture Patrol for a little while and then you know, we have had an annual high adventure trip every single year for the past 14 years and we wanted to be able to offer that experience to girls in our community. So we established a Venture Crew and we have had several girls come along on those trips and it's been great.

But establishing a Venture Crew and then running the Venture Crew is kind of problematic because of the way the whole thing is set up. And the whole thing is set up the way that it is because when the Venturing Program was established, based on some of the ideas from the Explorer Program, the idea was to have young women involved. But those young women couldn't earn the same awards that the older boys and a scout troop could earn.

So there had to be a very bright line between who was a Venturer and who was a scout, which means a separate unit, a separate committee, a whole other approach to positions of responsibility and everything like that, and if you sit and look at it it's kind of confusing. Now I'm not trying to cast shade on anybody who has a successful Venturing Program. Good for you, more power to you, go get them. What my problem is is that when somebody charters a Venture Crew it is perceived as being in competition for the attention of older scouts who are part of a scout troop, and Scoutmasters are famously skeptical about Venture Crews. They kind of feel like in vase on their turf and Venture Crew volunteers feel kind of put aside by scout troops and it's kind of a mess that you really wish didn't exist. And I see a similar mess coming in the way that the BSA is welcoming girls into membership in scout troops in February of next year, because the only way that you can have girls involved is to charter a girls troop alongside of the boys troop.

And yes, I've read through all the announcements and now we're setting up another administrative division with having girls troops and it's going to cause a fair amount of needless trouble and needless agita for a lot of volunteers and for girls and for boys. If it is the opinion of your unit.

The approach of having boys and girls in fully separate units is a good approach, I think you know. Fine, go ahead and do that. Personally, I feel it's a very bad message to send to boys and to girls to keep them separated that way.

But you know what, if that's the way that you want to serve the young people in your community, I'm not going to complain about it. The thing that I get kind of chapped about is the idea that there is no fully coed alternative, and when I mean fully coed I mean that you have a scout troop with scouts in it, and whether they are boys or whether they are girls is kind of immaterial. They're scouts and they just work in a scout troop.

So you have boys and girls in patrols, you have boys and girls in the troop and in the patrol leaders council, no big deal. And I know that that works, and it works very well because the vast majority of scouting organizations in the rest of the world apply the fully coed model just like that.

Now, I don't think that should be forced on you. If that's not something that you want to do- and you do have the option- you can just ignore the idea that girls are allowed to join now and keep your troop. All boys, it's fine, that's an option. What I'm upset about is there's no fully coed option for those of us who see that as the way that scouting could best serve the young people in our community.

If this seems disjointed from the discussion that we've been having about older scouts, it's not because the precedent for this idea of creating further administrative divisions when all's we want to do is serve the young people in our community with a scouting program is frustrating, because we've seen how it works in venturing and it doesn't work very well. What if you go to the doors of your meeting place and open them and say to your community at large: any young person who wants to have a scouting experience is welcome here.

Regardless of their gender, regardless of their sexual orientation, regardless of their religious beliefs, we can all be scouts together. BSA, over the past 5 or 10 years you have made some big strides in making us able to do that, but this one, where we're going to bring girls in and bring them into a separate unit, that is kind of taking two steps forward and three steps back, and I am told that a lot of people will just kind of ignore it and have a fully co-ed program anyway.

But what kind of a message does it send to our scouts, when we have clearly defined policies and procedures that we just kind of fudge or ignore or create elaborate justifications for ignoring or going directly counter to those things? It's an uncomfortable feeling, like the old preacher said. It kind of feels like washing your feet with your socks on. Hey, I'm going to stop there. That's my diatribe, that's my soapbox moment and you can get in touch with me and we'll talk about it.

You know the idea that girls are going to be a part of the BSA. That's settled business. Frankly, I'm just not interested in arguing about that. We've already done that. It's settled, this is happening. But if you want to talk about how it's going to happen, I'm happy to get in touch with me.

I really do enjoy your emails, I enjoy talking with you and I'm going to tell you how to do that in just a moment.