Scoutmaster Podcast 39

And now, for you, Scoutmasters.

So tell me this. How are Scoutmasters different from Sherlock Holmes? Well, Sherlock Holmes occasionally had a clue, didn't he? Yeah, alrighty then. Hey, this is podcast number 39. Hey!

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clark Green. Hey, we just got back from the camporee this past weekend. Had a big council camporee with, you know, 1,500 of our closest friends in the middle of a big field at a county park. Saturday, a beautiful day. The wind was probably about 20 miles an hour to, you know, 350 miles an hour gusts all day. I'm exaggerating a little bit. Camporees present me with the unusual opportunity as a Scoutmaster of learning to keep my mouth shut. You know, when you're in a big field and you have, you know, your square of campsite is laid out for you and you set up your tents, you're going to be a few steps away from the Scouts most of the time. And our habit is to make sure that we set up patrol sites and we're a good distance away from the Scouts. And when you're right there, man, you see every little thing and you want to jump in every single time and offer some advice. Do a little mentoring, perhaps, or just kind of yell at them every once in a while. So it was a bit of a challenge for me. Sat there with my assistant Scoutmasters and we tried to talk and not pay too much attention. It's not that the Scouts do things wrong. It's just, you know, do I have to explain? This time around, I'm going to talk to you about a parents meeting that we have coming up, an annual parents meeting in court of honor I'm going to explain. And then we're going to talk a little bit about ceremony. That'll wrap it up for us today. So we've got some things to go with. Let's get started, shall we?

Boy Scouts!

So I'm preparing right now for our annual parents meeting that's going to happen tonight. And I thought it would make a decent podcast to just kind of go through some of the ideas that we apply to that meeting and exactly what we cover. This meeting is combined with a court of honor that will recognize Scouts for all of the achievements that they have earned since our last court of honor, which is usually about somewhere between four and six months in the past. And we ask each family to make sure that there is at least one parent present at this meeting. And this meeting will last from a half hour to 45 minutes. At the meeting, we'll be talking about some of the administrative things that we need to do as a Scout troop. It's an excellent time for everyone to recharter or renew their membership for the coming year. We'll talk about our outdoor program plan. We'll talk about Friends of Scouting. And we also have a group camping gear order that we do on an annual basis. And we present that during that meeting. I know that I'm going to just jump around a little bit and talk about the various aspects of the meeting. One of them is the Friends of Scouting, which is making direct contributions to support scouting in your council. And I have done several of these presentations in the past. So I'll usually go ahead and take that part of the meeting. I like to tell folks this. I'll give you just kind of an encapsulated version of the way this presentation works. Because I volunteer with our borough planning commission, our local municipal government. And, you know, every once in a while I will hear somebody complain about their water bill. And what I like to point out to them is that their water is free. It's just the pipes that cost money. I mean, the system that makes water safe to drink and keeps the water mains flowing and treats wastewater, that's what costs money. The water itself, that's free. Your water meter measures the load you put on the system and we charge accordingly. And scouting, like water, is free. Books, badges, uniforms, and tents, and food cost money. But the camaraderie, achievement, and adventure of scouting are all free. The vast majority of people who deliver scouting, the places we meet, and even some of the places we camp, come with no charge. We do have a small number of full-time professionals in what's called a council. And the council maintains a service center and a 3,000-acre scout reservation. And these all cost money to maintain and they're vital to delivering scouting. Each are really important parts of a virtual pipeline. Now, most people are not going to visit their wastewater treatment plant or not going to think very much about the system that delivers water to their home. You go in the kitchen, you turn on the faucet, and there's water that's going to be there. And most parents will never see the network of professionals who support scouting. They simply expect scouting, like water, to be there when they turn on the tap. Delivering the promises of scouting does cost money. Water meters read the load that you've put on the system and what you owe to keep the delivery system maintained. And what I'm asking you to do for friends of scouting is to measure what your son gets from scouting and to give a really good idea of trying to translate that into dollars and cents. And that's what you owe. That's what you owe to help maintain our council. That's what you owe to help maintain our camp. I know there are associated fees with some of the things that we do, but these are all at cost. These are exactly what we are being charged for them. And often, because of our fundraising efforts, we're able to underwrite those and save a substantial amount of money over a year's time. So that's a nutshell of the way that I present friends of scouting during this parents' meeting. As I mentioned, we also do a group camping gear order every year. Now, understand this podcast is not sponsored. It doesn't have anyone paying me to produce it every week. I do have a couple of affiliate programs that run ads on the Scoutmaster blog at scoutmaster.typepad.com. And that brings in a very tiny amount of money, basically, that defers most of the cost of producing the podcast. But I don't have sponsors. And I say that because I'm going to mention a business name. And I want you to understand that this is coming to you from me without any kind of money being involved or sponsorship or anything like that. I'd actually love them to sponsor the podcast. And that business is Campmore. And many of you may be familiar with it. But Campmore is a big, giant camping warehouse company that is in Paramus, New Jersey. And that's not too far from us. And they historically, as far as I'm concerned, have had some of the best deals on gear that we've been able to find. Plus, they offer scout troops, as do many other camping outlets and things like that, if you ask. They offer a 10% discount to a scout troop who orders with a troop check. What we've done over time, I guess now it's been 10 or 12 years, we have identified the pieces of gear that we know are time-tested and that serve our scouts very well. So that's a backpack. That's cooking gear. That's a compass. That's a sleeping bag. That's a sleeping mat. These are all the things that if we just put them on a list and handed them to parents, you know, they would go out and they would do their best to find what looks like it would work. They might spend a little more money than they would if they got a discount with us. But it makes it simple for our parents and our scouts to be able to get gear that we know they're going to need, for one thing, and that we know really, really works and is well-made and will stand the test of time and that a scout can use pretty much throughout his scouting career. So we'll spend some time going through our order to camp more and showing everyone the gear and explaining why it's important. And then after we've dispensed with all of our business and things like that, well, then we will open our court of honor. And I wanted to talk for a few minutes about courts of honor and ceremonies in scouting. So without further ado, Scout Mastership in seven minutes or less.

Ceremony is an important part of scouting. It's something that we shouldn't underestimate. The formal public presentation and recognition of scouts and their achievements are an opportunity to emphasize exactly what we're all about. It's a time for people to think about what scouting is doing and what the intentions are. I'm going to talk mostly about courts of honor here. They shouldn't be slapdash and just kind of off the cuff. But in the same way, they shouldn't be so constrained and formal that people are kind of vaguely uncomfortable. Courts of honor are for scouts. And they really need to speak to scouts, not just their leaders or their parents. The tone we set is one of honoring achievement in a formal way. If our scouts are kind of getting bored and laughing up their sleeves at an overblown ceremony or some kind of florid theatrical display, it may be time to rethink the way that we approach a court of honor. A court of honor isn't just a slog through calling names and handing out a baggie full of badges. If it is, it's missing something. My experience has been that scouts appreciate a few things. They appreciate tradition. They appreciate brevity. And they appreciate meaning. Ceremonies outside of scouting, whether religious or secular, I mean, whatever kind of a ceremony you might go to, follow an established framework. And within that framework, it gets personalized. And what I'm talking about is something like a commencement ceremony. If you go to a commencement ceremony for, I guess they do them for kindergartners now, as well as college graduates, there are going to be some common elements to the ceremony. If you go to a wedding, you know, as different as weddings can be, there are going to be some common elements. There's a touchstone there culturally for everybody to latch on to. And we need to think about that when we're putting together our courts of honor. I would say that, above all, brevity is the most important thing. You need to be formal and meaningful without being overly blown and accomplish the ceremony in somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes. Not by rushing through it, but by making sure that everything in the ceremony has meaning. Scouts appreciate simplicity. Simplicity is memorable. And complexity is aggravating. So if we're going to explain something, it needs to be explained simply and clearly. And it needs to frame the presentation rather than take over the presentation. In other words, if we're presenting the Tenderfoot badge, we don't want to speak about the history of the Tenderfoot badge from the inception of scouting to the present day. We want a few brief sentences to explain what it means and then get on with the presentation. And when I'm talking about uniformity, what I mean is that individual honors are presented in exactly the same way. Let's stick with the Tenderfoot badge. If we're going to present the Tenderfoot badge to 10 boys, each one of the boys is going to receive the Tenderfoot badge in the same way as all of his fellow scouts. I'll give you an example. Within our Court of Honor script, the senior patrol leader calls each one of them by name. They come up front. They form a line. He presents the badge to them. He salutes them. He asks for applause and then dismisses them back to their seats. It's brief and it's simple and it's meaningful to scouts. And it works extraordinarily well. Predictability is an important point to consider. I know sometimes we want to change things up and we want the Court of Honor to be different and we want things to, you know, we want to spice it up a little bit and have some changes and things. But I'll tell you, I'm a very big proponent of these ceremonies being very predictable. And there's a few different reasons why. Scouts appreciate the predictability of a ceremony. They don't want to be, you know, all of a sudden called up to do something that they have no idea what it is and they don't really know how to do it. And, you know, they're going to be embarrassed. And they're very sensitive to that type of thing. So if they know very predictably well when it's my turn for my badge, I will be called up front and this will happen. And it's going to help them get through the Court of Honor. And parents are going to be looking for those predictable points in the presentation as well. So I really want you to think hard about the idea of establishing a Court of Honor, crafting it very well, and then using it as a tradition within your troop. So we've got the same Court of Honor script and we use the same Court of Honor script that we've had for probably a dozen years now. And each time they see it, they know what to expect. Since a Court of Honor is being presented with honor as the theme, it needs to be fairly solemn. I'm not saying that it should not have any humor injected into it at all, but the humor should be punctuations in the sentence and not the sentence itself, if you understand what I'm saying. There's going to be inevitable mistakes and omissions, and these need to be anticipated and handled in kind of an unruffled professional manner. What we don't want to do is break the idea of we are honoring Scouts and their achievement. We don't want to make it into something that's just a big joke or a big thing that the Scouts can, as I said before, just kind of laugh up their sleeves at. In a troop with a good tradition of youth leadership, the youth leaders are much more responsible for the achievements that are being presented than are adults. Adults should have very much a background role in making these presentations, and it should be clear who runs the Scout troop. So a brief, uncluttered, professional, predictable, and meaningful presentation is going to be appreciated by everybody. Absolutely. Adding things, adding unit-based awards and things like that, that's great, but if they're so complicated to try and figure out and very complex, they're not going to last very long. And I'll tell you, as soon as you add a unit-based award or some kind of special award that you come up with to a court of honor, people are going to expect to see it there each and every time. And I tell you, that's out of hard experience. So be cautious of creating something that will ultimately demand so much time and effort that it becomes unsupportable in the future. That's just my advice. Courts of honor are a wonderful time. If you think about these guidelines, I think it will help you shape one that is both meaningful and honors the achievement of Scouting and also helps to cement the idea of exactly why we are Scouting. Thank you. That's going to wrap it up for this edition of the Scoutmaster Podcast. I want you to notice something, if you didn't already. If you had the stopwatch out, Scoutmaster ship in seven minutes or less came in actually under seven minutes this time. So, if you would like to send me congratulations and brownie points, you can reach me at ClarkGreen, C-L-A-R-K-E-G-R-E-E-E-N, at gmail.com. ClarkGreen at gmail.com. You can read the Scoutmaster blog at scoutmaster.typepad.com. And you can follow us at the Scoutmaster blog on Facebook or subscribe to ScoutmasterCG, ScoutmasterCG on Twitter. Subscribe to the Scoutmaster Podcast on iTunes and feel free to leave a comment or a review or a rating when you do. And I will be eternally grateful. The Scoutmaster blog and the Scoutmaster Podcast are not official publications of the Boy Scouts of America, nor are they endorsed or sponsored by the Boy Scouts of America. Nope, it's just me talking into a microphone, trying to lend a hand to my fellow Scout leaders and perhaps have a bit of fun along the way. Before we leave you today, we'll want to hear from our founder, Sir Robert Baden-Powell. Sir Robert? Good luck to you and good camping. Why, thank you, sir. Thanks again for listening, everyone, and until next time. Thank you. matrices and youर Are Thank you.