Scoutmaster Podcast 48

And now for you, Scoutmaster.

So a Scoutmaster goes to his final reward and he's surprised to find himself standing in front of the devil. And he looks around and he sees another Scoutmaster that he knew in life. He's kind of walking around down there in the company of this beautiful woman. And he notices this and he points it out to the devil and he says, Hey, why don't I get the same treatment? I was a Scoutmaster too. And the devil turns to him and says, Just, you know, don't bother me. That woman's punishment is my concern. Oh my. Hey, this is podcast number 48. Hey.

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clark Green. So some emails coming in over the past week. This is from Ray from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Says, overall, I have to say your podcast is the best podcast I listen to. Well, thank you, Ray. I can't think of a single one that I have heard from you that didn't provide real insight in what I could use in my troop. I knew I had a lot to learn, but I guess I didn't realize that any topic you could discuss would be so beneficial to me. Again, you've inspired me to be better prepared for my troop activities. I see what a difference it can have. Thanks for all your effort. Well, thank you, Ray. It really is encouraging when people get in touch. Sure do appreciate it. Some comments from our last podcast, podcast number 47. Larry Geiger. Hey, Larry. Larry said it was a great show except for maybe that one musical thing in the middle there. What was that all about? He said, I fear my ears are too old to interpret it. That was a piece of music called Born to be a Scout. If you go on the blog, you will find it in the little Amazon music widget that's on the blog post, Born to be a Scout. Yeah, it's kind of a rap, kind of a, I don't know. I don't know. It's one of those things that the kids are listening to today. It's got some Scout stuff in it. So, the last time we did talk about Scouting as a movement versus as an organization. And Larry went on to observe that Scouting has always had kind of a low opinion of certain kinds of tradition. Hmm. That's an interesting thought. The BSA regularly rewrites the Scout book and its requirements, and I think this is a good thing. You know, Scout units come and go, volunteers come and go, and all Scouts come and go. Yet, Scouting keeps going. Cool, isn't it? So, I have to agree, Larry. There's, you know, we have some fine traditions, and then there is the reality of applying the program. And it needs to keep moving. Then Larry also comments on the email that we talked about last week. I wanted to say your answer to the guy with the Star Scout Senior Petroler was a very good answer. Scouts aren't in Scouting for the meetings. If a troop is camping, backpacking, canoeing, summer camping, etc., then Scouting is happening. Trying to make each week's meeting into a primetime show won't happen. As long as they're planning it, implementing it, and getting most of their business done, it's working. Excellent thought, Larry, and I've got to agree with you. I can't think of it. You know why I joined Scouting? It's the meetings. That is something I don't think you would ever hear a scout say. Oh, yeah. You should come over on Monday nights. We just have this really big blast at our meeting. No, you're right, Larry. They come to go camping and backpacking and canoeing and all that kind of great stuff. So, I appreciate everybody who took the time to leave some comments on Facebook. I also wanted to mention I got another review on iTunes, and I really appreciate that. It was an anonymous review, but it was from somebody who's a committee chair and a unit commissioner. And he finds the jokes entertaining, although he's still thinking about the penguin and canoe joke. But, no, I appreciate that. And you can do the same if you subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. You can get onto iTunes, and you can rate the podcast, or you can leave a written rating on it. So, I appreciate it when folks do that. Very encouraging. And today on the podcast, we're going to do a couple of things. We're going to talk a little bit about taking direction from youth leadership. And I'm going to outline a little exercise you can do with your troop as a way of kind of identifying what's going on and where you hope to be in the future. Then we're going to talk a little bit about a post I had on the blog this week that was an answer to a question about Asperger's Syndrome. A little bit about special needs scouting. So, that's a pretty full slate. Oh, you know, but before we go on, let me tell you that this week I recorded an interview with Canadian author and canoe enthusiast Kevin Callen. If you're familiar with Kevin and the guidebooks that he writes for Ontario, you're going to love it. And we're going to make that part of a canoe show coming up soon. So, I just wanted to let you know. It was a fun interview. Kevin's a great guy. Hey, we need to keep moving. So, let's get started, shall we? Scout Mastership in seven minutes. Or less.

We'll want to talk to you for a couple minutes about taking some direction from your youth leadership. And the goals of youth leaders and adults can kind of diverge sometimes. And maybe we end up duplicating efforts or working at odds with each other. So, we've got to kind of align those forces. We've got to have a plan. We've got to know what we're up to. Maintaining the integrity of youth leadership means that they have the opportunity to plan and act independent of adult micromanagement and adult coercion. And this exercise I'm going to describe will help define the roles of adult and youth leaders while balancing the oversight and involvement of adults. So, this is a very easy process. First of all, I ask everybody in a leadership position to write down three personal scouting goals for themselves. And three goals they have for the troop. Now, this isn't always easy. But writing the goals down is a crucial step in the process. Writing requires some more thought and commitment to the idea than just sitting there and talking about them. In a group setting, scouts will a lot of times latch on to somebody else's idea to the exclusion of their own or they won't really think of something. So, making the whole goal setting thing a group discussion doesn't work as well as saying, Okay, here, just write down three things that you want to get out of scouting. And then write down three ways that you want to move the troop forward. And then what happens is, in the second step, adult leaders need to meet on their own and discuss their goals. And they identify shared personal goals and work on the next immediate steps to achieve them. And then we discuss the troop goals and identify those aspects of them that should be worked on by the adult leadership and which we should suggest to the scouts for action. Then, instead of having the scouts meet initially to discuss their goals, we just will interview each youth leader individually and discuss them. And we'll help them identify the immediate next step to achieve their personal goals. And then we'll discuss their goals for the troop. What they see or hear or experience in their leadership role is very revealing. And it's important to interview them individually because they may have a perspective on things that they wouldn't express as fully when they're in a group of their peers. This process, over time, has revealed several things that might never have come to light otherwise. You know, scouts are at an age where they're very sensitive to the censorship of their peers. These individual interviews are just casual discussions with myself and my assistant scoutmasters. If the scout in question has a father serving as an assistant scoutmaster in another adult leadership role, he's not part of the interview. Then, once we've done this, we move on and we identify the shared goals that represent maybe new ideas or directions for the troop. And we develop a prioritized list of those goals. So by the time you get to this point, you're going to have a list of goals for the troop. And they're going to be shared between several members of the adult and the youth leadership, no doubt. And then you can begin discussing them and figuring out, okay, so what happens next? How do we make this happen? At the end of the process, both youth and adults are going to be on the same track. And they're going to have a common set of goals and the associated tasks to achieve them. As an added benefit, differences of opinion can be resolved and rivalries can be quashed. And those who are not really doing much or don't feel a part of the whole gang and the leadership part of the troop will be brought on in. So let's go over that again. It's very, very simple. Write down three goals for yourself personally in scouting. And this is for all the youth leaders and all the adult leaders. And then write three goals down that are more of a general nature for the troop. And then the adults will meet and discuss what they have written first. And then the adults will sit down and interview each one of the youth leaders individually so that instead of being under the pressure of a group of scouts, they'll be able to just talk about exactly what they're thinking and what they want to do. And then that gets boiled down to a list for a wider group discussion and the identification of next actions to start working towards those goals. It can really help. We try and put this into practice every year. Or if we feel like, you know, things have gotten a little diluted and we're unfocused in our efforts, this is a good exercise to do. So I hope you find it useful and I hope it helps you build your troop. Green grow the rushes, oh, what is your 12-0? 12 for the 12 apostles. 11 for the 11 that went to heaven and 10 for the 10 commandments. 9 for the 9 bright shiners and 8 for the April rainers. 7 for the 7 stars in the sky. 6 for the 6 brown walkers. 5 for the cymbals at your door. And 4 for the gospel makers. 3, 3, the rivals. 2, 2, the lily white boys. Carved all in green, oh. 1 is one and all alone and evermore shall be so. Here's a question for Scouting Magazine's next edition of the column, What Would You Do? used to be frontline stuff, if you go back that far. Here's what it says. One of our boys has Asperger's Syndrome. He does well learning Scouting concepts by reading, but he has struggled with campouts and activities that are not highly structured. What can we do as a troop to help him succeed? Also, it's taking him a long time to complete advancement requirements. How do we encourage him to keep putting in the effort to complete his requirements, even though they are more challenging for him than other scouts? Here's what I answered. People with Asperger's Syndrome have difficulty recognizing nonverbal communications and the clues of social interaction like facial expressions. So, imagine that everyone around you is wearing a mask and you can't read their facial expressions and you have some idea of what it might be like. I would encourage your scouts and leaders to ask and answer questions to the scout in a very nonjudgmental way, watching the tone of your voice and the way that you ask questions. That will help him read the social clues that he might not otherwise recognize. As for requirements, you know, I'd just ask him if he's having any particular difficulties and offer to help. Remember that scouts get to advance at their own speed and level of interest, and I would probably encourage him as I would any other scout. I've had the opportunity to work with scouts with Asperger's, and it challenged me to look at the world a bit differently. And I think I ended up learning a lot more from them than I ever was able to teach them. I put this on the blog last week, and it got some interesting comments when that blog entry hit Facebook. Christine said, I have a fifth grader with mild Asperger's who is crossing over to the Boy Scouts tomorrow night. I really appreciate all the people like you who take the time to understand him and others like him and to help them succeed. Jerry, Scoutmaster Jerry from the SMM podcast said this, I have three scouts in my troop that have autism. Two have been diagnosed with Asperger's. They love structure and do not do well with sudden changes. I think the best thing that any scout leader can do is to not treat them a whole lot differently than any other scout. They need to be in a patrol, they need to go on campouts, and they need to work on advancement just like everybody else. Scoot Looney, Scoot Looney, I will assume that that is a nom de plume, but he said, In the last five years I've been working with multiple scouts with autism. I've learned a great deal, and so should any leader that has been blessed with these young men. I'm the father of an autistic scout who is a star rank and an assistant scoutmaster. Part of my wood badge ticket, I created a website to let the parents of autistic kids know that the scouting program could be of great benefit to them and to help scoutmasters that have autistic scouts in their unit. And there's going to be a link to that. It's a really good resource, but there'll be a link to that site on the podcast blog entry. And then Walter had this to say, The first thing I would do, now that I found it, would be to read the BSA publication, Scanning for Youth with Disabilities, specifically the sections on autism and spectrum disorder. I will also have a link to that document on the blog in the post that contains this podcast. This is much, much improved from the material available 10 years ago when my son was going through cubs with disabilities. Scouter Adams said, My son has Asperger's. Pat currently has another scout on the spectrum as well. Every person who has this is a different case, so we work with it. People with Asperger's can be very high-functioning. For me, working with my son and others who have it, I have to just relate to them slightly differently. Overall, work with the boys, adults who have it. You can really learn something. And then Sean said, My son has Asperger's. And we have to do things a little more structured, and sometimes more coaching and teaching is in order. Autistic scouts are really no different than any other scout. Each situation, whether it's a, quote, normal, unquote, scout, or an Asperger's scout, will present itself in a different manner. It's up to the scoutmasters and assistant scoutmasters to be able to work with this scout and make decisions that any good leader has to make. I've had boys come through the troop in the past couple of decades who looked at the world a little differently and didn't relate in the same way socially. And, you know, they were just kind of a little bit of outside the circle. Then, as time has gone by, we've gotten a lot better at identifying this thing that's called the autism spectrum. And if you study a little bit about it, I think one of the things you walk away with is we're all on the autism spectrum somewhere. You know? I mean, there are people who function very highly, and then there are people who have a little bit more difficulty and challenge. But, really, I think we're all on there. And we've kind of begun to redefine normal. We've certainly redefined the way that we approach people with cognitive differences and with different ways of social interaction. And we've done that because we understand that this is not a choice that they're making. This is just simply the way that their brain is built. When I think of this subject, I think of one boy who was in the troop several years ago who had been identified as having Asperger's and was really, really difficult. He was just socially had real, real problems. He couldn't deal with what was going on around him. He couldn't. He found it very difficult to relate to other scouts. He would occasionally get violent. His way of self-regulating would be to walk away from whatever activity he was involved in if he began to get on overload. And that could be very disturbing because all of a sudden we would look around and we would see that he wasn't there. And this was when he was, you know, 11, 12, 13. And we had some really trying times. And it got so trying that at one point his parents decided that, you know, he needed to step away from scouting for a while. While they really worked at figuring out exactly how to do this. And they really worked at working with his counselors and doctors. And they did this over the course of several weeks one summer. And he returned to us with the right medications and things like that. And he was able to focus better. And he was able to socially interact better. And he did just a wonderful job of being a scout. And he, you know, we still worked with him in the same way that we would work with all of our other scouts. Just understanding that it was like working with a person who maybe spoke a bit of a different language. And so we learned to speak his language. And it wasn't really all that difficult. And, you know, learning to speak his language kind of broadened my world a bit. And being able to look at and understand the way that he was processing things and the way that he was understanding and interacting with the world. It was a real eye-opener. And I owe him a debt of gratitude for having been able to stick it out with us and to work through that. And he's gone on, you know, graduated from high school, went to college, to a very prestigious university over in England. And continues to study there. Has gotten an undergraduate degree or the equivalent thereof over there and is working on a graduate degree now. And is a very impressive young man. So these things are sometimes terrifying for parents. And it's sometimes a bit terrifying for volunteer leaders, too. Because we receive relatively little training in this type of thing. As the comments that you saw or that I read out indicate, there's a lot of kids who are identified either on the autism spectrum somewhere or are identified specifically with this Asperger's syndrome. And it's well worth taking the time to understand it and to begin to learn how to work with them. It's all too easy, you know, when you're dealing with a large group of boys, to marginalize some and to separate them out because you lack the time or the will or the empathy to try and understand what they're doing and understand how they're looking at the world. So this is a subject that bears much broader conversation. And I hope to do that soon on the blog and the podcast. And to put together, you know, some good resources for people who are working with Scouts with Challenges of all kinds. But the two references that we had here, the scouting document about working with Scouts and youth with disabilities and the website about autism and Boy Scouts, I will make sure to post those on the blog. Just some thoughts to get you going and some encouragement that if you are finding yourselves working with boys who are identified with these types of challenges, it can be a little daunting and it can be a little terrifying. But the story is only being half told in what you're seeing when they're 11 or 12 or 13 or 14. Their story goes on and on and on. And I can tell you that it can be a wonderful, very positive story. And it's something that you will look back on and see as a very important part of your life as well as theirs.

Thank you for listening to this edition of the Scoutmaster Podcast, podcast number 48. You can read the Scoutmaster blog at scoutmaster.typepad.com. You can follow us at the Scoutmaster blog on Facebook and ScoutmasterCG on Twitter. Subscribe to the Scoutmaster Podcast on iTunes. And when you do, feel free to leave a comment or review or rating. And you can email me, Clark Green, with your comments and questions at ClarkGreen at gmail.com. That's C-L-A-R-K-E-G-R-E-E-N at gmail.com.

So I hope you caught Green Grow the Rushes there in the middle of the podcast. One of my favorite Scout songs. And appropriate to the season. And I want to wish everyone a happy holiday. And hopefully, Larry, your brain was able to process that one. Yeah. I often find my brain doesn't process things either. So I'm right there with you, brother. I need to remind you that 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 Scout leaders and perhaps have a bit of fun along the way. Before we leave you, let's hear from the founder of the Scouting Movement, Sir Robert Baden-Powell. Sir Robert? Good luck to you and good camping. Why, thank you, Sir Robert. Until next time. Sure we付 awhile. I love you.