Scoutmaster Podcast 52

And now to you, Scoutmaster. So I asked a simple question at a troop meeting the other night. I got a kind of a testy response. I had the recorder on.

So here's what happened: Where are your badges? Badges, We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges. I guess the guys were a little edgy after their long winter vacation came to an end.

Well, this is podcast number 52.. Hey, Hey.

Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green. Hey, Humphrey Bogart, eh, Treasurer of the Sierra Madre. Yeah, That's what you just heard.

Does anybody not know that little piece of film trivia? How about that?

Well, over the past week we've gotten lots of messages through the blog on comments and iTunes reviews and emails and things. So let's see what we have to share with you. Here's one. Here's an update on how your podcast is making a positive impact. You recently highlighted the book Working the Patrol Method. I ordered six books, enough for me and my patrol assistant scoutmasters.

I gave it to them as Christmas presents and told them I wanted to use it to help us truly adopt the patrol method, to get it written into our troops' DNA. We had a meeting last week and were very excited about the prospects.

Along with helping us evaluate ourselves as leaders and the state of our patrols, we have selected specific application projects motivated by the book that we are working through in this coming month. My goal is to use the book through this year to help us adults, help our boys, be great scout patrols. Hey, it's a process, right. I'm encouraged to use this to improve our process and help us all develop as leaders. Keep up the good work and thanks for what you do. And that's from Mike.

Well, Mike, I certainly appreciate the kind words and I'm glad that you're finding the patrol method book useful. If you would like to get a look at the book that Mike is talking about, go to scoutmastertypepadcom. Look in the right-hand column.

You'll see links to my review of the book, an interview that we did on one of our podcasts and a link to buy the book. So thanks again, Mike. Really appreciate it. On iTunes from another Mike. As a new scoutmaster, this podcast has helped me accelerate my learning and have fun along the way.

I enjoy the jokes- but I'm a scoutmaster, so that probably explains it- The music and the variety of topics that range from BSA history to methods of scouting, to camping, to teaching scouts, to interviews of authors, etc. If you want to enjoy a 25-minute podcast, learn something and even be challenged, this is the one for you.

Well, thanks, Mike, for your kind words. Certainly appreciate it. Scouter Brian treated the folks at his roundtable recently to CDs that included the Scoutmaster podcast and other podcasts from PTC Media And PTC Media. It's easy to find on the web. They've got some excellent podcasts there and I do encourage you to go over and listen. Thanks very much, Brian.

Here's a message from Scoutmaster Bill. Bill, this Christmas, when I gave my son a new iPod Touch, he gave me his old iPod Classic.

Now, keep in mind, I've never aspired to own an iPod, so I really don't know anything about him. That being said, I'd love to get your podcast onto the iPod so I can listen at my leisure without having to use a computer.

So my question is: how do I get the podcast onto the iPod? I know there are some on iTunes, but what about the older podcasts?

Well, Bill, what you can do is go to scoutmastertypepadcom and look for a link to the archive of the Scoutmaster podcast in the upper left-hand column, And that link will lead you to all 51 podcasts that we've done in the past, And as far as how to get them on the iPod, I'd ask your son. When I have a technical problem, I find a scout. They usually are able to figure it out pretty quick. Here's another message, Dear Scoutmaster, I must say again that your production and delivery are at a par with professional podcasts to which I subscribe. Kudos for the great work you do.

My question is as follows: Do you wear the campaign hat which is shown in the photograph on the blog, And what make and type of campaign hat? And that comes from Thor Hey. Thanks, Thor, And thank you for the kind words.

I do wear a campaign hat, but just, you know, at summer camp, but at retreat ceremonies. That's about it. I got mine from BSA Supply like 20 years ago. That would be the first place that I would look. They're pretty decent hats. Mine's lasted that long, even though it doesn't get worn all that often.

Fun fact, Fun fact, Fun fact. The picture in the headline banner for the blog- Not me, It's a friend of mine who I snapped a picture of at a retreat ceremony And it just turned out to fit in what I wanted to do on the banner there.

So now you know. So now you know. Scott, a Scoutmaster from Loudon, New Hampshire, wrote thank you for the podcast. I haven't heard many of them yet, but I do appreciate the ones that I have heard. I will go listen as time permits and check out more of them. It's nice to know that a Scoutmaster is not alone in his challenges.

Well, Scott, you are correct. Most of the problems, difficulties, challenges and a lot of the fun that we encounter is pretty old hat.

Yeah, people have been through it before, So that's why we're here trying to lend a bit of a hand. Last time, on Podcast 51, we talked about an eagle ambush And if you didn't listen to that, what happened was is I got an email from a parent who was concerned that the Scoutmaster in his son's troop was kind of making up rules and these rules were preventing his son from becoming an Eagle Scout. Go back to Podcast 51 and listen to that and it'll fill the story in for you. And I had a couple of email responses to that. Mark in San Diego, San Diego, S-A-N-D-Y-E-G-G-O.

Well, I found out after I looked on Google that that's a nickname for San Diego. How about that? Hmm, Sounded like a breakfast tragedy. But yeah, Mark had this to say. He says The arbitrary eagle requirement issue isn't really a new one. I recall a similar issue about 40 years ago.

I was a Scout and my father was the Scoutmaster. There was a Scout that was prevented from attaining Eagle by an arbitrary rule of some other troop And I recall hearing my father on the phone talking to the boy's previous Scoutmaster and being kind of angry because not only did the other guy not agree to the importance of following the real requirements for Eagle but he wouldn't give my father any of the boy's leadership or advancement information. The Scout ended up joining our troop. My father made sure our troop leadership got behind this boy to support his Eagle project and attain his award. It seems that others in the council adult leadership appreciated and respected my father's actions. He was a great man and I am trying to do my best to follow his example.

Well, Mark, as we said in that podcast, there's a common problem. Unfortunately It's nothing new, as your story evidences.

Walter got in touch about the same subject and he said: You know, I think the ambush scout should just change troops immediately. He doesn't have enough time to work this out and he's likely to be re-ambushed when it's time for his Scoutmaster conference.

You know, Walter, I think I agree. Walter suggests that a parent call the district executive, explain the problem and ask them to recommend a troop. Walter goes on to say- I disagree, that district, council and national should stay out of things like this. I mean, it is the BSA program and this kind of behavior is wrong and it gives the whole program a bad name. This behavior is far too common and it's kind of a cancer on the BSA.

Well, I'm with you there. I'm with you there, Walter. If this doesn't get resolved at the troop level, then a commissioner needs to step in, and a commissioner is going to carry more weight than a complaining parent. Other organizations don't allow local units to do whatever they want and use the national name. For instance, McDonald's won't let their people just do whatever they want, and the BSA shouldn't either. One of the duties of the council is to ensure that each local unit within its territorial area carries out the general principles of advancement and scouting, and the council should really not dodge this responsibility.

Well, yeah, Walter, I agree with you to a point. It's very difficult for our scouting professionals to involve themselves in these troop level disputes between parents and leaders. Sometimes Perhaps a little more training, a little bit better of a message getting out to scoutmasters in things like this podcast, I hope will prevent this kind of ambush and this kind of drama in the future. But I do appreciate your thoughts, Walter. We've got an awful lot to do on the podcast today.

I want to mention that the Scoutmaster newsletter for January is going out about the same time as the podcast does, And if you haven't signed up for the Scoutmaster newsletter, go to the blog scoutmastertypepadcom and go ahead and sign up. You'll find a sign-up block up in the upper right-hand column.

In Scoutmastership, in seven minutes or less, we're going to talk about responding to Youth Leader Initiative And then in our email segment, which will come up after that, we're going to talk about patrols again. I got a couple of really good responses with some good thoughts and with a couple of questions about the makeup of patrols, and that will expand on the conversation that we had last time.

Hey, that's a lot to do, so let's get started.

Scoutmastership, in seven minutes or less. So what I'm going to ask you to do is to imagine that you're 13, and you've just been elected to be a patrol leader.

What happens next? What resources do you have to call on to do the job that you've just been elected to perform?

Well, you've probably watched how all this works for a year or two, since you've been in Scouts, and you've got a pretty good idea of what a patrol leader does. Gets to wear a patch. That's a big deal, And it's likely that this is the first time you've had this kind of real responsibility, the first time that people are looking at you for leadership. See, you don't really have an appreciation of what this means yet. You certainly don't look at it the same way that your Scoutmaster does, Probably not even looking at it the same way as your patrol leader does. In other words, you might not really have much of a clue at all.

Now you could be a real self-starter with a lot of energy, And- whether it's bravery or just being a little naive- most likely it's a bit of both- you jump in with both feet and you really get going. Now it's likely that you're going to make some mistakes and that you'll misunderstand something, or you'll just plain forget to do something. Or you may be indecisive or afraid of looking bad in front of your peers, And that fear might mean that you don't do much of anything at all. You try to be inconspicuous. You don't say much, You keep your head down. If your troop leaders and the adults involved in your troop work with you and encourage you, if they're nonjudgmental and kind, you'll begin to gain some confidence.

You'll begin to be a leader. If these people react to your work negatively, if they kind of pester you, bug you, make jokes about you, if they talk to you angrily, you're not going to develop much as a leader, are you? You're going to keep your head down and you're going to hope that this is over with as soon as possible.

I think about this sort of thing as a scoutmaster a lot and I understand more and more how important my attitude and reactions are to developing good leaders. I think that any initiative that a scout shows in the leadership position, no matter how imperfect or misguided or lackluster or whatever shortcomings we may detect, should be met with a very positive response, with an overwhelmingly positive response.

I remember when I was taking a college course in geography some years ago, the professor asked a question and that was to explain what is meant by the description vegetation when it relates to geography, And one of the students, you know, hesitatingly raised her hand and she said: isn't that like the kind of vegetables they grow in that part of the world? Now a lot of us stifled a pretty big guffaw, but the professor's expression remained absolutely unchanged And she looked at this student and very kindly said: well, that's close, but it's not precisely what I was looking for.

Now, if the professor had laughed or belittled an honest attempt to answer the question, that particular student may have never voluntarily responded to a question again. When our scouts attempt anything, we should look on it as an expression of initiative and take the opportunity to build them up.

Sometimes we have really very little bit to go on. Scouts can be very reluctant to step into a position of responsibility because they've seen how others who did it before them were treated. If they know that they're going to be treated, as I said before, non-judgmentally, with some kindness, with some understanding and empathy, they're going to be very anxious to be leaders. If they think that they're going to be criticized, they're going to be spoken down to and that they're going to receive a general attitude that is not conductive to them developing as a leader, they're just not going to be involved. Once we recognize the slightest gesture of initiative on the part of any of our scouts.

We need to respond with unalloyed encouragement, And each time we do, they will take successively bigger steps and soon become the competent leaders that we're looking for. 887, wwwlabbilitystationscom- So that's all we talk about.

So to begin, break someone's perspective and start to jump in and start everything in a moment of a career or taking progress or missing a piece to these religions can't reveal anything we see for the whole Times And all that's it. Hi, I'm Kevin Callen, the Happy Camper, and you're listening to the Scoutmaster Podcast. Write me a letter, send it by mail. Email, that is folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails. So Ray wrote in about the discussion we had of patrol ages in the last podcast. This is what he had to say: Another excellent podcast. The discussion of patrol ages is very timely As we enter the season of Webelos crossing over into Boy Scouts. I've been considering our patrols.

We have used the new Scout patrol and after a year these Scouts get integrated into other patrols. We also shift other Scouts around to balance patrols as the older Scouts move on. I've been considering the merits of distributing new Scouts into the existing patrols. First I thought I had read that the original intent was that the patrol would form and be a permanent patrol that would not be changed too frequently. To allow the patrol to fully develop, New Scouts would flow into the patrol and older Scouts would flow out. The patrol makeup would change through the aging process, not by shuffling the members.

Of course, as the troop grows or shrinks, the age distribution of a patrol may get unbalanced. Now this might not be a big deal, but I have three questions for you. First, I'm interested in your thoughts about changes in patrol makeup and how these changes affect the patrol performance and the goals of Scouting.

Well before I answer that first question, I want to give a tip of the campaign hat to Larry Geiger, who is a frequent contributor to the podcast and a commenter on the blog. He offered some comments to raise questions on the blog and I and Larry are pretty much on the same page about this. I get a lot of questions about the new Scout Patrol and the way patrols are described in our training materials, because the way I do this and what I say and write differs from the advice offered in training.

So what I want to do is concentrate on the broad underlying concepts of Scouting that bear on the issue of patrols. Boys join Scouting to do great stuff with their friends. To my mind, they're the best judge of who their friends are- not me. In. Some practices in Scouting are adopted because, frankly, they drive good numbers. They make for good statistics.

We want to retain more Scouts and we want more of them to advance in ranks. The new Scout Patrol was implemented because it was found that boys who attained first class rank in the first year were more likely to stay in Scouting.

I mean, that's what the statistics showed, So the new Scout Patrol would be a good way to make this happen. There are also concerns, you know, about younger boys being intimidated by older boys and leaving Scouts and that they would be more comfortable with their peers.

Now this all sounds great and I'm sure it's effective in attaining goals for which it's intended, but it also had some unintentional effects. This new Scout Patrol plan- Perhaps the most deleterious one- is that Scoutmasters think they need to engineer patrol memberships to get a certain result.

So common practice has become that Scoutmasters are making decisions about who goes in what patrol, And once you start doing this, you end up pretty much continuously re-engineering and maintaining patrols. This is compounded by the fact that adults have an aversion to unpredictable results and the kind of uncertainties that follows when boys make decisions about these things.

As I said, I think my Scouts are much better judges of who their friends are and who they want to do Scouting with in their patrol, and I'd rather that they make these decisions. There's also the idea of a permanent patrol, one that exists in perpetuity and just changes members as the Scouts age in and out of the patrol.

I think it's great when that happens, but I wouldn't engineer patrols specifically to make that happen. Really, what's more important- A Scout being happy and working along with his buddies or having a permanent patrol? I'd rather have a happy Scout working with his friends. Some patrols end up lasting for years and years. They change members but maintain the same name, and that's great. But if that doesn't happen, I don't think that's any big deal.

So what's the broad underlying concept? Well, I'll repeat it again: Scouts join Scouts because they want to do the things that Scouts do with their friends. If they're happy doing this with the boys they choose, they'll advance. They'll develop some skills in leadership, they'll develop some practical camping and Scout skills and they'll learn to work together to get things done. It's a very natural process. They won't do these things on a schedule, they won't wring every ounce of potential out of every opportunity, but they will be doing something for themselves And really that's what we're all about.

The second question is the maintenance of patrols, And I understand you leave the patrol organization up to your patrol leader's council. Do you give some guidance to the patrol leader's council about the outcome? Patrols should have some balance, either in patrol size or age distribution.

Well, I do keep this subject in front of my senior patrol leader all the time. I train him to continuously monitor his patrols and to be aware of when changes should be made. My direction to him is that patrols really need to have six to eight Scouts and they need to function on their own without undue oversight from adults or youth leaders. I also counsel them that stability is a good thing and they should think through any changes they're going to make carefully.

You know, frankly, they do a great job of this. I don't want my assistant scoutmasters involved with patrols at all, unless it's to assist with the occasional specific request from the senior patrol leader or patrol leader. I don't want my youth leaders to do the patrol leader's job or interfere in any way or kind of micromanage him. I want them to give the same latitude that I give them.

So that's you know. I give them some very basic advice and I kind of monitor what they're doing and I leave them to it.

The third question: do you move older Scouts out of a regular patrol into a venture patrol and what's the criterion for making that transition? We've done this a couple of different ways over the years and this seems to be the most workable solution that I've found so far. We do have a venture crew that includes every Scout in the troop who's 13 or older.

Now this venture crew has not been set up or officially designated in paperwork or anything like that. This is just a handy handle that we hang on this group of boys who are 13 and older.

But that crew only exists when we have a venture activity planned and that's usually about once a year. They're not a regular patrol in the troop, They're all in their own patrols When it's time to start talking about the venture activity that we're going to do the big trip or something like that.

Then they will get together outside of a meeting- you know a troop meeting or anything like that. They'll elect a crew chief and they'll begin their planning and execution of whatever trip they want to do. Much like a patrol would We just end up calling it a venture crew.

My senior patrol leader, my assistant senior patrol leader, the scribe and the quartermaster and any junior assistant scoutmasters we have at the time are the only youth members who are not attached to a regular patrol. They function as a patrol for outings along with the adults who are attending, in that they plan meals together and things like that.

Other than that, you know these guys, these three or four youth leaders, are busy running the show. So naturally the question comes: well, so if a guy is no longer one of those four guys, what does he do?

Does he go back to a patrol? Usually he's old enough that he's going to be appointed. He's going to be 16,, 17 years old. At that point He's going to be appointed to be a junior assistant scoutmaster and kind of work in with that older boy group. But there have been instances where a guy has left one of those higher leadership positions, goes back and works with a patrol. Hey, no problem.

I would encourage you to look at the patrol method book if you haven't already. We talked a little bit about how to find that in the beginning of the podcast, But I'll tell you one more time: scoutmastertypepadcom, Look over at the right-hand column. You'll see the patrol method book And you'll see how to be able to purchase one, my review and the interview that I did with the authors.

So, Ray, I appreciate the questions, appreciate the comments And Larry sure appreciate the input and helping me answer.