Scoutmaster Podcast 6

And now to you, Scoutmaster. We're going hiking next Saturday. Now take this note to your mother and get it signed. And we got the note signed. Went down to the Army-Navy store, bought it out.

Had picks, axes, shovels, everything. And I had all this stuff, man, which any guy, normal guy, going to war would have. You know, except for the gun and the bazooka.

Got up 4.30 in the morning before the crack of dawn. Loaded down with cans of beans and matches. You know, the blue tip Ohio matches. I had a little manual. I'm all ready to dig a hole and put the logs down in the fire and take them beans on the skillet and do it upright.

Had USN forks and knives and everything. We were really cool, man. And everybody's all dressed with the packs on the back. And we bought brogues, you know, heavy marching shoes. We were ready to go on a hike. Went right out there and caught a trolley car.

Hey, that's Bill Cosby talking about being a Boy Scout in the beautiful city of Philadelphia. Hopping on the trolley and hiking in the wilds of Fairmount Park.

Not real wild, but a great little story. Hey, this is podcast number six. Hey. Hey. Hi, this is Clarke Green. Welcome back to the podcast. I want to tell you about a web resource that I think you'll enjoy. It's called theinquiry.net, and I'll have a link to it on the Scoutmaster blog at scoutmaster.typepad.com. It is a huge historical resource put together by Rick Seymour, and he has some great advice and also kind of an endless number of program ideas and outlines and things of interest to scouts. And Rick features old school scouting, so look for lots of wood skills and things like that. It's just an amazing piece of work, and congratulations, Rick, on putting together something that has been very valuable to me personally, and I hope we can spread the word a little bit with the podcast.

Pretty full slate today. Let's see. In the Scoutmastership from seven minutes, I'm going to read you an essay from Andy, the Net Commissioner at Ask Andy. Then talk a little bit about something we call the moccasin telegraph.

If you don't know about the moccasin telegraph, well, we'll get you informed. Then we're going to have part one of a feature about moving your troop from being adult-led to youth-led. I hope you'll find it valuable. We're going to do that over the next several podcasts, have little installments, and then we'll end up with a Scoutmaster's Minute, so let's get ourselves moving.

Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. Andy is a commissioner, and he has an online column where he answers questions that people send in about various scouting conundrums, and every once in a while he offers a little essay. I really love this essay, and I think it's an important thing for everybody because it's a good debunking of that word, Scoutmaster.

He says this, If you're a regular reader of my column, you already know about tyrants and tin gods, renegades and recalcitrants, bullies and belligerents, dictators, martinettes, and the world's oldest patrol leaders masquerading as Scoutmasters.

And thank goodness that for every one of them, there are a thousand more dedicated scouting leaders who get it right. But how did this happen? How did we get so far away from true north in these cases? Aside from warped mentalities seeking out this position in order to foment their brand of meanness, is there some sort of cultural error or acquiescence that has abetted this? I think there might be.

A hundred years ago, while Baden-Powell was formulating how the Scout movement would be structured and organized, and what nomenclature would be used, one of the decisions he needed to make was this. What designation do we use in referring to the adult volunteer who guides and mentors the boys and young men in the troop? Since he considered scouting for boys largely a system of education, it was a natural and small step for him to borrow from the educational system used in Britain at the time. This would aid in understanding the role of that adult volunteer.

So, to parallel the role of the male teacher who was commonly referred to as a schoolmaster, the very natural choice was scoutmaster. Its meaning in the time and country of war origin was straightforward.

Scoutmaster equals a teacher of scouts. When the Boy Scout movement crossed the pond to America, some things remained intact and others changed, including the scout oath and law, but the term scoutmaster remained even though in America there was no educational equivalent.

Teachers in America were and still are called teachers, not schoolmasters. The decision to use scoutmaster instead of a designation appropriate to American culture proved unfortunate because scoutmaster was not instantly translated into teacher of scouts. Instead, it was translated as master of scouts.

And to Americans, master meant, and still means, the one in charge, the boss, and so on. The true meaning became lost in the translation. Even Webster's, when they define scoutmaster, gets it not quite right.

The adult leader in charge of a troop of Boy Scouts is what Webster defines scoutmaster as. In fact, the United States is the only English-speaking country in which the now-anachronistic scoutmaster remains.

The Scout Association in the United Kingdom and Scouts Australia have both for many years referred to the position as scout leader. In Canada, it's a scouter, or a troop scouter.

On top of this, two movies very popular in their times reinforce the notion that the adult is in charge of the troop and direct leader of the boys in it.

In effect, the adult patrol leader. The first, in 1953, was Mr. Scoutmaster, starring Clifton Webb, as kind of Mr. Belvedere, fuss-budget personality type. The second was produced in 1966 and is currently enjoying a kind of a resurgence, at least among scouters.

It's Follow Me Boys, starring Fred McMurray. In this latter film, someone did pay attention to accuracy, but the non-initiated will still come away with the impression that the scoutmaster is the day-to-day leader of a troop of Boy Scouts. On top of these, we had the popular one-panel comic, The Little Scouts, by cartoonist Ronald Coe, featuring a rotund and clueless scoutmaster with his bunch of Little Scouts.

This comic thrived in the 1930s and through most of the 40s, and although it did much to popularize Boy Scouting, it did little to dissuade folks from the notion that Boy Scouts are led by adults. Speaking of comics, we can't overlook Charles M. Schultz's Snoopy of Peanuts fame, who became the Beagle Scout leader of Woodstock and his little friends way back in 1974.

Again, a depiction of one large leader and a bunch of little followers. Bottom line, just about everything in American culture that's referenced scouting has done so by depicting the scoutmaster as a master of scouts. Is it any wonder that we seem to perpetuate this fiction in troop upon troop around the country? So, what to do?

Let's begin, first of all, by throwing the rascals out. Got a scoutmaster that just doesn't get it? Get rid of him. Oh, you're worried about hurting his feelings? Just stop and consider how he's hurting the lives of boys and young men, sometimes permanently. If that doesn't tell you that he needs to be done, no words of mine are likely to help you grow a spine and do what's right. Worried about who will take his place? Maybe by taking action, another parent will realize somebody has a spine, and on that basis, step up and be counted too. Second, let's from now on put foremost in our minds that scoutmaster doesn't mean master of anything.

In fact, if we substitute servant for master, we'd be a lot closer to the truth of the matter. Even better, let's substitute teacher or mentor or guide.

This is what scoutmastering is all about. As Baden-Powell himself put it, it's being an older brother to the boy. Find the best in the boy and bring it out. So that's Andy's little essay. And I've got to tell you, I think he hit the nail right on the head.

Now, his advice to dump him seems pretty harsh. But I want you to consider the source. Andy has a lot of years of experience as a commissioner. And was a scout as a boy and an Eagle Scout.

You know, very experienced fellow. Commissioners are there to sort out problems. The first thing they learn by hard experience is that problem people don't change. They really have to go.

They can't be trained or treated or threatened or cajoled into changing. They simply have to step aside or be dumped. And that's a sad but true fact. Most scoutmasters are valuable, wonderful people who do the best they can.

And it takes an experienced eye in about three minutes to tell the difference between troops that are functioning well and ones that are in trouble because they have somebody who misapprehends the term scoutmaster.

Just a little food for thought. I think, like I said, Andy really hit the nail on the head with that one. Do check him out at Ask Andy, his online column.

This has to be the truth, folks, because there is no way anyone could make this up. So when the troops at summer camp every evening, the patrols will sit down and do entries in their patrol log.

And then after that's done, we'll have the patrol leaders get together with the patrol leaders council and kind of, you know, do a little reflection on the day and see what's going on. And it's always a good time for the adult leaders to kind of catch up and see what the scouts have been up to all day, handle any little difficulties or problems that may have arisen.

And one time this past summer was particularly memorable. Thank you. One of the patrol leaders mentioned that as an entry in their patrol log that one of the fellows in the patrol was really kind of uncomfortable with the snake that was apparently had taken up residence under his tent platform. Now we use, you know, wooden tent platforms and pitch wall tents on them.

And the scouts stay in those throughout the week. And this kind of caught my attention because I've mentioned before, we have one very interesting species of snake at our camp, the copperhead. So after the patrol leaders council dismissed, very quietly took another adult leader and we went to visit that tent platform.

Well, sure enough, it was the snake I suspected, a copperhead, which is a poisonous snake. So while the scouts were off to the showers, we kind of disassembled the tent platform and sent for the nature fellows who have the prerequisite equipment to extract a snake from the tent platform.

And we noodled around for a while and finally we got the thing and then we took it way out in the woods and released it. And the scout was no longer uncomfortable because there was a snake underneath of that.

So fast forward to the next day and one of my assistants is walking down the trail towards our campsite and ahead of him are three or four scouts from another troop.

And he was listening to them relate the story of this giant poisonous snake that was found in one of the campsites last night and that the scoutmaster had to kill it and, you know, had to rescue several young scouts from its grasp of its harbor jobs.

And apparently had skinned it and made it into a hat band. You know what we call that at our camp? We call it the moccasin telegraph. We call it the moccasin telegraph.

For the next several podcasts, we're going to be discussing how do you change your troop from being an adult-led enterprise to a scout-led enterprise. It's not as difficult as you may think, and mostly what you have to deal with are just basically a few unfounded fears on the part of adults.

Placing the leadership of a scout troop in the hands of the scouts, getting a troop into the habit of youth leadership, it's an excellent piece of service that you can do. But before all this can happen, the adult leadership has to understand exactly what they're trying to accomplish, and they need to define their relationship to the scouts, and they need to overcome any reservations they might have with investing the scouts with actual responsibility and leadership. I think the single most important concept for us all as adult leaders to really get and to maintain, and one that I mention very often, is that a scout troop belongs to scouts. It does not belong to adults.

The adults are there to facilitate, to administer things, but not to run the troop. Scouting is not a program that we prepare and present for the scouts.

It's not a program that we do in cooperation with the scouts. I would even go so far as to say that. It is a program that scouts do for themselves. It's not a curriculum or a set of object lessons or useful skills.

It is an experiential program that scouts do for themselves in self-motivation, self-government, self-realization. Adult leaders aren't chief executive officers. They're not the captain of the team. They're not the sergeant of the platoon. They are coaches and mentors to the actual leaders of a scout troop, and that's the scouts.

Now, coaches and mentors, they help develop skills. They provide motivation. They provide inspiration. But they can only observe the game being played from the sidelines. Two common fears keep a lot of troops in the hands of adults. First of all, we fear that given broad decision-making capacities, scouts will make bad decisions. And I am here to tell you that they will occasionally make a bad decision. But we're going to be training and mentoring them. We're going to encourage them to find the proper approach and to learn from their mistakes.

And we're going to show them how to get things back on track. We're going to review things and talk about them. We're going to work hard on making decent leaders out of the scouts, wise, mature leaders who make good decisions.

The other main thing I think that people fear is that the scouts, if they are given the keys to the asylum, are going to just have the wrong emphasis about everything. I mean, why would they do any of the more or less difficult or challenging things in scouting? If they can just make a decision not to do them.

Why go on camping trips if we can just maybe have pizza parties? Why go to a backpacking trip if we can just go to an amusement park? Well, the answer for that is simple.

Boys don't have to be forced into scouting. They are doing it voluntarily. And they're doing it because it's something that appeals to them. They want to go camping and backpacking. They want to do the challenging and difficult things. That's what they like about it. They might kill a few of the leader's sacred cows that really don't amount to a hill of beans.

How's that for a mixed metaphor? Now, once we've settled on the idea that this is something that we want to do and that we should not be afraid of doing, and we understand that we're going to help youth develop into mature, intelligent leaders who make decent decisions and who know their program, we have to think about what really matters.

Remember the sacred cows and the hills of beans? Advancement in ranks and earning merit badges and making eagle all recognize something about scouts. I mean, it means that they've passed through a number of challenges and experiences, and as laudable as they are, the results are not really the end in themselves. Scouting is more about the process that leads to the results.

Scouts will learn some useful skills, but they're not the whole story, are they? What they take away from the experience is confident self-knowledge, the ability to work well with other people. So, I mean, focus on creating and preserving an atmosphere where scouts can have those experiences and forget about the rest of the stuff. And I'm serious about that.

Forget about it. Listen, you're going to fear, as I did, that the scouts won't do a very good job of things. And if they don't do a very good job of things and they do things poorly, that that's going to let down all the other scouts, and so I should really step in and do things better, and you get into this little circle of responsibility. And you think, well, I can't let this troop suffer under bad leadership. I need to step in and I need to fix everything.

And that can really sabotage the entire enterprise. I mean, I've watched troop meetings that, in my humble opinion, were really poorly planned, poorly presented, ones that adults certainly could have done much better. I've worried that my scouts were not prepared properly for outings, and I wondered if we should step in and maybe prepare them better. I have learned that even if scouts have conducted what I may see as a lackluster troop meeting and planned what I may consider ill-conceived outings, what is really important is that they have done this under their own leadership. They're doing and learning things that their peers outside of scouting aren't.

And my direct responsibility as a scoutmaster is not the quality of the program. It's not the number of advancements or the number of scouts that we have advancing, or any of the other, you know, 700 numbers that we are habitually paying attention to. But our real job is to inspire youth leadership towards achieving the real goals of scouting. And that is really the only thing that matters. Boy Scouts!

Boy Scouts!

Boy Scouts! That's right, it's time. For a Scoutmaster's Minute.

A scout is cheerful. This one's easy. Of course a scout is cheerful. Most boys the age of scouts, they're always cheerful. Yeah, okay, when they become teenagers, yeah, I gotcha. But a scout looks on the bright side of life. He cheerfully does the things that come in his way, and he tries to make other people cheerful too. Watch them. Observe, my friend. And you will see that this is what they usually are.

It's the natural state of most boys. They could be sad and tired and frustrated or afraid. But given the opportunity and a little bit of time, they resume that cheerful demeanor pretty quickly.

Cheerfulness comes from a lot of opportunities. Opportunity to challenge themselves rather than having a challenge thrust on them. Letting them choose.

Letting them choose some of these things. Opportunity to explore and discover this incredible world of ours. To form and cement friendships with one another. To experience nature in that wonderful, glorious outdoor world. And the opportunity to sit and think. To work, to play, and sometimes just to sit.

There's enough demands on our time. We don't need to have every minute of our day program, do we? Sometimes we just want to sit. Most of the opportunities will arise naturally in the course of scouting.

You know, we go camping. We have meetings. We do things. Most of these opportunities are going to arise naturally. What else we have to do as scout leaders is make sure that nobody stands in the way of those opportunities.

And our guys are going to be cheerful. Because A, it's the natural state of most boys. And B, a scout is cheerful. So that's the Scoutmasters podcast number six.