Scoutmaster Podcast 65

And now the old Scoutmaster. Here's a question: What's the difference between a band of Desperados and a patrol of Boy Scouts? Boy Scouts have badges, Oh dear. Hey, this is podcast number 65.

Music playing Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green. Neil Thomas wrote in this week. He said: I really enjoy your podcasts. I'd like to download past episodes, But none are available through iTunes and from your website. It just has the Podcast player.

I'd like to put them on my iPod so I can listen on the go. Any way to download the mp3 files?

Well, yeah, actually, Neil, there is. If you go to the blog and you go to the post that contains the podcast, There should be a little download link there and if you right-click on that link and you click, You know whatever your browser says.

That says you know, save the file, as you should be able to download the mp3 file. Now, with this in mind, I'm looking for somebody who's an iPod or an iTunes expert. The way that my podcast is set up on iTunes, It only has one or two episodes. I'd like to have them all on there and I don't know how to do it and I haven't been able to figure out How.

So if that's your area of expertise, give me a yell and you could sure help me out. Hey, we heard again this week from Kyle real. Real is his real last name. I called him rile last week. Kyle had this to say: first off, another great podcast. Listening to your shows has really given me some clarity and encouragement that I'm helping our troop move in the right direction.

Becoming a boy led troop is not only taking some adjustment from the scouts, but It's taking some adjustment on my part and the adult leadership as well. Listening to you and reading many different blogs on scouting is helping me be a more confident Leader, moving our troop to a much more boy leg organization than we ever had.

Thank you Well, thank you for listening, Kyle. I'm glad we got the name straight. It's a big adjustment for everybody. Just keep on, keep it on, keep moving in that direction and things will work themselves out. The the scouts are really a lot smarter than we are sometimes. It's amazing, and Kyle is a Scoutmaster of troop one six nine in Barnum, Minnesota.

Brian wrote in to say this. Thanks very much for taking the time to answer my questions and comment on the situation. I appreciate your email and I was pleasantly surprised to hear you talk about it on your podcast. You have a great way of explaining things. I appreciate your perspective, as I know you must have a lot of experience and understanding of the scouting movement in addition to the Program. I continue to learn a lot from your podcast and just want to say: keep up the good work.

Well, thanks, Brian. We talked about a question that Brian sent in in the last podcast and I certainly appreciate the feedback in the kind words. Thank you very much. Ray Britton is a Scoutmaster of troop 42 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He wrote in to say this.

It's been a while, So I want to thank you again for your excellent podcast. It continues to be the most informative, helpful and professional podcast I listened to. Also, I'd like to compliment you on your move to the new website.

It's very well done. Well, gee Ray, Thanks, I'm just feeling real good right now. See and ask 528 Got in touch and said I really enjoy your articles and, as a commissioner, I pass them on to the troop.

Well, if you haven't gone over and taken a look at the blog and the website, go to scoutmastercgcom. Scoutmaster, letter C, letter G. It's all one word: scoutmastercgcom. The April newsletter is coming out this week and We're going to be talking about cooking and campfires and Cooking related skills in April and we've got a great giveaway. I wrote a review about the little bug Stove. It's a wood burning stove.

It's very simple. I'm sure a lot of you saw it on the blog. If you haven't Scoutmastercgcom, look up the review on the little bug stove and the manufacturer and inventor is going to Supply one to us for our monthly giveaway in the newsletter.

So you'll want to make sure that you subscribed to the monthly newsletter scoutmastercgcom, you get that and Be able to qualify for the giveaway, and that'll be based on your correct answer to a Relatively simple scouting trivia question. So this time around Got two or three things to talk about in Scoutmastership. In seven minutes or less we're going to talk about the training continuum and just some thoughts about training. Usually I Have a segment about answering questions that come to me by calls or emails.

Well, this time I'm going to start asking some questions. I want to get some feedback from you about two or three subjects that have come up in recent days and See what you have to say.

So I'm going to turn the tables on you a little bit and then I've got a scoutmaster minute to share with you before we leave,

And I think that's plenty for any podcast, don't you? So let's get started, shall we Scoutmaster ship in seven minutes or less. Any Discussion of training for volunteer leaders- if you're a scoutmaster, a cup master, assistant scoutmaster, Den leader or anything like that Committee person- assumes this: that you understand that training is a good thing, and not only a good thing. It's part of your obligation as a volunteer to get yourself trained and to make that a Priority amongst the other activities that you do in scouting.

And here's why Training is important: because you need to understand what you're doing. That's pretty easy, isn't it? And it's also going to make your job easier And it's going to enable you to deliver the promises of scouting.

So that question has been asked and answered Now. It's easier to get trained now than it ever has been in the 27 years I've been involved as a volunteer leader.

Let's go back. Training used to be very event-based, and when I say event-based, this is what I mean.

It happened over here, you know, at a church or a school or at the scout office or the camp, and You had to find out when that was going to happen, And then you had to sign yourself up for it and then you had to head over- and you had to do it now to be Completely trained as a Scoutmaster. Involved at that time, I think, four or five different evening training sessions are spread over as many weeks, and then a weekend training session, and That was how you got trained as a Scoutmaster or an assistant Scoutmaster at that period of time, That's, you know, 27 years ago.

Now The bulk of the training that used to be spread out over those five or six nights is now available online. You can go and you can take the training whenever you want. You can do it at your own speed, and it used to be to become to get a certification in safe swim and Safety afloat that you had to go normally during a summer camp period, Go down and and work with the aquatic staff and get yourself trained in that.

Now it's online. There's some supplemental training Modules that now are required. That includes hazardous weather, health and safety, Like I said, safe swim Defense and safety afloat and, most importantly, and the one that every volunteer- Every adult volunteer in scouting has to have, is youth protection.

Now, compared to what one had to do in the past To get themselves fully trained and what it takes to do today, It's a it's a totally different world and I really I am behind it 100%. I think this online training is a great thing and at least gets people conversant with the general concepts.

Now, The one thing that is missing from some of this is the ability to ask questions Back of the people who are training you. There's some mentoring that doesn't happen and some discussions that don't happen, so we supplement that by Doing things like we're doing right now. I have a podcast Scoutmaster Jerry out there in Oregon. He's got the SMM podcast, PTC media. He's a part of PTC media. They have several podcasts on there That help cub scout leaders and scout leaders alike.

There's the Moms podcast there. There's a lot of blogs. There's actually quite a few scouting blogs out there with some great information. There's tons of online resources- Online scouting service project.

That's a great resource, and if you go to scoutmastercgcom, You look at the links page, You're gonna find all these resources And you'll you'll find other blogs that you can follow and this kind of virtual discussion thing Has been going on for a number of years now and I think it's very useful. I think it's been.

I think it's been helping out a lot. But let's go and look at what makes a trained leader, and I'm working off a document that is Available from the BSA.

It's a PDF document and there'll be a link to this document on the post that contains this podcast. So what makes a trained leader?

And I'm going to concentrate on Scoutmasters and assistant scoutmasters right now, because that's my basic area of expertise. So to become a trained leader, You need to have these boxes checked off. You need to have the fast start training, which is online. Youth protection training, Also online. You need the leader specific training, which is not available online. You need this is scouting, which is available online, and as a Scoutmaster, assistant Scoutmaster, You need introduction to outdoor leader skills.

Also, supplemental online trainings that I've already mentioned: the hazardous weather, Safe swim defense, safety afloat, health and safety training. These are all important pieces of the puzzle, But hazardous weather in the health and safety training is going to be required now with the new tour Plan scheme that's been released within the past couple of months.

So I think it's a. I think that they're important enough that every leader should be conversant with them. Then there's also wood batch. That is what's called advanced leader training, and that scheme has trained has changed a great deal In the past quarter century to so.

The trend has been to move from Training being an option, from training being difficult to get to, and now we've also supplemented our training schemes Unofficially with things like the efforts that I explained earlier, that the podcasts and the and the online resources. Now, if I can look in the crystal ball for a moment and think about what's going to happen over the next five or six Years as far as training volunteer leaders is concerned, I Can see that taking advantage of the internet is going to be a key piece of that. Any district, any council has people who are just wonderful trainers, who've been at it for a long time and know how to get the message across, And they do it in the least painful way possible.

If you've been to a lot of training sessions, you know what I'm talking about, And these resources Should be available to anyone in the country. They should be available to the most remote district or council. They should be available to every single volunteer who signs a form And getting to know a little bit more about that and getting those resources kind of organized and and put out there.

Well, that's part of the mission, that Of all the folks who are online and blogging and podcasting and that sort of thing. What you'll hear us talk about a lot, and I'm going to talk about too in the next segment, Is the necessity of hearing back and getting feedback about things.

It's very difficult to guess what people are thinking or how people are reacting And you know if you study the whole online milieu and having a podcast or having a blog or having a website, You know the amount of people that access the information And, as compared to the amount of people who react by sending an email or, Uh, putting a comment on a blog, It's- it's just miniscule- Much less than one in a hundred people who listen to or read things, React to them or comment on them. If we're going to build something- It's useful- and build something it continues to be a good resource for volunteer leaders- We're going to need to get it into the idea of everyone joining in the conversation, So asking questions, Making comments, supplying information- That's a very important thing to do now. I haven't mentioned yet Email groups and things like that. I know that there's a number of them out there- Email groups and things.

I think they're fine, I think they work well. I think they can be very useful for people.

I think also that they have a pretty predictable lifespan And there's a pretty predictable arc of the way discussions go And and I don't see them as being the ideal way to deliver this kind of information. So what is training going to look like in the future?

Well, I think it's going to be this sort of thing. I think it's going to be an exchange, and to make it an exchange, We need to hear from you.

So if you follow podcasts and blogs, make sure that the authors hear from you and that you help contribute to the conversation.

Email, that is, folks, and here's an answer to one of your emails. Well, like I promised, I'm going to turn the tables on you because I've got four questions for you. All four of these have come up over the last week or so. People have emailed me about them.

Some of them are a little sensitive, So we don't want to discuss anything specific about them, But I think that, in general, these may be difficulties or situations that have come up Many, many times before and I'd like to hear from you- experienced scouts about you, how you've handled them. Now, no doubt I have my opinions and answers, But if my theory that I explained earlier is correct, A conversation is going to be the best way to solve a lot of these things and to bring them to resolution.

So here's four questions for you to answer. There's two ways for you to do it.

I'm going to tell you now, and then I will tell you again later as well. You can email me at scoutmaster cg. Scoutmaster cg At Verizon net, and you can also call and leave a voicemail. And this is the way you do it: use any telephone call, 484 734 0002.

You'll hear an announcement from me, and then you can leave a voicemail. Answer: Okay, are you ready? Put your thinking caps on question number one.

What happens when you take on the position of scoutmaster and the retiring scoutmaster doesn't seem to want to go away? Hmm, That's a toughie.

So, yep, you've agreed to become the scoutmaster, But the retiring scoutmaster seems like he's planning the next couple of years of events and he's kind of taking on More responsibility than you thought that he would, and looks like he's going to hang around for a while, Or at least he's going to try and influence what you do And you might not necessarily be in agreement with the way that he's uh conducting business at this point. So what do you do there?

How does that work? I'm sure somebody out there has been in the situation before and has found an answer for it, And these are the kinds of things I think can really be useful, because, you know, If you're brand new to a situation like this and you've never been through it before, it can take weeks or months To get everything sorted out, and somebody who's been through it before might be able to really help you out.

So if the scoutmaster that is going to retire doesn't look like he's really going to retire, He wants to kind of haunt the troop and call the shots, even with a new scoutmaster in place. What are we going to do about that? That's question number one. Question number two: A scout makes some bad decisions and he finds himself in trouble. He comes to the attention of the authorities or maybe gets suspended from school, And these are all for actions that he took outside of scouting. It's a pretty familiar story: Good kid Made a couple of bad decisions, ends up getting in trouble.

Now, these things all happened outside of scouting. So what do we do?

How do we react? What's the proper way for a troop to handle this?

So there's a couple of parts to this question. Should the troop do anything, And if so, what?

And how should the troop handle communicating Their take on, the situation to the rest of the parents, because they're going to find out about the whole thing No doubt You know how it works. So that's a good question, uh, and it's a difficult one, but that's question number two.

What happens when a scout misbehaves outside of scouting? What kind of a reaction should a unit have to that?

The third question is a little more fun, A little more, a little more lighthearted. So let's say you have a scout troop or a venture crew in the middle of the country.

Um, you know, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma. You're getting to philmont, going to northern tear, going to sea base Is not really an economic alternative for you.

So where do you go for a good high adventure experience? What kind of programs have you seen that maybe are run by a council or a camp, And what kind of programs has your troop participated in?

Now, when i'm talking about high adventure, I'm talking about a multi-day trek, and that's how i'm defining it. There's no official definition of it, but that's how i'm defining it: a multi-day trek, You know, a backpacking trip that lasts four or five days, a cycling trip, a canoe trip, something like that? Um, and and if you've got a better definition or something to do Or something to offer in that wise, do let me know.

Now, a lot of uh, summer camps have programs for older scouts, And that's not really what we're looking for. Those are relatively easy to find.

What we're looking for are high adventure treks in the central part of the country That would be easily available to people with, you know, some reasonably limited means, Who aren't going to be able to afford a trip to one of the coasts or to philmont or northern tears Or something of, uh, that level of complexity and expense. Have you ever had an email battle within your unit?

You know what i'm talking about, right? Somebody sends you know kind of a hotheaded email and and they uh Give it to a big distribution list and, Oh, my goodness, and then it causes all kinds of problem. There's all kinds of replies and the and the dust has kicked up pretty good.

How do you put that kind of thing to bed? I know this happens in more places than scouting.

But you know I get questions about this with scout units and you know people getting, uh, people getting upset, deciding to uh post it In an email and then trying to get a lot of other people upset- How, how do you manage this? So there's four questions for you, and i'm going to remind you how to get in touch with your answers After this.

That's right, it's time for a Scoutmaster's minute.

Well, this past weekend we had an eagle court of honor with our troop, Two of our guys having reached the rank of eagle, and we had a presentation for them and, uh, you know what I got to say a few words. Surprising, isn't it? Yeah, I know. Uh, I tried to keep it brief. This is what I had to share with everybody who attended our eagle court of honor. Boys joined scouting as they begin to leave childhood and enter the years of transition into adulthood.

During these years, they're both predictable and Kind of unpredictable. We think times have changed and that things are so radically different, But boys are still much like they were a century ago when scouting started. They have the same basic interests, talents and needs. They act on the same basic instincts and motivations. As a crowd, they're pretty predictable.

But as individuals, Well, you never can tell. At this point in their lives, They wake up in a new world every morning. Who knows what they'll be thinking and doing today. Yesterday they may have been really passionate about skateboarding or something like that, and tomorrow they'll have their heart set on a career in medicine.

I mean, who can tell? Scouting accepts all this uncertainty and presents boys with a set of surmountable obstacles that help them ask the right questions And guide them towards the right answers. Scouting provides a safe environment to exercise real responsibility, where failure has real consequences And where success is rewarded, and it's rewarded by the satisfaction of Scouts doing something for themselves And serving the interests of others. Each one of them is going to make their own way, But only four percent of boys who become scouts make it to an Eagle court of honor. Over the years, our scouts have gone from here to do some pretty remarkable things. They've become college professors and army captains and engineers and teachers and television personalities, lawyers, executives, doctors, salesmen and tradesmen.

As diverse as all those pursuits are, they share some common characteristics: They've also become decent, contributing citizens with a sense of service and decent human beings with a sense of compassion. Now, that's our measure of success and that's our aim. Our Eagle scouts stand to stride their futures. It'll be some time before we know what they'll become, But they approach the future having succeeded, having proven to themselves They have what it takes. This badge, this medal they receive today are symbols of this achievement And as symbols, they're a reminder that these young men can do whatever they set out to accomplish. They're also a reminder of their responsibility to serve and to put the interests of others.