Scoutmaster Podcast 72

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. What did the necrotips say to the scout hat? I have no idea.

What did the necrotips say to the scout hat? You go on ahead, I'll hang around here. This is podcast number 72.

Music. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green. Hey, if you've visited the blog within the past two or three weeks, you notice the caption contest. It was kind of an accident.

I got a funny picture from somebody and I posted it on the blog and I said, hey, we need a caption for this. And that turned into a caption contest, which was very well received, and now that's turned into a weekly feature on the blog.

If you have a humorous scouting picture that you think could be improved with a really funny caption, send it to me and we'll post it on the blog one week and we'll give everybody a week to come up with the best caption and then you can vote for your favorite caption and then we will name a winner and that winner, as well as the contributor of the picture, will receive the coveted Kiber Pass. Now I can't go into the entire history and tradition and origin of the Kiber Pass on the podcast.

It would take too much time, but I have recorded it on the blog and I want you to go and take a look at it at scoutmastercgcom when you have a chance And participate in the caption contest. It's great fun and I wanted to mention that because my first message came from Bill McFarlane, who says: I got my Kiber Pass last night and I wanted to pass along my undying gratitude for it. It's a great idea and I love the humor. Hmm, Love the humor.

I don't know that the Kiber Pass is all that funny, but okay, Both the letter and the pass were laminated this morning and will take a place of honor in my equipment for summer camp this and every year. Well, thanks, Bill. That's Bill McFarlane wrote in. He was a recipient of a Kiber Pass for the contribution of a humorous scouting photo And thanks very much, Bill. I'm glad that you enjoyed and will enjoy the honor of being a Kiber Pass recipient.

Tony Ratzel is an assistant scoutmaster in Troop 457 in Memphis, Tennessee, and he wrote in to say this: Clark, I love the podcast as well as the articles. They all help. If every scoutmaster could hear all the podcasts and read the articles, it would be an outstanding training program.

I kind of liked it better when you didn't have so many sponsors. But hey, I realize why and it's not too much of a distraction.

Well, thanks for writing in, Tony. Thanks for the kind words.

We have to keep the doors open and the lights on at the Scoutmaster blog and podcast facility, So we certainly do appreciate it when people do patronize our sponsors. Jamie Humphries wrote in and said: I just got the patrol method book this week and read it in a couple of nights. It's a really great book. As I get a new Troop started this fall, it will be the reference for my assistant scoutmaster and committee. Thanks for putting up the review and reference.

Well, Jamie is talking about a book that everybody needs. Every scout leader who's involved with the Scout Troop at least would greatly benefit from, And that's a book called Working the Patrol Method. It's by Rob Ferris and Harry Wimbrow. They were interviewed on a podcast last year.

We have a review. It's a fantastic piece of work, a fantastic reference for working the patrol method in the 21st century.

So do check out scoutmastercgcom and make sure you get a look at the book. And that segues into what we're spending the rest of the podcast involved with and that is a interview with author, Mark Wray.

Now Mark is the author of the scoutmaster's other handbook and the Eagle Court of Honor book, and another one that you might not have heard of but you will have heard of by the end of this podcast. I really enjoyed talking with Mark last week. He's a great guy And I am happy to welcome him to the podcast.

So let's get started, shall we Music?

Today we're talking with Mark Wray, And Mark is the author of the scoutmaster's other handbook, the Eagle Court of Honor book. Now, a lot of you know about those. You've probably read his articles in Scouting Magazine or in the National Eagle Scouts Association's Eagle Letter- And we're going to talk about another book that Mark wrote about. That you probably don't know about, but you should in just a moment.

Hey, Mark, how you doing? I'm doing great.

How about you, Clark? Oh, we're doing all right.

You're down there in Louisville, Kentucky, Is that right? That's correct.

So down there in Louisville it must be about as hot as it is here in Kennett Square this morning. Yeah, it's definitely summer camp season. It's summer camp weather. Let's say that. I'll give you that.

So tell me a little bit about your background in Scouting, Mark. Okay, I joined Scouting in the third grade- Back when Scouting still started in the third grade- And went all through the program in Oxford and Mississippi and became an Eagle Scout.

I worked with my home troop through college and then, after I graduated from my bachelor's program, my master's program decided that I would give professional Scouting a try, And so I was a district executive for about five years, both in Fort Myers, Florida, and here in Louisville, And enjoyed that a lot. But as I went along I realized that the things that I was really good at and enjoyed were sort of the side projects more than the fundraising and the recruiting that are key to the district effectiveness job, And so I jumped out of that and back into the volunteer ranks And then an adult volunteer for about 25 years I guess, mostly with Boy Scouting. I was a Scoutmaster for five years And I did a lot of things there and currently I'm on our troop committee, also on our PAC committee and chair our Venturing Crew committee.

So I'm involved in all three sites of the program right now. That's a lot of hat, And a few others as well. Not all that uncommon out there in the world of Scouting where a couple of different hats.

So somewhere along the way you decided that we needed another Scoutmaster's Handbook. What about? I guess a couple of things. First of all, especially when I was a district executive, I would look around at a lot of Scoutmasters and realize that a lot of them were struggling, Some were disorganized, some were going it alone and really didn't have the tools to recruit and empower volunteers.

A lot of folks get really focused on one or two of the methods of Scouting and the exclusion of the others, So they end up with a really unbalanced program. Then, when I looked at the Scoutmaster Handbook- the last several editions- I realized that it's intended primarily for new Scoutmasters, which is an intentional decision that National has made and makes sense, because those are the folks that go to the Scout Shop and are looking for resources and they need to know the basics: What is a patrol, What is a troop, What is a board review and so forth- But there's not a lot in there that talks about so what do you do when things go wrong? And that's the sort of information that I wanted to give. And also, over the years I just picked up a lot of ideas that I thought were valuable, that I wanted to be able to share with folks.

What's some of the common feedback you get or common questions you get about the book? A lot of what I get is from experienced leaders who say I didn't think I'd find anything useful in here, but there were really some things that I found useful.

I think a common reaction is: wow. This lets me know that I'm not alone.

Everybody runs into these same issues that I've been dealing with, Because you know, one of the things that's interesting about working in a Scout unit is you often really have tunnel vision and you just know what's happening in your unit. You go around the table, you see people at camp freeze and so forth, But you rarely go to another troop's meeting and see it in action. But you don't realize that everybody's dealing with common struggles. It takes a little bit of an ego to be a unit leader. Whether you're a Cub master or a Scoutmaster or whatever. We're not real likely to go looking for help a lot of times.

Is there a particular part of the book that you've gotten a lot of comments on or that has been really relevant for folks? One of the sections of the book, and also something that one I've shot a film on, has really seemed to be important to folks is this idea of achieving some balance in your program. I guess it's a two-star process. First of all is remembering the distinction between the aims and the methods. The aims are citizenship, character and fitness. The methods are camping and uniforming and advancement and adult association and all those sorts of things.

And some folks get those mixed up and are so focused on teaching kids how to camp that they forget about developing character. You've got these eight methods and you've got to come up with some sort of balance.

You can have an extreme where you're so focused on developing youth leaders that you're totally delegating leadership to the PLC, which is great, but if they drop the ball and you don't go camping all year, things are really out of whack. Or the other extreme: is the Scott Masters really hands-on, has a really really great outdoor program, but his junior leaders are figureheads?

Do we spend enough time on that in leadership training? Do you think? I don't think we do.

I've been on a task force at the national level that specifically looking at how we need the character development aim. We don't spend a lot of time talking about character.

We spend a lot of time talking about camping techniques and the administration and so forth. We don't really talk a lot about intentionally teaching character.

One of the things that we have done at Fillmont is to hand out a worksheet that has each of the values from the oath and the law. So we say, okay, come up with a list of ways that you can intentionally teach the value of thrift or the value of hearing loss.

And guys will say, well, you could do a Scott Master Minute. But when you get beyond that, it really gets challenging.

When you start brainstorming, you think, well, there's some really neat stuff we could do. Talking about obedient: Well, if we're going to be obedient and we're going to set an example, we probably should take our radar detectors out of our cars when we go on camping trips. Yeah, there you go. That hit though Exactly.

And then somebody else said, well, with trustworthy, how about we don't have any padlocks on our footlockers at summer camps? There are some things that we could intentionally do that would model and teach these values more than just giving a Scott Master Minute at the end of the meeting or repeating the oath and the law at the opening.

And the other thing is you say, well, they get the values naturally in the program And that's true, But that doesn't mean that we can't push it along a little bit more. Tell me about your philosophy of working with youth leaders and what you think are the most important two or three bullet points for people to understand about that.

I think the first, most important point is to have a really good understanding of where your youth leaders are and come up alongside them and provide them the support that they need. I had one senior patrol leader years ago who was really a natural born leader- such a thing- and we would spend 20 minutes on the phone talking about what was going to happen Thursday night. In the course of that conversation he was prepared for that meeting and I didn't really have to worry. We've had other senior patrol leaders.

He almost had to stand beside and whisper: okay, now it's time to do this, Now it's time to do that, And you've got to figure out which approach works for that one scout rather than just having a one-size-fits-all approach. One of the more interesting statements is: you point out that youth leadership is a method and not an aim.

What does that mean? It's interesting.

I think if you interviewed a lot of Scoutmasters, they would say that creating leaders is what we're all about, and it's really not because a lot of our kids are not going to be quote-unquote leaders in their life. They're going to be followers and we want them to be good followers just as much as we want them to be good leaders.

And when we focus so much on the youth leadership method, I think that's where the other pieces of the program can fall to the side. One of the hardest achievements for an adult leader is being able to first see that that's important and then actually be able to make it happen.

Let me add just one other thing on working with youth leaders that I think is really important. Sometimes, when there's a work in the action, when it's time for the closing and nothing's happening, our first reaction is to jump in there and fix the situation. But unless somebody's bleeding, sometimes we just need to let things happen, And that's where leadership is formed.

When those kids have to deal with those situations, We need to give them the same opportunity to figure that stuff out as we've had, and sometimes that means not fixing it. If you're sort of trigger happy, maybe you've got to count to 10 or count to 50 before you do anything. No, I'm pretty trigger happy, Mark, I don't know about you. I wanted to ask you about rethinking the ideal patrol size. You talk about the difference between what's recommended as a patrol size and what really works. The program tells you that eight scouts is the ideal patrol.

If you go to Wood Badge, if you go to NYLT, that's the ideal. The problem these days is that our kids so often are so over-scheduled. I don't think in most cases kids are making as many troop meetings and outings as they did when you and I were in scouts. Suddenly, your eight scout patrol gets reduced to three scouts or four scouts or two scouts on a camp out.

What people seem to usually do is say: well, we'll combine the shark patrol and the flaming air patrol for this one camp out and have a provisional patrol which gets the job done, but it destroys the patrol identity. My argument is: one way to address that problem is, instead of having eight guys in the patrol, have 12 guys in the patrol, let's say, with the idea that, okay, if half of them don't show up on the camp out, then you've got six and that's enough to get the job done without having to mess up the patrol's identity.

I think that's really wise. I think things have changed significantly, that we really need to look at patrol structure in a different way. The other book that we mentioned in the introduction was the Eagle Court of Honor book.

How did that book come about? That again goes back to my district executive days. One of the things you do as a DE is go to a lot of courts of honor, and I went to some that were really good and some that were pretty horrific. Two cases in particular that sort of crystallized the need for me One. I went to a court of honor where there were two scouts being recognized. Somebody from the troop committee got up at the end of the ceremony and read all the congratulatory letters that one of the scouts had received.

Then he read the other set, which of course were identical word for word to the first set. Oh man, I've read them all. I have never experienced that before. Kind of difficult courts of honor before, but that's a new winner right there.

And then there was another one, and this was actually in my district. There was a set of twins who were both receiving their badges And for some reason in this ceremony they had the guys go up on stage at the very beginning and stand at attention. Oh no, Oh, I know how this goes.

Okay, go ahead. I'm sorry. At some point in the ceremony the first one passed out. Oh, no, Almost, don't cue. The other one passed out, Oh man, Oh, Yeah, Yeah.

Well, that would be two good reasons to write a book right there. A third reason came up after I wrote it, and I had no idea about this, but there are many, many troops out there that basically delegate the whole process to the family.

Yeah, How about that? Huh, Yeah. I've heard from I don't know how many parents who said: I've never even been to an Eagle Court of Honor, Mm-hmm, And they want me to plan this thing.

Help, Yeah, What, What of what? The book is a collection of very practical advice and then some scripts and things like that as well.

Mm-hmm, What's your best advice for somebody who's looking at scheduling and presenting in an Eagle Court of Honor? To go on my website. I've got what's called the Eagle Court of Honor Backdater. It's a free interactive tool where you plug in the date that you're going to hold the Court of Honor and it tells you basically everything that you need to do, from the board review date to sending thank you notes, But it also helps put things in perspective, Like you need to reserve the place You're going to hold the ceremony first before you submit an invitation. You don't need to worry about getting the programs printed until much later in the process, for example Mm-hmm.

So it gives you kind of a to-do list and helps you make it a little bit simpler. Exactly, yeah, Okay, Because I'll make sure to have a link to that.

What kind of feedback do you get about the Eagle Court of Honor book? People are thrilled.

What I like about it- and I hope this is what people like about it as well- is I sort of talk through the parts of the ceremony and then I give people a bunch of mix and match segments that they could plug in to create a ceremony unique for their recipient. I think every Eagle Court of Honor needs to be different because every recipient is different.

Let's see if we can kill a couple of urban legends of scouting here real quick. There's no official format that you have to follow or anything like that, And you don't even have to have a court of honor. You are an Eagle Scout once you pass the board review. That's the second Urban Legend is there's no kind of incantation or ceremonial something or other that happens at a court of honor that makes somebody into an Eagle Scout. That's probably when you look at the certificate that comes from National. The date that appears there is the board of review date, because that's when you become an Eagle Scout.

The third book is maybe not quite so well known as the first two. It's called Growing Up Right, Growing Up Strong- The Parents' Guide for Scouting.

How did that come about? It's part of the Scout Parents' Initiative, which was actually started by a longtime scouter named Gerald Longhorn passed away a couple of years ago. He had this vision that parents needed to be more a part of the scouting program And basically what we wanted to do in the book is help people understand how scouting supports the family.

So I interviewed parents of Scouts literally from around the world, because we tracked some folks down who have been involved in scouting as expatriates in the military and talked about what scouting does for kids, what scouting does for families and what scouting does for parents. In that sort of a call to action of what parents can do for scouting, Put together sort of a little decision tree that folks who are thinking about getting involved can use to figure out how the best could serve.

So it's got categories- How much time do you have available? Do you prefer to work with your son, with adults, bookkeeping and finance- and then it sort of directs them from those attributes to particular positions in the unit where they could serve. And this book is free.

We can download it as a PDF file. There'll be a link on the post that contains this podcast. You made it up to the National Jamboree last year.

I did, And what did you do there? I was on the staff at the National Eagle Scout Association booth.

What was happening at the booth? But the real highlight was that just about every day, we had at least one nationally prominent Eagle Scout on hand.

Oh, okay, And those guys were extremely gracious to sign autographs, to answer questions. Some of them would get up on the podium and speak for a few minutes, And then the real highlight was that we presented the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award to Colonel Charles McGee, who is one of the original Tuskegee Airmen from World War II.

Planning on going in 2013 up to the summit, I think. So I'm excited about what's going on there and really want to get a look at it firsthand.

You've been around scouting now for 25, almost 30 years as a leader. What do you think has changed significantly about scouting?

I think technology and how we do training, how we communicate with our kids- that's really changed, potentially for the better. I think in terms of the organization, the summit is a really good example of how, more than ever, we're really looking at what kids want and need and tailoring the program to meet their needs and also to be maybe more relevant and exciting than it was 30 years ago.

Been really exciting to see that and I think that's going to carry through across the organization. If I gave you the ability to talk to every new scout leader and you had 30 seconds to talk to them and tell them everything that you know, what would be the most important points you would hit on? You are uniquely positioned to make a real difference in some young person's life, More than their parents, perhaps more than their Sunday school teacher, perhaps certainly more than their soccer coach or their piano teacher or their teacher in school.

There are just so many examples of folks who look back and say that their life was drastically changed because of an adult who took an interest in them and saw potential in them. I guess I would say: stick with it.

It's a hard job- That's why we get paid so much- But impact kids' lives and you can impact the future of our country and train the world as a result. That is excellent advice. It sets the entire stage for everything you're going to do. As a volunteer leader, You're uniquely positioned to be able to actually make a difference. I really like that. That's a good choice.

Let me share a little story related to that. One of the folks that I interviewed a while back for the Eagle Letter was a guy named Chuck Smith and when he was growing up in inner city Los Angeles- in the 50s I guess it was- he was shy, he was dyslexic, he had learning disabilities, but he wanted to be somebody and to do something. And he went up to his teacher and shared with her that he wanted to go to college and maybe get into radio or the space program or something. And she looked at him and said: get out of here. You're going to be lucky if you can get out of high school. He was crushed by that, obviously.

But his parents had a friend who was a ham radio operator and was a Scoutmaster and this guy said to Chuck: you can not only learn about radio but you can learn about life and I've got just the organization for you, which, of course, was scouting. Chuck learned about radio. He learned about communications a couple of years ago, retired as the president of AT&T West, and he's been an incredible mentor to a lot of inner city young people who are in the same situation that he was in, and that all happened because that one scout leader took an interest in him and saw the potential. It is pretty awesome and not in the late 1980s sense of the term, but it is like really awesome what can happen and the kind of influence and the good that a person can do as a scouting volunteer.

Well, I really appreciate you spending the time with us. I know that everyone who listens to the podcast will be interested to hear from you. A lot of them have your books and if they don't, there will be a way to find them. If you go to scoutmastercgcom and you look at the post that contains this podcast, We'll have links to all of Mark's work and his website and the free resources that he mentioned. Mark, I really do appreciate you taking the time.

Well, thanks so much. I appreciate it.