Scoutmaster Podcast 74

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. It was really fortunate I got down to camp again this week.

Just to you know, look around, talk to some of the counselors, talk to the Orienteering Counselor, who I really like. He has a very magnetic personality, Even though he can be a little overbearing at times. I declined to needle him about all that. Hey, this is podcast number 74.. Hey, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green.

So, uh, yeah, sorry about that there at the beginning. Puns, more puns.

You didn't know there were that many scouting puns, did you? No, my goodness, Ron Morris, Scoutmaster of troop 494 in Olathe, Kansas, wrote in and said: love the podcast. He said with regards to how many listeners you have, you should probably consider those who copy and share the MP3 files with other leaders. Oh, I know people do that every once in a while, Ron. Ron says he's giving copies to his assistant Scoutmasters.

Well, thanks, Ron, Appreciate it. He did have a problem being able to download a couple of the podcasts when we went in and fixed that. Uh, thanks for being my eyes and ears and my quality control people, Ron and everyone else. If you find a problem, yeah, do get in touch, Let me know. You get in touch by emailing me at scoutmastercg at Verizonnet Or you can go to scoutmastercgcom. We got a contact form and all kinds of fancy schmancy stuff over there.

So the newsletter went out this week, the June edition of the newsletter, and the theme in this newsletter is the patrol method And the giveaway in this newsletter is several copies of working the patrol method, which is a really transformative book and it comes with a very high recommendations And it will really aid you if you're a scoutmaster, assistant scoutmaster or you work with a Boy Scout group. Great book to have.

So get over to scoutmastercgcom and make sure you're subscribed to the newsletter so you can get future newsletters, future giveaways. So really interesting thing happened this week. I had a package in the mail and that package came from a scouter in Pittsfield Mass, Bill McFarland, And Bill has this really interesting thing going on. If you're old school scouting and you go back probably a little farther than you'd like to admit, you'll remember in Boy's Life magazine there was a column called Whittling Gym And Whittling Gym had a necrochip slide in it every month And if you got your pen, knife and a piece of wood and the column you could carve yourself a necrochip slide. He always had some kind of cool, interesting idea.

Well, Bill got the idea that he would go through and he would carve all of the Whittling Gym necrochip slides And he's keeping track of that on a blog called Channeling Whittlin Gym and it's channelingwhittlingymblogspotcom, and there'll be a link to Bill's blog in the post that contains this podcast. Now.

So I opened up the package and what is it? Well, it's a necrochip slide that Bill has carved. That is kind of the logo that I've been using for the past five or six years on the podcast and on the blog of the saluting Scoutmaster. And boy, what a nice gift. There's a post about making it over at channelingwhittlingymblogspotcom and some very kind words from Bill and I just wanted to recognize that and I was very touched. Very nice gift and I really do appreciate it, Bill.

In other things going on, let's see here I got a book called Primitive Paradise by David Disselhorst and I've just started reading it, got a good skim through it and everything like that and what it's about is it's about scout camping in the United States and it's actually a pretty interesting piece of work. It centers mostly on one scout camp. The author, David Disselhorst uses the experiences of this one scout camp to kind of ponder the bigger issues about scout camping and the way it's handled and what its future is.

I think it's a worthy book. Hopefully we'll get to talk to David here on the podcast at one point, but I wanted to let you know about the book, and there's a link to it in the post that contains this podcast.

So this time around, Scoutmaster ship in seven minutes or less, we're going to talk a little bit about summer camp and we do have a comment that came through on the blog to talk about in our listener answer section that we have here, and that's enough for any good podcast, don't you think? Hey, I do, So let's get started.

Scoutmaster ship in seven minutes or less. One of the most fun things I've gotten to do in scouting was be on our camp staff, and I was able to do that for about 12 years as a director in different departments and as a camp director, and so the advice I'm about to give you is kind of based on watching hundreds of different troops and thousands of different scout leaders over those 12 years come and experience a week of summer camp.

There's some common difficulties and problems that arise and there's some things that you can do that will just make things go a lot better for you while you're there at camp with your scouts. Now, scout camp is a great place to go if you're a scout. It's fun, there's lots of challenges, there's great stuff to do and it's the same as when you're an adult. It's just a little bit of a different level.

Now, if it's the first couple of times you go to scout camp, it can be very stressful. You can be faced with a lot of new things, a lot of things that you're unfamiliar with. You're not quite sure what the expectations are.

So you do have to take real good care of yourself. Now that's if you've been going to camp, if this year is your first time or your 25th year going, you have to take good care of yourself physically, because if you take good care of yourself physically you're going to be in good shape mentally to handle camp. Our camp is one of the only remaining ones that has a seven day schedule.

We bring everybody in on Sunday and they leave on the following Sunday, So somebody gets to camp. You know your average adult leader gets to camp on a Sunday afternoon and the first day of camp. That's kind of stressful. There's a lot of things to do, there's new things to learn, there's people to meet, places to get to, and you might feel a little bit rushed.

And by the time you're headed off to bed that night you're probably pretty tired and you may sleep well and you may not. And you know the food's going to be a little different, the water's going to be a little different, your latrine's going to be a latrine. You're going to have a lot of the same experiences that the boys do with unfamiliar stressors and things like that. But you're also going to be older than they are. I don't know if you notice that.

So you know your abilities are going to be compromised, maybe by being a bit older than they are, being a little more set in your ways, and you could become cranky real fast. And how do I know this?

Do I have to tell you? I mean, I've been there, I've done it, I've not taken very good care of myself physically, and then I get real cranky and yeah, then things just get ugly.

So if you are hot, tired, hungry, thirsty, you need to get cool, you need to get rested, you need to get fed and you need to get hydrated, and that's going to be a pretty big service to you yourself personally, your fellow leaders, your troop and the camp staff. If you're not cranky and mean, it's going to make the whole week go a lot easier.

So that's one key piece of advice. You're coming into a situation that you may not be familiar with, but you've got a staff there, people who are adults and who've been at it for a long time- and then you've got young adults, guys who are around college age, who got a lot of energy and may have been at the camp staff job for several years.

And then you've got a bunch of younger staff members who are basically learning right along with your scouts. They're learning a lot of things right along with your scouts.

Now they probably are a little bit farther ahead of them as far as the camp things go, but maturity-wise and things like that, they're going to be more like your average 15,, 16, 17-year-old and you've got to take that into account. You need to be considerate and supportive of them in the same way that you're considerate and supportive of your scouts. You never, ever want to step in and be raid or criticize or argue with a camp staff member. You don't want to do that with a youth leader in your troop, you don't want to do that with a fellow adult leader and you certainly don't want to do that with the presence of scouts.

And now, how much you may think that that staff member deserves it, what you want to do is you want to have either a quiet talk with them or their boss at an appropriate distance from the scouts, and that will usually solve the problem, and sometimes that might be your problem. You have to realize that camp staff members are totally dedicated to making your stay worthwhile and your idea of what might be right and their idea of what might be right could be two different things.

So you kind of got to go with the flow a little bit. You got to join in the program and encourage your scouts to do so, even if the program, in your humble opinion, isn't all that great.

If you go to a scout camp and you're eating a dining hall, there's usually a program around the dining hall time and you know it may be a really great whiz, bang, high energy program. It might not be all that great. It encourages a lackluster kind of difficult program as a lively audience. A lively audience goes a long, long way and you and your troop, with the right attitude, could be the catalyst that makes for a great week for everybody in camp.

You know, in the vast scheme of things, I know that as a staff member and as a director at camp, we always emphasize that we were serving scouts and scout leaders and we were doing our dangest to make them comfortable and to make things work well for them. Now that's being said, you don't want to go pulling rank as a adult or a scout leader. You don't want to ask for special privileges. You don't want to try and impress the staff members with your self importance. A lot of people instantly respect your position as a scout leader and they're going to try and do their best for you. Just don't make a big giant deal out of it.

There's really no rank to be pulled there and remember that these guys are working hard, trying to help you. So just go easy. You need to look for the opportunities to participate with a lot of gusto and a lot of spirit in ceremonies and traditions and practices at camp, even if they're unfamiliar to you.

If it's the first time you end up at a scout camp, you know, maybe it's a new one that you're trying out with your troop, get into it, jump right in. Camps and camp staff members are very proud of their traditions and you don't want to try to impose the way that everybody did it at the last camp you were at or the way that you think it should be done. Let them call the shots, let them run the show and just jump in and have a great time with it.

You'll be a camp with a lot of different scout troops who will be run one way- and you know you might be doing things in a different way and sometimes little inner troop rivalries may develop. Now, scout age boys, as you know, they're pretty hyper competitive and they need to be reminded about fairness and courtesy and sportsmanship every once in a while.

So you want to set the tone, when there's competition, of it being a gentlemanly scout like competition, and you want to make sure that you require that of your scouts. As always with anything we do in scouting, give our youth leaders all the responsibility for success, see that they understand what needs to be done, how and why, and then observe them from a respectful distance, check in with them every evening, ask lots of questions and put your ore in when you're asked for it where it's a matter of safety. But otherwise, let them run their troop. Let them work with the camp program and the camp staff to do that. You can run a lot of interference by learning what happens next for them or if you have the experience that you can share with them, but let them have all the responsibility and all the credit for the success of their troop.

You know, be proud of your scouts, encourage them and congratulate them, admire them. Don't try to be one of them because you know you're too old for that now. There'll be some opportunities when you can join in the fun at more or less the boy level. Jump in and have fun, but don't interfere.

So those are a few things that are going to help you when you get to Scout Camp this year. Next time around we're going to talk a little bit more. We're going to talk about preparing parents for Scout Camp. We're going to talk about homesickness and things like that, but we'll be doing that in future. Podcasts,

E-mail, e-mail, that is. Folks, and here's an answer to one of your e-mails. There's a post on the blog this week. It got a lot of discussion.

Parents should force, encourage, cajole their boys to stay in Scouts and we just talked about some of the broad underlying concepts of what happens when boys are the age that they are, you know, in that middle school, in those high school years, when things change, what signs we should be looking for and everything like that. One of the replies I thought was kind of interesting to that discussion was from Ann Hendricks in Griffin, Georgia, who has a boy who's a tenderfoot Scout and it says we encourage him, we don't push him, but we've decided that he's not going to be allowed to get a driver's license or a date until he becomes an Eagle Scout.

What do you think? Well, Ann, I don't know. It's kind of hard to say because I don't want to give advice to parents about how to raise their children. I can give you advice about how to deal with Scouts and things like that.

I've been around long enough that I've seen people try this plan and I've seen it work and I've seen it not work so great. You're talking about a tenderfoot Scout, so he's going to be 11, 12, maybe 13 at the oldest, I would imagine, and that 11 or 12 or 13 year old is going to be a different person when he's 14, 15 or 16. It's just part of growing up. They change quite a bit.

Their ideas change, what they like changes and I don't think I don't know if it's a legitimate thing for parents to start out with an 11 year old and say, well, it's going to be thus and so when you're 16, and expect there not to be any mitigating circumstances between now and then. Then again, like I said, I've seen that plan work. I've seen people who've created that rule and held that up and managed to work it and work it well. It has a lot to do with the personality of the boy. It has a lot to do with the personality of the parents and the circumstances they find themselves in. I will advise this: when you're raising an adolescent boy, flexibility is a pretty important skill to have.

It's a pretty important thing. You've got to be rigidly flexible. There are some things that you can give in on and some things that you can work with.

There are going to be some standards that you're going to have to uphold, but so far as scouting goes, I would make sure that if that is the way that you're going to manage it, that the Scoutmaster knows you keep up with it and you help him. You help him make that goal, and you do that not by doing the work for him, but by being encouraging, by being supportive and helping remind him that he has this goal in front of him, because we all have set this up in such a way that he owns the goal, that it's not something that you're imposing on him, but it's something that he owns and that he agrees is a good idea.

So I know there's probably a lot of people listening who have some thoughts on this particular question. I'd love to have you get in touch with me and you're going to find out how to do that in just a moment.