Scoutmaster Podcast 79

Alright, I finally found the secret. I did and I'm going to share it with you- for nothing, But this is how to make a million dollars being a scout leader.

Okay, you got a pencil paper. Are you listening? This is how you're going to make a million dollars as a scout leader. Get two million dollars. Hey, this guy got some 79.. Welcome back to the Scout National Podcast.

This is Clarke Green. Hey, it's summertime and I'm traveling and camping. I've got articles and podcasts lined up to publish automatically while I'm gone, but I won't be online very often and it will take quite a while to moderate any comments that you leave on the blog or reply to email or anything like that.

But you know, do keep in touch and I'll catch up when we're all back home. This time around we have some favorites from podcasts over the past year. In Scoutmastership, in seven minutes or less, we're going to be talking about the Patrol Method, which is something we talk about a lot, But I found this little piece from a past podcast and I thought it was worthy of re-broadcasting for you this summer.

Then we have a Scoutmasters Minute about Ernest Thompson Seaton and finally, a story about a clean camp. So I think that'll be plenty for a summer podcast.

Let's get started, shall we?

Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. This is from Baden Powell's Outlook. This is something that's not too hard to find online. You know. Google Baden Powell's Outlook And this is from June 1910.

So this is quite early in the scouting movement. He says this: the best progress is made in those troops where power and responsibility are really put into the hands of the patrol leaders. It is the secret of success with many Scoutmasters when, once they have half a dozen patrol leaders really doing their work as if they were assistant Scoutmasters, The Scoutmasters find themselves able to go on and increase the size of their troops by starting new patrols or adding recruits to existing ones. Expect a great deal of your patrol leaders and nine times out of ten they will play up to your expectation.

But if you are going to always nurse them and not trust them to do things well, you'll never get them to do anything on their own initiative. That's Baden Powell way back when, a hundred years ago, At this week's troop meeting, I counted eight active assistant Scoutmasters.

Now, following Baden Powell's advice, we often have comparatively little to do. We don't do a lot of instructing. I mean maybe two or three times in the past year we've had an adult from our pool of Scoutmasters instructing the Scouts, And we do next to no program planning. All of these things are in the firm grip of our youth leadership.

So what do we do? What do we do at troop meetings?

Well, three assistants are working hard on recruiting. One is following the progress of several Eagle projects and applications. I was meeting with a visiting Weeblows parent and the remainder were observing the proceedings of the troop meeting from a respectful distance. And that's it. That's really it. There's not a lot for us to do Now.

I know Scoutmasters spend an inordinate amount of time worrying over their troop meetings and they sometimes work on the entertainment quality of the meeting. So far as I can tell, a lot of them are actually running the meetings and this is really a big no-no. A troop meeting is not a television show hosted by the Scoutmaster or a podcast where I get to talk and talk and talk. No, Here's some thoughts from an old Scoutmasters handbook that I found on theinquirynet And if you want to go there and check it out, it's great. It's got lots of old school resources on scouting Inquiry-I-N-Q-U-I-R-Ynet. That'll get you to the website.

Here's what this advice said. As the years have gone by, some Scoutmasters have set troop meetings on too high a pedestal. They have spoken of it reverently and they spent hours and hours in perfecting his programs and have seemed to consider that the conducting of a troop meeting successfully once a week was the whole idea. And the purpose of the Scout Movement is running a fine, lively meeting on Friday nights or Tuesdays or Thursdays, And their work was done then for the week. There never was a falser idol set up than this glorification of the weekly troop meeting to the exclusion of other forms of scouting. We must keep clearly in mind at all times that the weekly troop meeting is but a means to an end.

It is not an end in itself. Its business is not to be the scouting of your troop for the week. Its business is to make scouting for a week, To inspire it, to pep it up, to give it purpose and activities, to make it extend all through the week in each patrols and each boy's life.

We can't accomplish much actual work in an hour and a half or two hours every week, but we can use those hours to motivate every other hour of the same period. And by motivate we mean to stimulate activity by providing a motive to every boy and every patrol. The troop meeting can have great value. By simply bringing the boys together for a common experience, It can make them feel they belong together as part of the whole big scouting brotherhood.

Well, I read that and I could see myself in a couple of the comments there. Yeah, big, lively, fun troop meeting got to be rocking and rolling all the times. Got to be something exciting and interesting and things like that.

Well, that's really not what we're looking for. It's great if that happens, but hopefully it's the scouts that have made that happen. And we talked before about a matter of perspective as to what was good and what looked like it was orderly and useful for scouts according to our lights as full grown adult men. And we've talked that scouts have a very different idea of that. What they consider to be fun and challenging.

We might just pass by, But if we have, as Baden Powell said, put the full responsibility of what happens in a troop meeting on our youth leadership, they're going to shine, They're going to rise to your expectations and surpass them, As long as you look at it in the right perspective. So that's the heart of what a Scoutmaster's role is at a troop meeting.

You know there's a widely circulated little narrative called the one minute Scoutmaster and I think it was based on some management science thing. We're going to talk about that in the next podcast.

But basically, you know, one of the tests for a successful troop meeting with you as a Scoutmaster is you sit in a chair and you wait. The scouts begin the meeting, they conduct their meeting, they do whatever it is they're going to do whatever they've planned.

And then they look at you towards the end and they say now it's your turn for a minute And you stand up, you give your Scoutmaster's minute, say good night scouts, and that's about it. Now, actually, you're not going to be sitting in the chair the whole time because you're going to have the odd Scoutmaster's conference to do. You're going to be talking with your fellow leaders. You might be planning your part of an upcoming outing or something like that, Just making sure that you have enough tents to sleep in for the leaders and all that type of thing, But you're not actually engaged and involved in the ongoing program of that troop meeting. That might be an unfamiliar picture to some of us, But I've been on both sides of the dividing line there. I've been actively engaged and involved in running troop meetings and presenting things for the scouts, And I've been on the other side where I'm watching what's going on And I'll have a couple of things to talk to my senior patrol leader about at the end of the meeting.

Did this well? This didn't go too well.

How are you going to fix that? What's your plans for next time?

And the boys are so happy when they're actually running the show that they'll come back. It's not a Nielsen rating kind of thing whether they're going well. The Scoutmaster wasn't really on this week. Yeah, I didn't like that show.

Who wrote that one? That one wasn't very good. No, they're not an audience. They are the participants.

They are the ones that make this happen And that's what we need to keep in our heads as we're looking forward into the fall and the winter in our troop meetings. Well, we're going to wind this up in the next podcast. We're going to just finish up talking about some of the broad underlying concepts about what adults do at a troop meeting.

That's right. It's time for a Scoutmaster's minute. One of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America, Ernest Thompson Seaton, was visiting a camp he founded near his New Jersey home, And Seaton had invited several important local businessmen to join him on this particular visit to interest them in supporting the camp. During their stay they watched with great interest to some of the scouts there.

They probably weren't scouts right then because I think this was during the period where Seaton was working on his Woodcraft Indians idea, So this was probably before the founding of the BSA. But during their stay they watched with great interest as some of the boys tried to light a fire by friction, using the ancient bow and drill method. Their efforts were great and the resulting fire was a victory won over many, many attempts.

As they turned from the scene, one of the guests turned to Seaton and said: Mr Seaton, why in a world of matches, do you ask the boys to struggle with these primitive methods? Well, Seaton thought about it for a moment and he pointed at the ground. You are thinking of the fire that is lit here.

And then he placed his hand over his heart and continued: while I am after the fire that is kindled here in the heart, The challenges that life present often turn us from an easy path to one that requires much more effort and more skill. As scouts, we deliberately challenge ourselves to develop our skill as outdoorsmen and extend our own personal limits. There's a lot of easier ways to do things, but the way that offers growth is often the most difficult and, in the end, the most meaningful. ["The Truth"].

This has to be the truth, folks, because there is no way anyone could make this up. Keith Monroe was the Scoutmaster of Troop 2 in Santa Monica, California, for the first 42 years of the troops' existence. He was also a writer and he wrote for Scouting Magazine, very involved in scouting until his death in 2003 at the age of 88. Keith pseudonym for some of his writing was Rice E Cochran, and I have a book called Be Prepared- The Life and Illusions of a Scoutmaster. I've read a couple of excerpts from it on the podcast before, because some of it is just screamingly funny. As a matter of fact, I don't know where I got this from, but somebody told me that this book was the basis of the Clifton Web of movie.

Mr Scoutmaster, Here's part that I thought you would be interested in: The littered appearance of our camp grounds by the end of an outing always exasperated me and I insisted on thorough cleanups. But at first these took an interminable time. When our scouts were instructed to walk through camp and gather up all the trash inside, they wandered around like the spirits of the dam, aimless and without emotion. Most of the orange peels and paper stayed on the ground until I personally planted them out one by one and directed some scout by name to pick each one of them up. At last I discovered how to get the job done rapidly.

10 minutes before we were ready to depart, I announced: the last thing we're gonna do before we go home is to auction off these candy bars I have here. The bidding will be by pieces of trash. Whichever scouts collect the most trash will be able to bid the highest. You've got eight minutes to pick up everything you can find. That always worked, because 10 minutes later, when the camp, as bearers of jackals and scavengers, had been there, and when the Victoria scouts munching their candy bars, and when the Scoutmaster, smug in the knowledge that he had mastered his scouts once again, we all went home rejoicing.

You know what I found really funny here, because I can picture this in my mind- When our scouts were instructed to walk through the camp and gather up all the trash inside. They wandered out about like the spirits of the dam, aimless and without emotion. Anyway, I'm sure we'll find some other interesting things in this book. Again, it's rice Cochrane, Be Prepared, the life and illusions of the Scoutmaster, and it is out of print as far as I know, But it's not that difficult to find from some of the used book sellers online.