Scoutmaster Podcast 82

And now the old scout, master, Young scout, tenderfoot scout, signs on to the troop website for the first time and he's prompted to create a password. He reads the password instructions and this is the password that he comes up with. You ready, Mickey Minnie Pluto, Huey Dewey, Louie, Donald Goofy, Harrisburg.

That's a long password but it sounds right to me because the instructions said, you know, to make a secure password you need at least eight characters and it needs to include at least one capital. All right, All right, I can hear you out there. Hey, this is the podcast number 82.. This is the podcast number 82.

Well, this is Clarke Green. Welcome back to the ScoutMaster Podcast. Listen. Comments and questions about the password joke you just heard. You can send those directly to Larry Geiger, because Larry is the one who sent in the joke.

Thanks, Larry, I think. Hey, the great storm came and went, That's right. Hurricane Irene came and went. It left our community fairly untouched. It was more of a glancing blow than a big fat punch in the face and, that being said, I know there's a lot of communities up and down the eastern seaboard who suffered a great deal more than us, and my heartfelt encouragement. If you've been handed travel over the past few days, things will get better.

Walter Underwood is a new contributor at scoutmastercgcom. Walter found the blog when I started writing it about six years ago and he has been a faithful commenter and he's participated in a lot of conversations on the blog. Walter and I have tried have played tag with one another, trying to set up a podcast interview and maybe, maybe one of these days we'll get around to it. But I invited Walter to become a occasional author and contributor to the blog and he was kind enough to consent to do that and to offer his experience as a scout leader and a Scoutmaster, and as a young man he was a scout. Go on the blog at scoutmastercgcom and look in the about column and you'll find Walter's profile there with a little bit about Walter.

And then do look at the first article that we posted this past week. It was about how the adult leaders in his troops sat down and they had a brief but meaningful discussion about how well they were applying the eight methods of scouting. I thought it was a really great idea and I will be repeating such a discussion in our troop very soon. And thanks, Walter, thanks for doing that and thanks to all of you who've been in touch.

You know we were away for a while there in August, for about three or four weeks, and now vacation season is drawing to a close and school's getting ready to start up and scouting will begin with that full slate of fall activities that we all have scheduled, and I look forward to hearing what you're up to This time around. On the podcast. We're going to answer two email questions that have come in over the past week. One kind of expands on our discussion of discipline and scouting last week and it's about how youth leadership can get scouts to listen to them. That's a familiar problem, a pretty perennial problem in scouts.

And then there was another question about scoutmaster conferences and a little bit different slant on scoutmaster conferences this time. So that's what we're going to be doing in this podcast.

I think that's plenty, don't you? Yeah, sure, why not? Clark, let's get started.

Shall we Find me a letter? Send it my name email. That is, folks.

And here's an answer to one of your emails.

Scoutmaster Michael Beck wrote in and he said: a couple of my scouts have come to me struggling with the question of how to get their scouts to listen to them. I'd like to discuss this and give advice to them at the troop leader training we have planned this weekend. Tell me prepare.

Could you give me your thoughts and tips? Well, I'm more than happy to Mike and and thanks for being in touch.

Here's what I've. You know, this is what my experience tells me. Scouts will listen to the directions of their peers most of the time, as long as those directions are fair, as long as they're reasonably well-reasoned, as long as they appeal to the personal wants and needs of the scouts who's being directed, and are made in a very respectful way, and that means as a request rather than an order.

Now scouts aren't listening to their peers. One of those aspects is most likely missing, or there's just some kind of basic perceptual difference of opinion, or there's some other underlying reason why they need to be disobedient or defiant.

If a youth leader makes a request it's not obeyed, I think the best thing for him to do is just to go down that little list and see if he included all the elements above. Now it sounds like a long drawn out process, but only take a couple of seconds once they've practiced it a little bit and then they need to go back to the scout and see if they can modify the request. If the youth leader has included all those elements.

You know fair, well-reasoned appeals to the scouts, personal wants and needs and it's made in a respectful way. We need to see if there's some kind of a perceptual difference about what's being asked or if it's just being defiant.

And you know the patrol leader just needs to try and reason with the guy. Listen, did you understand what I, what I asked you and why I asked it? I mean, I'm not trying to be the big boss here, but I am the patrol leader. We do need to get things done.

Maybe I can explain why better is there something you you know? Would you rather take one of the other jobs?

Well, do you understand we all have to share in doing this and that's, you know, that's pretty mature thing for a, a young patrol leader, to do. I understand giving them as many tools to work with as possible seems to help. Here's one of the things I tell my youth leadership during our troop leader training.

Do you know what happened? August 1st of 1907, that's right, you trivia hounds. You got it. That is the day that Baden Powell, the founder of Scouting, took a group of boys to Brown Sea Island for the first scouting camp out ever now. They elected patrol leaders that day right around noontime. Just about noontime, and by 1201 that patrol leader had given his first direction to the scouts in his patrol.

Right around 1202, one of those scouts either ignored him and ran off somewhere else to do something, or he was just outwardly defiant and said, no, I'm not going to do that. And that began a great tradition of scouting. That's right, ignoring your patrol leader or telling your patrol leader: no, I'm not going to do that. Ever since then, every patrol leader's ever been elected, every single one has been ignored and or disrespected to some extent.

So when we experience this in our patrols and in our troop, we can remember that. You know it's a grand tradition, a venerable tradition in scouting and you need not be upset by it. You need to expect it and it's going to happen.

So what you need to know is how you're going to handle this when it does happen. And every leadership position in scouting is one of service to the scouts. You didn't become a patrol leader or senior patrol leader or have another leadership position because we thought you made a great boss and you should be able to boss everybody around. No, you. You became that leader because we think, and your fellow scouts think, that you are best suited to serve in that position.

So serving them means that you need to think about making requests so the people you are serving, rather than issuing orders to them. You're not a drill sergeant, you know. You're not the president of the united states, you're not the captain of the football team. You need to see this as service that you're doing for others and you need to get them involved and encourage them to cooperate.

So you need to be fair and relevant and patient and respectful and you'll get good results most of the time. Now, if a scout in your patrol is continuously disruptive or just absolutely disobedient, then you need to call on the senior patrol leader. That's the next guy and he's going to come in and try to help you.

If he's unsuccessful, guess who's next? That's me.

So that scout who's causing a problem is going to get referred to me and we're going to sit down and have a discussion about whatever's bothering him. Now, sitting down to have a discussion with me, at least in our troop, is something that boys do not look forward to, not in those circumstances.

Okay, if, if you've been disobedient or you've been a problem and you're going to have to come and talk to me. If it gets to that point, which is pretty rare- then they know that that's not going to be a fun time.

So this is what i tell every scout at the earliest Scoutmaster conferences, and i reinforce it, uh, several times over, but this is what i tell them. I said now you won't often hear me or any of the other adults telling you to do something in Boy Scouts, because that's not the way Boy Scouts works. Adults don't end up telling you what to do. Your patrol leader and your senior patrol leader run the program and they'll be asking you to do what needs to be done.

Sometimes they'll be giving you directions and- and i want you to follow those directions because they're for your own good and it's the way scouting works- you're not going to do this. You're going to do everything that you're told because you are mature and you understand that it's for your own good.

But sometimes scouts decide they don't need to listen to their youth leaders now if that happens and they can't persuade you that, uh, to get on the team and to cooperate, you're going to come and talk to me for a while. And if you have to come and talk to me for a while, that means you're going to miss out on whatever the fun is that everyone else is having at the time. If you ask the other scouts who've had to sit and talk to me about things like this and ain't all that much fun.

So that's what i, that's what i tell them at the Scoutmasters conference, and naturally my older scouts kind of play up. What a horrible thing it is to have to be referred to the Scoutmaster. It's, it's dishonorable. If you have to be referred to the Scoutmaster, you're just beyond the pale.

And if you have to be referred to the Scoutmaster, it's kind of the worst thing it could ever happen to you, because now you're going to have to sit down and talk to him. Now i'm not really mean, i'm not and i'm not, but i'm comfortable with being kind of the boogeyman about this because it works. In the rare instance a scout does end up being referred to me.

Well, he comes over and he sits down and i glower at him a little bit and i ask him somewhat sharply what he's been up to and he mumbles a bit and, you know, looks at his shoes. Then i remind him of the discussion we had at his Scoutmasters conference and i ask if he's been treated badly or unfairly.

Because, you know, patrol leaders make mistakes and senior patrol leaders make mistakes. We expect them to right, but almost always the answer is no, he hasn't really been treated unfairly.

And then, you know, we, we talk about the problem a little bit, a very, very little bit, and then he sits there for five minutes or 10 minutes, absolute complete silence. Now i don't call it a timeout, because that makes the boy feel like a toddler and i don't want to demean him. But that's exactly what i'm doing. It's a timeout and timeouts are useful because they make you sit and think.

And so the scout gets to sit and think for a while and when i think that he's had enough time, i send him back to his patrol and i say: you know, just listen and do what you're asked to do. And then i also tell him that by no means does he want to have to come back and talk to me again about this. They usually get the message, go back and they're reasonably cooperative.

Now, this doesn't always work. It's not. It's. There's no silver bullet for this.

Of course you know youth leaders and adult leaders too. We take disobedience or or being ignored as a pretty personal upfront and we can get pretty touchy about it. I mean it can. It can really make you angry, it can make you frustrated, it can make you depressed.

You know it's a pretty common feeling. It takes a lot of patience and time to earn the respect of your peers, no matter how old you are.

You know that from the work that you do outside of scouting most likely for that new patrol leader, it's the first time they've ever encountered the situation of of having to be a leader and having to ask people to cooperate and to do things. And when people don't do that, they take it pretty personally and it's pretty painful, it can be pretty emotional. It can make a guy. Once he's had that happen, you make him want to quit and not not be a leader anymore.

So you kind of have to work and empathize with them and- and you know, let them know that it's a price of doing business as a leader, no matter what age, no matter what situation or no matter what's your station in life you're going to run into these problems. The way adults relate to patrol leaders and other youth leadership in the troop is also crucially important to make sure that things are running smoothly. I mean, youth leaders are expected to make mistakes and misjudged situations.

That's a given, and we have the provisional authority to step in and to stop any activity that we see as being inappropriate or unsafe. But how we react when they make misjudgments or make mistakes is incredibly important to their being able to command respect from their fellow scouts.

We should never, ever, countermand directions given by a youth leader in front of other scouts, if it's at all possible, like i said in, in times where something is unsafe or inappropriate, you know is you might have to do that. When a youth leader needs to change course, we need to take him aside and we need to ask questions that will help them discover a better way of approaching the matter in hand.

So it looks like you're having a little trouble there, john. Uh, the guys don't seem to be cooperating with you very well, or you're planning on going and doing this now.

Is that the best thing for you to be doing now? Is there a way that you can fix this? Have you looked at your watch lately because it's getting kind of late.

Have you guys decided, when you're going to make dinner, you know, questions that suggest, uh, some new directions and a bit of a course change, and never in front of the scouts? Because that is that. That's a pretty hard hit. That's a pretty hard hit for a youth leader to be questioned by an adult in front of the scouts, uh, who he's supposed to be directing. Finally, i'll say this about the question: the way we relate to each other in scouting is fully described in the scout oath and law, fully described. However many words in the oath and the 12 points of the scout law, that's all you need.

So i want you to resist the temptation to add a bunch of rules and regulations and bylaws and policies to that scout law to try and encourage good behavior. It's not going to work. Boys are a force in nature. If, if there were rules and regulations that we're going to encourage good behavior from them rather than required of them. The only way that you can do this with rules and policies is to suggest punishments, and punishment has no place in scouting. We talked about that last time around in podcast 81, you know.

Resist the temptation to do that. Use the scout oath and the scout law. It works every single time relevant. They are relevant to any situation and they will actually suggest resolutions to difficulties where rules and regulations. I'll tell you i discourage them, i don't think it's a good idea. Encourage your scouts to follow the scout oath and law and many of those problems just end up disappearing over time.

So, uh, mike, i hope that helps and uh, we're going to move on to the next question.

Now you might remember Scoutmaster steven jensen. He is Scoutmaster of troop 228 in santa cleary to california and we were talking with steven uh by the emails, uh earlier this year because he was bringing 22 new Webelos to uh join his scout troop and uh, he sent me this question on Scoutmaster conferences. He says, by the way, uh, having 22 new guys has gone extremely well. The new energy in the troop is just phenomenal. But one thing i've learned as a part of this is that not all parts of uh scouting and our troops scale equally well.

Some of our processes are working just as well, if not better, with the larger numbers than before, but others haven't been quite as flexible. One thing that needs work is our Scoutmaster conferences. I don't have a problem delegating most tasks to my assistant Scoutmasters, but the one task i do not like to delegate is the Scoutmaster conference. I know these conferences are important and they help me keep tabs on how every one is doing and and it's the one way that i really get to know the new scouts. Here's my problem. If all 22 scouts reach first class in their first year, that total is about 90 Scoutmaster conferences.

How in the world am i going to handle that now? How do you handle it?

Do you let or expect uh assistant Scoutmasters to do it? Thanks for whatever advice you can offer.

Well, thank you for getting in touch, steven. Um, it's good to hear that things are going well with the new bunch. That's pretty intense, man, having 22 new scouts in a spring. Um, i salute you. Uh, i i agree with you, steven.

I think it is important for the actual Scoutmaster to do Scoutmaster conferences because, as you say, it gives you an idea of what's going on with individual scouts and it and it might be the only real chance you get to sit and talk to them. Uh, you do have a bit of a workload problem with all those guys, but i don't think it's unfixable or unreasonable. Let me tell you about my Scoutmaster conferences, and maybe that'll help. My Scoutmaster conferences last about five minutes or so. Some last a little bit longer. I tend to spend more time with younger scouts than i do with older scouts, because my older scouts usually are in a leadership position of some kind and i have a pretty ongoing dialogue with them from week to week.

I mean, i'm always talking to them. It's the younger scouts that i don't get to talk to as much and so, uh, i like to sit down and take at least five minutes or so with them. The reason that i i'm saying five minutes, i'm not trying to create a rule and i don't want you to sit there with a stopwatch. I'm just giving you an idea of of how long it should take.

You know, if you, if you're following my advice, okay? Um, there's a little bit of a tendency for us to get kind of overblown with Scoutmaster conferences. I mean, if you start looking around on the web, there's pages and pages of questions and unfortunately, there are forms and other stuff and it just all seems a bit much.

I think my idea of a Scoutmasters conference is a lot more casual. What are my goals?

Well, it it's. It's uh, used to be called a personal growth agreement conference. I'm kind of glad they changed it back to Scoutmaster conference and basically that's what you're doing.

You're saying, hey, how are things going? It's nice to meet you, you know, are things working out well for you?

Is there anything that you don't understand? How did these requirements go?

You know what? What did you think of them? And that's basically the way that it works. My average Scoutmaster conference up to first class.

You know, i start with a couple of standard questions. I i brand new guys. I like to know what their favorite subject in school is. I i get a real basic idea of what makes them tick.

You know, i try not to stereotype them, but it gives me an idea of the kind of person they are. If they really like math or they really like english or they really like geography or they really like science. I get a little bit of an idea and it's not a scouting question and actually they usually answer that question much more readily than they do any of the scouting questions i throw at them. I usually ask them of the requirements that they did for the rank, that we're having the conference about which one they like the most and which they'd rather not have to do again again, just gives me an idea of what's going on. And if i'm listening carefully, i can also see if there's a problem with the way that those uh requirements are being administered by my youth leadership. Uh, i, i like to ask them to read, especially when they're younger.

I like to ask them to read a requirement out loud to me, um, and i like them to do that because i can kind of gauge their reading ability and, uh, if there's really any undeclared learning disability going on there, i mean, usually i know or i have a basic idea. But, uh, if a scout reads out loud, and he reads out loud, well i have a pretty good idea.

You know that he'll. He'll do fine without any extra help. If a scout reads kind of uh haltingly and he's not able to figure out big words and things like that, he may need a little extra help with written things.

Um, so that that's one thing i try to do when it gets down to it. Uh, i don't do, uh, i don't do requirements, especially not at a Scoutmaster's conference. If a boy comes to me and he has a bunch of things that are not signed off, i refer him to somebody else, i refer him to an assistant Scoutmaster or one of the youth leaders to sign his book off and to check it off, um, and that that's just the way i do things. I leave the Scoutmaster conference requirement and the scout spirit requirement. That's for me. Those are the ones that i want.

So when it gets down to the Scoutmaster, uh, or the scout spirit requirement, um, i turn the tables on the scout and i say: you know, read that requirement to me and rate yourself on that requirement. So what specifically did you do that qualifies you to have been considered completing that?

Uh, if you were me and and i was coming to you asking you, uh, to get this signed off, and i gave you the evidence that you just gave me, would you do it? And what i'm trying to do is i'm trying to get the idea instilled in them that they need to evaluate themselves, they need to look at the job that they're doing themselves, because usually you, you can be a little bit tougher of a judge than anybody else is going to be. I'm a pushover with that stuff.

I mean, i'm pretty easy, uh, but i know that scouts are probably a little bit harder on themselves and so we get past the scout spirit requirement. I asked them how things are going in the patrol, how they like their patrol leader, you know, if there's any particular problems or if there's any particular things that they would like to do, that they don't seem to be doing, um, and you know they. They're usually, uh, reasonably talkative about that subject.

And then i asked them if they have any questions for me, and nine point, five times out of ten that's a big no because they're ready to get out of there. And this takes five minutes, six minutes, i don't know. Takes takes just a short amount of time, and that's plenty from a scout's point of view.

Now, every so often i get a scout who enjoys rather than dread, sitting down and talking to me, so it might go on for a little while, uh, and you know that's always great, but i know most of the time i'm a guy with a big beard and a loud voice and a somewhat off-putting manner at times and they're not really interested in sitting and chatting with me. I do a very cursory check of the requirement signatures just to look and see, see if uh, you know if, if uh, who signed them off and when. Um, and like i said, i i refer most of those things off and steven. That's something i recommend to you. If you're in the habit of sitting there and signing off requirements of the Scoutmasters conference, get somebody else to do that.

That's easily delegatable, and then spend your time in the Scoutmasters conference focusing on the things that you want to know and focusing on getting to know those scouts and what's going on with them. Um, i can also include a question or two about a requirement that helps me assess what kind of job is being done by whoever signed it off and you know, ask them exactly how it worked and and how they got things signed off and- and you know, it'll give me an idea if, if, uh, the patrol leaders and the youth leadership and the assistant Scoutmasters are paying close attention to what that requirement means. In my experience, scouts don't like Scoutmaster conferences all that much. Some of them do, some of them don't.

So they don't like boards of review all that much. They don't like courts of honor all that much.

I mean, if you put it up and you said: what's your top 10 favorite things that you ever get to do in scouting? I'd be surprised if any scout ever put Scoutmaster conference or court of honor or board of review. I.

I think they more or less see them as necessary evil. And once again, my goal for conferences: i want to get a sense of how they're doing, i, i want to know if they have a general understanding of the way things work and uh, and then i want to get them on their way. When it comes to Scoutmaster conferences, i try and think of myself as, like a fish biologist. Yeah, i, you trap uh, fish, uh, and you get them in the boat and you take some quick measurements.

You know well, they're this long and they weigh this much and they're this big around and and they're probably this age, and then you put a little tag on them and you release them back into the wild and and you keep them out of the water for as little time as possible. Uh, and i kind of think that way about Scoutmaster conferences too.

You know we're taking the pulse and we're finding out: hey, are things going okay? Things seem to be going good.

Okay, back to your patrol. So, uh, steven, i hope that helps and i appreciate you being in touch. I'm interested to hear your thoughts and opinions about what we've had to say today and your questions.

If you need a question answered, you can reach me at scoutmastercg, at verizonnet, and there's plenty more ways to keep in touch, and i'm going to tell you about those in just a moment.