Scoutmaster Podcast 9

And now, for you, Scoutmaster.

Greetings to you from Bryce E. Cochran's book, Be Prepared, The Life and Illusions of a Scoutmaster. He wrote this in 1952. He says that the songs of the Boy Scouts of America are full of insistent tributes to the joy of hiking. Hey, just like the Happy Wanderer, we use it as our theme song, right? He goes on to say, The man in charge of a group of boy hikers has somewhat the same problems that faced Moses in the managing of the Exodus, or Napoleon in supervising the retreat from Moscow.

There's a similar effort involved in keeping up morale and discipline. There's the same need to dispel the almost universal fear of death and thirst or privation.

There are those brave figures who collapse by the side of the road and gasp, Go on without me. I can't make it. Hey, this is podcast number nine.

Hey! Hey! Hi, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. It's Clarke Green. In Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less, this time around we're going to talk a little bit about second chances in scouting.

And I have a little story that I swiped from one of my favorite authors that I think will entertain you about his experience in scouts. Then three booklets, three things that will help you as a scout leader, whether you're a scoutmaster or a den leader or whatever. And then we're going to wind up with a scoutmaster's minute.

And that's going to be our podcast this time. Listen, I want to tell you about Scoutmaster Jerry and his blog and podcast, which is called the Scoutmaster's Minute. Do go over and check him out. I'll link it on my blog at scoutmaster.typepad.com.

So do go over and say hi to Jerry and take advantage of all the work that he's done over there. Some really good stuff. Well, without further ado, let's get started, shall we?

Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. What's the best thing that really piques my curiosity is recent brain science and research that kind of opens a door on a lot of adolescent behavior and helps to explain it. Apparently the brain, the physical organ in our heads, is developing in adolescence that we really had not known before.

So there's a couple of broad concepts that I draw from that that help inform my work as a scoutmaster. One is that when adolescents are thinking, which might be an exclusion in terms, but when adolescents are thinking and making plans and trying to weigh risks and the advisability of different courses of action, they're working with a physically limited amount of brain matter.

I mean, actual physical limitation. It's not that there's a mature, reasonable adult sitting inside their head and they're listening to that and saying, Nah, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go for the really risky, stupid idea, you know, which is what happens in adolescence sometimes.

I'm going to react emotionally instead of cognitively to this situation. They're not really making that choice as much as going along with the dictates of the actual physical function of their brain. Is that making sense to you? This does not mean that we divorce any consequences for action, no matter whether it is just based on, you know, brain science or not.

Because adolescence is also that period of time in which we learn about consequences and responsibility and things like that. But what it does do for me as a scoutmaster and as somebody who works with youth is it informs my attitude.

It informs my attitude about the way that we should deal with, you know, the miscreants that we run across sometime in scouting. Now, with over two decades of time as a scoutmaster, I will tell you that I have had scouts who have gotten in fistfights, who have been caught in lies, who have been caught stealing, who have been caught smoking, who have made bad decisions in one way or another. And I've even had a couple of them charged with crimes.

But I will tell you something. In this two plus decades of scouting, I have never kicked one out of my scout troop. Never. I think that when you're in this age, you're particularly vulnerable to making bad decisions.

You need to have at least one person in the world or one group in the world that believes enough in you to give you a second chance. We do have a judicial system, as do most countries in the world, a judicial system that is different for minors than it is for adults. We have that system because we understand that there are questions of accountability in the mind and the actions of a minor that are not the same in somebody who is an adult.

There are questions of reason and the ability of them to overcome outside influences that we ascribe to adults that we do not ascribe to minors. I have to think that it is both wise and proper for us as scout leaders to look for opportunities not to kick guys out of a scouting experience, but to include them in it and to give them as much of a second chance as possible. This all comes to mind to me because recently I sat down with a parent and a scout who had been asked not to come back to a troop across town. I am not going to go into lengthy explanations and details about the incident that led up to this, but suffice to say this was one incident and it was not a pattern of behavior so far as I could tell. So, you know, I asked some questions about school and family and was satisfied that this fella is not a risk to the safety of my other scouts and is not going to be an undue poor influence. Another important piece of evidence is that this fella has been in a scout troop for about four years. He was almost done with life when he left.

If you're a star scout, this is what's happened. You've had four Scoutmaster conferences. You've had four boards of review. This guy had about a dozen merit badges.

So he has worked with, you know, about a dozen merit badge counselors. He has held a position of responsibility in his troop for at least four months. His execution of that position has been approved by his scout leaders. So there's a lot of evidence there.

This guy, if he came to me and he was 16 and had little or nothing in the way of rank advancement, if I learned that he was a problem in school and perhaps he had come to the attention of the civil authorities once or twice, then I would have to do some hard thinking about exactly how we would structure his return to scouting. I have a bold prediction. I think this guy will probably become an Eagle Scout.

I think this is what he wants to do. I think he deeply regrets the actions that he took that led him to not be included in his troop. But this all begs one more question. Why couldn't his home troop, the troop that he was with for four years, try and figure this out? And try and make good on the promise to this guy. And try and realize the potential that he had.

That's going to remain a mystery because I'm not going any further with it. But it's a question that I think is worth pondering for us scoutmasters. Have you handed out second chances that have borne fruit? Because I know I have.

Remember I talked about guys who have basically run the gamut of bad behavior, who have come to the attention of the civil authorities for one reason or another? Well, I remember these guys chiefly because they went on to become Eagle Scouts. Scouting is about second, third, fourth, fifth chances.

He renouncing to the beat, boy, beat, boy.

This has to be the truth, folks, because there is no way anyone could make this up. Garrison Keillor, the host of A Prairie Home Companion and Arthur, wrote this about his days in scouting in Lake Wobegon in his book, Lake Wobegon Days, talking about his scoutmaster, Einar Tingvold. Why did we need to know semaphore code? Well, Einar said it was handy for sending messages in the outdoors at a distance of up to a half a mile.

Imagine, he said, if you're camping on a hill and another troop is on another hill a half mile away and suddenly you need medical help. Well, you flash a mirror at the other camp and you get their attention, and they train their binoculars on your camp, and meanwhile you take two shirts and tie them to two sticks, and now you're ready to send a message using semaphore code.

This is why we need to learn this. Imagine you were sending an urgent message somewhere and somebody couldn't read it. Why, help could be delayed for hours. Somebody could die as a result. Einar's only answer raised a lot of questions in my mind.

I mean, number one is what hills. You need to have pretty high hills to be able to see a fellow scout waving his flags a half a mile away, even with binoculars.

We don't have any hills like that in the out there.

Number two, what binoculars? None of us scouts had a pair. Now, Einar had one, but what good would that do if he was with us, the troop that needed urgent medical help? All he could do with his binoculars would be to see that the other troop couldn't see us.

Number three, what other troop? No other scout troop camped around where we camped out on the Talaroods pasture with its one extremely low hill. The only people to see our semaphore signals would be the Talaroods, and probably they'd just think we were some kind of kids waving shirts. Number four, if we needed urgent help, why not just get into Einar's car and drive to the doctor's?

Einar always had his car when we went camping. I mean, that's how we got there. Why stand around waving at a non-existent troop on a hill that wasn't high enough and send probably a misspelled message in the process? Unjent, send heave, I'm Bradley Kurt.

Alls we really had to do was hop into Einar's studio, baby. Mulleroo! Woo! Maywe!

Mooreend

Now, nine out of ten problems you deal with as a scout leader are not coming from the scouts themselves. They're coming from some kind of need to find a policy somewhere or a question that you might come up with or even an argument you might get into with a fellow leader.

As civil as these arguments may be, sometimes they can really stymie the program. Here's an example. Boy's getting ready to do his Eagle Project, and the committee chairman says, oh, scouts aren't allowed to use power tools or climb ladders.

That kind of throws a big old monkey wrench into everything, and we need to go looking for answers. Now, where are we going to find those answers? Ah, well, there's a very simple rule.

Yule Brenner, probably best personified it in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. So let it be written. So let it be done. So let it be written. So let it be done. So it's written down, and it's written down in the guide to safe scouting.

Do you have the guide to safe scouting? It's now available as a PDF file that I will link to on the blog at scoutmaster.typepad.com, and it will answer most of the common sticky questions that you have.

So what about tools? What about power tools? And what about ladders? The guide is kind of silent about ladders. Now, climbing a ladder is a fairly ubiquitous and common activity, so if there was a prohibition against it, I think the guide to safe scouting would say something about it. I'm certain that it would.

As to power tools, there's a handy chart called age-appropriate activities that indicates that scouts, in other words, boys who are members of a Boy Scout troop, that means between the ages of 10 1⁄2 and 18, are permitted to use power tools. You would have to hunt a little bit, but you would find a prohibition against using chainsaws and mechanical log splitters. But you're going to hunt a little bit, because you're going to learn the book.

You don't have to know chapter and verse in it, but you just need to know that it exists, and that it's a wonderful reference for you. How about let's go to a paintball place and make it a troop outing and do paintball?

No, sorry. You really can't do that. Specifically, on page 39, it says, pointing any type of firearm, including paintball, dye, or lasers, at any individual is unauthorized. It's just an unauthorized activity. It's not something that scouts do, so we don't do it.

If you're in a law enforcement venturing program, then there's an exception. But as for Boy Scouts, no. We don't do paintball. We don't do laser tag. We don't do any of that.

It's an unauthorized activity. Again, the guide to safe scouting, it's available as a PDF. It'll be on scoutmastertypepad.com. So there's another real handy guide that you should have, at least in the PDF file or in a hard copy, ready to pull out and to use for references, because the advancement system of scouting is pretty direct and simple, but there are times when you really need some help, where you really need to know some things. For instance, a very common thing that is said is that, you know, if you're working on a merit badge, the requirements for the merit badge expire in six months.

If you don't finish it, if you don't finish a partial, and you let it go for six months or a year or whatever, then you have to begin all over again. Now, that sounds, at the same time, like a smart rule and a stupid rule for a lot of reasons. But what is the actual national policy on merit badges? Well, it's right there in the Advancement Committee Guidebook. That's what it's called. It's called the Advancement Committee Policies and Procedures Book. It's available as a PDF. Again, it'll be at the blog at scoutmaster.typepad.com, and it will save you a lot of wear and tear, because you'll find the answer to the question that I just asked about, you know, when do requirements for a merit badge expire, and they say there's no expiry date except the Scout's 18th birthday. Oh, well, our troop really doesn't want the boys to carry, you know, a partial merit badge for more than a year or six months. The boys will just get lazy, and they won't do them, or they'll forget about them, and they'll waste all that time. Well, that's really none of your business. Your troop can't make rules that change national policy.

Boys do not have to be a certain age or a rank to challenge a merit badge. The rule is, and it says exactly this, is a Scout can challenge any merit badge at any time. So this is all in that wonderful handbook, the Advancement Committee Policies and Procedures book.

And now, you don't get this book and run around like you'll and point your finger in people's face and say, So let it be written. So let it be done. No. You use this to be helpful, not to be a doctrinaire of fuss budget who's going to go around and tell people the right way to do things. I'm just telling you these things because they were great help to me. I'm not trying to put my nose into your business and say, Well, you have to change all these things about your program. I'll let you take care of that. You'll figure it out. But these are pretty invaluable resources. Now, there's a third one that is not yet a PDF file as of this recording, but it is available online in its entirety, and that is the BSA Insignia Guide. And it can be very helpful, too, because there are questions that come up. There are questions that come up all the time about, you know, how this is worn and where this is put and how many of these can I put on and how many square knots can dance on the head of a pen. Well, turn to the Insignia Guide for your answers, because in the Insignia Guide, as in all the other guides, So let it be written.

So let it be done. That's right. If it's written in there, you can count on it being national policy. If it's not in there and somebody tells you something different, well, I would be kind of suspicious of that statement.

Three resources that will help you as a scout leader, there are the Insignia Guide, the Advancement Committee Policies and Procedures Guide, and finally the Guide to Safe Scouting. They're all three should be in any scout leader's possession, either as a PDF file or you should be able to find it on the web.

Definitely save you a lot of time, folks. And remember what Ewell said. So let it be written. So let it be done. Thank you.

That's right. It's time for a Scoutmaster's Minute. A Scout is brave. Yep. A Scout can face danger. He might be afraid, but he can still face it. He has the courage to stand for what he thinks is right, even if others laugh at him or threaten him.

That's real bravery in my book. Chutzpah is a great old Yiddish word that has been defined as a combination of gall and nerve and guts and presumption and arrogance.

I mean, it might not be as noble as the connotations that we attach to bravery. And it may not be that all brave people have chutzpah, but those with chutzpah, baby, they are brave in one way or another.

I mean, it takes real chutzpah to stand up to society. Our Scouts win popularity or risk ostracism at the shifting standards of their peers. Do you remember that?

Remember? One day one thing was cool and you go to school the next day and it's not cool anymore? Hehehehe. There's no more unforgiving and intense and capricious society than the one we encounter when we're teenagers. You know?

It takes chutzpah to be a scout in that society, to stand out and to achieve in a world that often belittles anyone who dares to explore their own potential.

But we've got chutzpah, right? Because a scout is brave.