Scoutmaster

The Rules

From an (anonymous) list of Troop Rules posted on the web:

Troop Chairs chairs are a privilege, not a right. Bringing chairs to a campout will be decided at the discretion of the Scoutmaster. Abuse of this privilege results in forfeiture of a camp chair. Camp chairs are defined as a bag chair, or folding chair. Not a lounge chair with foot rests, recliner, or rocking chair.

I would be curious to know what set of circumstances precipitated this particular 'rule'. Perhaps the Scoutmaster didn't have a rocking lounge chair with foot rests and just couldn't conscience that others did?

When I came across this I had to smile wryly to myself and recall that I once thought that most of my problems could be solved by writing rules or developing forms and procedures.

Most of the problems turned out to be what I call 'the price of doing business'. Scouts are boys, and as Plato said: "Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable."

Rules require enforcement, and enforcement is an unpleasant and un-soutmasterlike task. The Scout oath and law are as close as I would like to come to rules - if everyone strives to achieve those ideals we need nothing else. Except perhaps a rocking lounge camp chair with footrests.

Social and Emotional Development in Scouting

From an article at Edutopia:

Social and emotional learning can help students successfully resolve conflict, communicate clearly, solve problems, and much more.

Whether it's in the boardroom or the classroom, individuals need the skills to communicate, work in teams, and let go of the personal and family issues that get in the way of working and learning. Such skills add up to what is known as emotional intelligence, and they are even more important as educators realize that these skills are critical to academic achievement.

Emotionally intelligent individuals stand out. Their ability to empathize, persevere, control impulses, communicate clearly, make thoughtful decisions, solve problems, and work with others earns them friends and success. They tend to lead happier lives, with more satisfying relationships. At work, they are more productive, and they spur productivity in others. At school, they do better on standardized tests and help create a safe, comfortable classroom atmosphere that makes it easier to learn.

Scouting's wide open atmosphere of learning is a perfect setting for developing emotional and social intelligence. Our ideals embody high expectations for emotional and social maturation.

On my honor I will do my best
Scouts must develop an internal standard against which they measure themselves. They must judge their own actions based on self knowledge and self motivation.

To do my duty to God
Scouts pledge to recognize and nurture the moral imperatives that grow out of spiritual reflection.

And my country
Scouts understand that their needs and interests can only be met in the context of a wider community. They develop a dedication to supporting and strengthening society by looking beyond themselves.

To help other people at all times
Scouts are led to see beyond their own welfare to the interests of others. They learn the importance of teamwork, engagement, commitment and working together towards common goals.

To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.
Scouts realize that properly maintaining themselves physically, mentally and spiritually not only benefits themselves but keeps them prepared for service. They learn to appreciate and nurture themselves.

It is up to us, the Scoutmasters, to maintain an atmosphere of awareness and reflection that develops emotional and social intelligence. We accomplish this by focusing on the promises of the movement, our place in fulfilling these promises and creating conditions that allow the work to flourish.

Associated posts at Scoutmaster
Promises to Keep
Scoutmastership, Leadership, Management
Scoutmaster's Mission Statement
Taking Direction from Youth Leadership

Scoutmaster sees more than most.

Scoutmaster J.R. Hotaling (center in picture) of of Rotterdam, New York, Troop 54 was born without eyesight.

From an article in the Schenectady Daily Gazzette:

“He can hear you and find you,” said Brandon Vine, 16, a member Troop 54. “He knows everybody’s voice well enough that he’ll catch it everywhere you go, even when you don’t think he will.”

... In his two years as scoutmaster and decade of being involved with the troop, his blindness has never hindered him from hiking, fishing or any of the outdoor excursions his Scouts embark on each year.

Read the full article here

Never-Fail Campfire Building in Esquire Magazine

Tom Chiarella at Esquire Magazine has posted an article The 75 Skills Every Man Should Master. Skill # 51 uses many of the the methods and measurements from my video Never Fail Campfire Building.

51. Build a campfire.

There are three components:

1. The tinder -- bone-dry, snappable twigs, about as long as your hand. You need two complete handfuls. Try birch bark; it burns long and hot.

2. The kindling -- thick as your thumb, long as your forearm, breakable with two hands. You need two armfuls.

3. Fuel wood -- anything thick and long enough that it can't be broken by hand. It's okay if it's slightly damp. You need a knee-high stack.

Step 1: Light the tinder, turning the pile gently to get air underneath it.

Step 2: Feed the kindling into the emergent fire with some pace.

Step 3: Lay on the fuel wood. Pyramid, the log cabin, whatever -- the idea is to create some kind of structure so that plenty of air gets to the fire.

When is it time to find a new Troop?

Before you waste anymore time trying to fix what is wrong with a Scout Troop look around and see if you can't find one that is a better fit. Put aside the question of dedication, misplaced loyalty and grim determination and look at what the problems are doing to your son.

People of good will sometimes find themselves at odds with one another in schools, churches, community organizations and Scout Troops. Not everyone gets along all the time.

Examine your goals for being involved and keeping your son in Scouts. If they are not substantially being met by his current Troop its time to find another. This process can be as histrionic or as  simple as you choose (please choose simple). 

Simplicity is making the change quickly and quietly. No long letters, emails or discussions, get the papers and walk. If the Troop you are leaving is interested in why they will ask. If they do  have the simplest most direct answers ready - but don't be drawn into a long discussion. If you want a cathartic experience speak with a neutral third party.

Join the new Troop without complaining over the old. Make a fresh start of it.

Our little town has two active Scout Troops and they are quite different. During Webelos transition time we get visits from families who choose us, or choose the other Troop.  Sometimes we swap Scouts back and forth after they find that one or the other Troops is a better fit. My attitude is that this is all "no harm, no foul" territory. So long as the boy stays in scouting I am happy.

Free Range Kids

I encourage you to pay a visit to Free Range Kids; a blog by Lenore Skenazy op-ed columnist at The New York Sun:

Do you ever let your kid ride a bike to the library? Walk alone to school? Take a bus, solo? Or are you thinking about it? If so, you are raising a Free Range Kid! At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail. Most of us grew up Free Range and lived to tell the tale. Our kids deserve no less.

Skenazy rocketed to fame (or infamy) recently when she wrote a column about letting her nine-year-old son take the New York City Subway on his own.

There is a propensity to exaggerate the danger of giving children some measure of independence. High profile yet statistically extremely rare abductions of children have made most parents jittery about letting children out of their sight.

At ten or eleven years old I was allowed to hop on the bus and travel from our suburban Virginia home to downtown Washington D.C. - a voyage I made many times without incident. We rode our bikes all over kingdom come and hitch-hiked quite a bit too.

No I'm not suggesting that children should hitch-hike. It is probably a good idea to give them some more autonomy and reexamine the often irrational fears that cause us to restrict it.

Teenage Angst

Angst, German for fear or anxiety, is used In English when we speak of intense emotional strife.

Wikipedia says; 'The word Angst has existed since the 8th century, coming from the base-Indoeuropean *anghu-, "restraint" from which Old High German angust develops. It is pre-cognate with the Latin angustia, "tensity, tightness" and angor, "choking, clogging"; compare to the Greek "άγχος" (ankhos): stress.'

Our Scouts come to us just as they enter the age of intense personal change and discovery we call adolescence. It serves us well to understand this period of paradoxical joy and suffering. Our boys are working through things that are at once confusing, revelatory, elevating, disappointing and encouraging. We may remember this transition in our own lives but it is sometimes difficult to recall the intensity of that time.

Cary Tennis writes the advice column 'Since You Asked' for Salon Magazine. His latest contribution answers a letter from a teen in some distress;

...All the beautiful things I believed are gone, and now I can't believe anyone or anything. I realized how easy it is to be lied to, how easy it is to lie, and now I've lost both my ability to trust and my own trustworthiness. I'm 18. I'm young, and most of what I feel qualifies as teenage angst, but this seems different. Something feels dead inside of me, and I don't know how to revive it. I don't know if there's anything left to revive.

His answer is equally intense and insightful;

The important thing to realize is that everything you are experiencing as a young person making the transition to adulthood is normal. It sounds crazy but it is simply the truth of the matter. When we are young, we see easily what physicists and mystics know only through a lifetime of arduous study: that matter is a vibration, sort of, and that everything is energy, sort of, that invisible worlds exist, and that language can only capture the edges of this eternal and infinite reality.

I encourage you to read the full article. It may be at odds with the way you see the word in some respects but it will help recall the conflicts we have all encountered and aid us with better understanding our boys as they march forward to manhood.

Related posts at Scoutmaster:
The Work of Adolescence
The Teenage Brain

Scoutmaster Blog Post Number 550

Forgive, if you can, a self-referential moment.

This is post number 550 on the Scoutmaster Blog.
There have been well over 200,000 visits logged since I started in November of 2005.
On average 225 people visit the blog daily and log around 400 total page views.
I receive emails and comments at a reasonable rate.

What I conclude from the numbers is maintaining the blog has been worth the time, and I appreciate your interest. Blogging is a good way to sort out your thinking, share useful information and has been, overall, an enriching experience.

Thanks for looking in
(yes, that is me caricatured above, some of my nephew's work)

U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

Ask Scouts how they observe their "Duty to God" and you are sure to get a wide variety of answers.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently released their U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Results based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older find religious affiliation is increasingly diverse and fluid.

The survey finds that a growing number of Americans are unaffiliated with any religion. 28% of American adults left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion or no religion at all. 44% have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

Every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing adherents. Those that are growing are simply gaining new members at a faster rate than they are losing members. Conversely, those that are declining in number simply are not attracting enough new members to offset the number of adherents who are leaving those particular faiths.

My own religious journey is mirrored by these statistics, so I may be allowed the conclusion that my experience is being shared by a growing number of Americans. I was raised attending two different protestant churches chosen by my parents based, not any denominational loyalty, but on their own evaluation of the church's articles of faith. Our first church was an independent congregation, our second was an established denomination.

In my teens I began reading and studying on my own and made my own affiliation with much more independent, fundamentalist groups that I retained into my mid to late twenties. By the time I reached thirty I had basically ended any affiliation with any religious body. Further searching, reading and independent study have led me to observe Buddhist teachings.

This evolution has changed my view of that part of the Scout Oath pledging duty to God and the point of the Scout law aspiring to reverence. For example there is no God in Buddhism; the Buddha is not a deity. We follow a robust philosophy or set of teachings called the Dharma that encourages us to sharply question even its own basic teachings. We do not worship or pray, in the traditional Judeo-Christian sense, to the Buddha or anything else for that matter. Though my practice has changed I am still an ethical and moral person. Functionally some would identify me as an atheist but thankfully the BSA has accepted the moral and ethical underpinnings of Buddhism are sufficient for a Buddhist to fulfill the Scout Oath.

I would venture to guess that our Scout Troop is almost a perfect microcosm of the Pew Study findings with commensurate percentages of religiously observant and non-observant families. One of the finest aspects of Scouting is plurality and tolerance of this kind.

Organizations like Boy Scouts of America will continue to be relevant in a society that is evolving and changing by embracing these changes. We must maintain and advocate the highest ethical and moral aspirations for our membership without compromise. But we cannot continue to deny membership to a growing number of people who's interpretation of "duty to God" is changing.

Associated posts at Scoutmaster
Duty to God
Reverence

Scouting's 'Urban Legends' Quiz

Powered By ProProfs - Create A Quiz or Flash cards

How many square knots can dance on the head of a pin? What is the policy on uniforms? Who decides if a Scout may advance towards ranks? Scouters everywhere wrangle over these issues. Are there real answers?
Take the quiz and find out.

Need help? Here's a link to the Guide to Safe Scouting

Associated posts at Scoutmaster
Insignia Guide Now Online
Scouting's Urban Legends