Stosh

I lived in North Dakota for 3 years, that is 3 winters. I knew the compass bearings to each of my neighbors' doors and to the service door on my garage. The Mrs. thought it was a bit over-kill. But when one goes out on the back stoop to "let the dog out" one makes sure the dog is securely tied before going out the door because even at night with the porch light on 2 feet from the house one cannot see their hand in front of their face. One hangs on tightly to the knob of the back door. People have died in a blizzard trying to get to their neighbor's house when the heat went out in their own. By the way this is not in the rural area, it is in town! Like I said, I knew the bearing for the door on the detached garage.

Thank your son for me. I appreciate him taking his Eagle charge seriously.

I used that looking back technique any time I knew I was going to do a return trip. Saved me a ton of times. It surprising how different the trail looks depending on which way one is traveling. So then I am assuming you are on the mandatory Luddite training for the boys? There are a ton of examples were "guys" get their new 4-wheeler and head out into the desert only to get lost and some have even died. They relied on GPS and when gas runs out and batteries do too, a modern day scenario for disaster is readily apparent. The best example I had was when I was in Philmont. Boys were following the map, arguing, voting on directions, etc. and all I had was my compass, no map. At least I knew the general direction I was supposed to go and the general direction we were going. Well they dug themselves into quite a hole, but from the last camp to the place we were, I had a pretty good idea how to get back to the original trail we were supposed to be on. Needless to say, simply heading out from the old camp following a trail without taking an initial reading of direction will have them pretty much messed up by noon. They got a lesson in triangulation and we did get to the next camp before sundown.

Thanks, Krampus, I know the TomTom is wrong a lot of the times, and Google Maps is better but not foolproof. The thought that I had with the whole dependence on our technology (and not printed maps) is that the ultimate Zombie what-if attack and there's loss of all technology..... Are we beyond the catastrophic energy collapse so we can rely 100% on these things or will the possibility occur when we will actually have to survive for even as little as a few days on "old technology" like maps and compasses or even finding one's way without even those basic tools? People used to be able to do that. Can they still and is it necessary to teach the next generation? It got me thinking after my old PC crapped out on me, I lost my whole set up, now I'm on an old Dell from the 1990's running Linux and getting by. When I was in college studying business administration, my finance teacher mentioned that General Motors was a company comparable or greater in wealth as compared to most 3rd World Countries. He said GM was to big to fail. We all smiled and agreed with him without a second thought. Where are we putting our eggs in today's basket? What odds are we doubling down on? Maybe being a Luddite isn't such a bad thing as our naive grandchildren claim.

Ever wonder why kids today walk around with their Nike's untied? Could it possibly be they don't know how to?

The Mrs. and I went to TX and OK on two recent trips. I used the TomTom she used the Google Maps. Which worked better? Neither! Roads that didn't exist, spent a ton of time driving out in the fields telling us to get back on the main I-Highway, turning the wrong way onto a one-way street. Signs pointing one way to an event, GPS telling you to go another. Fortunately my Mrs. has navigated herself around the back woods of Alaska working for the US Forestry Service that a simple road map got us to where we needed to be. "Death by GPS" is not for the off-roads crowd anymore, it's a reality for everyone.!

In this day and age of high tech equipment, LED lighting, solar rechargeable cell phones, STEM, EDGE, S.M.A.R.T. GPS, velcro where's the future of scouting headed? When the power grid go out and the last drop of fossil fuel is used up in the generator, what's left in our society?

Wow! Finally a scouter who dumps his life on something other than sexual abuse...... I'm tempted to make a joke about a Jihad ScoutMaster, but maybe it wouldn't turn out to be a joke.... (knock on wood!).

I'm with Eagle94-A1 on this. Get him registered any way you can to get him in the door. If he's allowed, I'd go for the training, but if not, go Eagle94-A1 route. He doesn't need the ASM classification to function as one. He can take the course as soon as it is offered after he's turned 18. I'm thinking the council would go along with this approach with your son only months away from his 18th b-day. Depends on their mood that day you ask.

Oooooooh, much better, I like it!

My take on this situation would be from the perspective of ... "are you giving special considerations to your son and not to the others just because you are the den leader/CubMaster?" Would you go over to some other scout's house, not from your den, for his birthday party sleepover? After all, you are the CubMaster for the whole pack, not just DL for your son's den. I would always be a bit careful of using my position of leadership in the unit to favor my son, or any one other scout in the unit. There's the parent hat we wear and the scouter hat we wear, not good to wear them both at the same time especially if it can be construed as "playing favorites" and having a pet scout, worse if it's your son.

I had a parent who bought the spiral bound book. Took out the spiral. Taped both sides of ever page on the spiral edge. Hand punched 3 holes for a 3 hole ring binder. put it in the 1/2 page sized 3 hole ring binder. He now has a page reinforced, page removable, page writeable, lay flat, hard covered scout handbook.

htusa31, I'm with blw2 on this point. Don't let the naysayers discourage you. The wife/family thing, we all work at whether we've been at it for 4 months or 40 years. As a soccer coach you know what parents are like, they don't get any better or worse with scouting, but as mentioned a good CC and committee can be a real asset if they really do cover your back. Your attitude of total focus on the boys is not an asset, it's a curse, but if you can take the heat, it's the only way to go! Boys of scout age are looking to define their independence as they mature. That puts them at odds with their parents who want to keep them their's forever... Well, if you side with the boys, you naturally side against the parents. If you sell out it is to the detriment of the boys. It's not an easy road and the temptation to go with the flow, pencil whip the requirements, and get everyone their Eagle whatever it takes, and constantly acquiescing to the parents will make a popular youth group, but not necessarily a place where boys learn to grow up, be leaders and are successful later in life.

Just imagine a morning where it's -20o, windchill that takes it down to -45o. Dad said he would take me on my five mile paper route but the car won't start. The grease in the bike axles is frozen up and the wheels won't turn, so it's a 5+ mile hike pulling a sled full of papers. Had to stage out the papers because there were too many to get on the sled all at the same time. I don't have to exaggerate for my grandchildren. Snow was so deep that winter that I had to stop at every driveway to see what house I was at. Nobody shoveled sidewalks that year, it was way too deep and had no place to go, 8' piles on both sides of the street with openings where people shoveled out their driveways to get to the house/garages. Didn't have snow blowers back then, just neighborhood boys looking to make a few bucks.

htusa31 I started camping at the age of 4 years. My younger brothers started before they were a year old. By the time I started scouts I was already proficient in campfire cooking and owned my own equipment for overnight camping under canvas. From early May through mid to late October, my family camped every weekend with a group of other campers. Dad bought a runabout for skiing when we started high school. Only my brother and I still do the outdoor thing. Never burned out. Younger brother been in adult scouting for 20+ years, I've been in scouting 40+ years. Still working on burning out. Go for the adventure, pace yourself a bit, and when it isn't much fun, just back off a bit, be in charge of the coffee pot and let the young and foolish do the heavy lifting. I do tend to agree with you on the parent thing as well. They are black or white, there is no gray with them. Either they are the best support team on earth or the demon spawn. They let you know right away which they are...... The ride will be great when your boy gets old enough for Tigers, but there's nothing to say the daughter can't camp. I have one daughter that tolerates camping and will go out once a year to make me happy and the other is always bugging me to take her camping, and now her daughter too. She's only two, but she's been out there now as well. I have been told in no uncertain terms I'm responsible for teaching my granddaughter how to hunt, fish and camp. Live the adventure, don't just read about it.

First of all - Welcome to the forum! Secondly of all congrats on Eagle, degree, marriage, and the little ones. My son did not follow in my footsteps. I made it to 2nd Class, and stayed on in scouts for 40+ years. He made it Star and walked away never to look back. Just give him the opportunity and let him decide for himself (you can encourage and support all you want.) As far as fund raising.... I'm the last person to ask. My boys just spent every penny in the bank from last fall's popcorn drive to pay for winter camp and the opportunity to recruit Webelos boys with it. They have spent it all! They have no money for even advancement patches. They know it and they are making plans to raise more for summer camp. They'll keep me posted as to how things are going. So how's this going to shake out in the long run? Mr. Stosh and his lovely ASM are going to start writing checks out of our personal funds to keep the new troop solvent as long as the boys keep working at it. When they quit, so do we. ....and who said Scouting isn't an adventure!

Yes, I know the requirement, but what's so magical about it? That was the question I posed to Eagle94-A1. My question is what do the other 5% know that 95% don't know? "Setting the tone" for a generic tradition sounds like a general one-size-fits-all kind of approach and we know that doesn't work well for everyone across the board. Simply accepting something at face value without trying to make it work for the unit may or may not be in the boys' best interest. One can also see that my approach to multiple positions held for a short period of time over 6 months without any tenured term limits also works with the requirement. "...serve actively in your unit for a period of six months in one or more of the following positions of responsibility...." Nowhere in that requirement does it say anything about how one is selected, elected, appointed, volunteer, etc. for a period of arbitrary time. If a boy gets elected PL of his patrol then does SPL work concurrently and then does the Chaplain Aide work for the troop, too, who really cares about his SPL and CA work, he has it covered with the PL POR requirement. On the other hand using my analogy earlier where the boy sequentially fulfills 3 different positions over the 6 months it, too, fulfills the requirement "as spelled out in BSA literature." But if one were to be locked into a 6 month election cycle it would never work out that the boy experiences more opportunities for leadership development in a variety of different areas. Well, he could, but it would take him 3 times as long. It is this kind of adult derived traditions that most often involve the greatest angst for Scouters and Scouts alike. Look at all the threads about coming up with elaborate formulas for determining whether or not a boy is even active in the troop. How many days/activities does it take to deny a POR over a 6 month period? Even if the boy gets sick for a month, the adults have to make a special circumstances rule to account for the fact that one month of the time he is "excused", instead of just letting him add on another month before handing off the reins to the next scout. No room in that in a 6 month election cycle. He'll have to serve another month and then he can quit that POR in the middle of the term and leave his buddies hanging. Then there are the long, drawn out job descriptions minutely spelling out all the hoops the boy has to jump through to satisfy the POR requirement. Hmmm, he slacked off consistantly for 5 1/2 months, but he got his feet on the ground the past couple of weeks so we'll give him credit for it. (Sound like the pattern of the "death bed" Eagles?) I may not do thing according to every else's traditions, but then I don't seem to have anywhere near the number of problems others are having either. Your mileage may vary..... By the way, this isn't another one of those "my way or the highway" things. It's just another way of looking at things that may or may not make someone else's life out there a bit easier. Maybe their unit needs a wee bit of tradition and a wee bit of out of the box to make it work for them. At least now they have some options to consider.

Eagle94-A1 Sorry, Eagle, for not using the mention button. My computer crashed and I'm on a backup Linux machine and I don't get all the features I used to. Yeah, I'm under the impression that the 6 month "term" is some arbitrary adult rule based on POR requirements. I've never used it because if a patrol picks a popular PL who is only interested in wearing a patch and getting by on unearned POR credit, the boys don't have to wait 6 months to correct the problem. My boys can also jump ship from one patrol to another at any time and control who is in their patrol and who is not. All I ask is that the boys keep me up-to-date on who's in what patrol. Right now with the numbers I have (one patrol), no one jumps around much. My BOR committee members are trained to accept POR fulfillment in pieces. A boy might get credit for 1 month of QM work for getting the trailer ready for summer camp. He might get a month or two as Instructor for helping out with the NSP patrol's advancement, then fill for the Chaplain Aide for 3 months while the usual CA is in football. If it adds up to 6 months, it doesn't make any dfference whether the boys was selected, appointed, elected, volunteered or not or whether he even wears the patch. If he does the work, he gets the credit. In all my tenure as SM I have never had an SPL. The position has always been temporarily filled by a PL as needed. With only 4 patrols at the most, I've never had a PLC either, so those 6 month POR issues never arise. I have had a number of boys fulfill the POR piece-meal, though. The longest running POR I ever had was my first Eagle Scout who served the entire 4 years I was there as one of the PL's and was capable of doing the SPL work as needed at activities that required it. There is a drawback on the long running office holders, the expectations for the next guy are often way out of line and impossible to fulfill. Usually takes a couple of boys to break into the position and the boys don't wait long enough for the new leader to get his feet on the ground. However, once the patrol figures out one of those new guys is capable, they settle down. I had one older boy age out just before I took over as SM in my prior troop. Big legacy and big shoes to fill. A new guy went in, lasted a month, second guy went in lasted about as long, then then went back to first guy, then a third guy, and finally settled on the first guy. He stayed for over a year as PL. They didn't have to listen to political speeches as to who would be the best PL, they got to "test drive" them and then decide. They got it settled on their own. It was interesting to watch. It's kinda surprising that the boys always seem to figure things out if you leave them alone long enough. One must also realize that cream seems to rise to the top and the "untouchables" end up in a "loser" patrol. I often worried about that at the beginning. Either the boys quit or they "grew up" and did rather well in Scouting and were even reabsorbed back into the other patrols over time. It was their choice and they either stepped up or quit.

Works for liars too. Seriously, hasn't one figured out that everything that is bad for society comes from the world of politics. Bullying is such a small part of it one hardly even notices anymore. There's even a term for political bullying, it's call Mud Slinging and it's been around for a long, long time. Sorry to point out the obvious.

What's the magic behind the 6 month thing?

If all people are as different as snowflakes, why is it so important for bullies to find intellectual fulfillment in life by pointing out the glaringly obvious?

At 4' 11" 98# when I started high school I knew what bullying was all about. Like Cambridgeskip mentions, we have all gone through it at one time or another and it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. So as mentioned, how do we get our boys through the process and keep them safe until they are old enough and mature enough to deal with it appropriately? I have found one area that I harp on consistently that I believe really helps. (Drum roll, soap box) That is in the area of teaching the difference between Leadership and Management. To me leadership is "taking care of your boys". Once the boys take that premise seriously a lot of the bullying dissipates. The focus is centered on being a caring help to another, the focus is on another person. Leadership is a person-to-person dynamic. On the other hand management is focused on getting a task done and people are used to accomplish that goal. Concern for the other people in the process isn't the #1 priority, but the task at hand is. Here is where the opportunity for abuse comes into play. The domineering PL, the unfair duty rosters, etc. all play into, getting the job done and having to deal with the slackers and screw-ups along the way. I have even seen troops where the SPL is not elected but placed there by the SM. So who gets the job? Yep, his pet scout. An iron fisted SM will have an iron fisted SPL. I had a boss once who spelled it out very clearly in a staff meeting. He said his job (management) was to make sure things got done and his role in the process was to "determine whose dog got kicked". At first it didn't make sense to me, but later he explained, at sometime or another someone's going to end up on the short end of the stick and they are going to pass down the ladder that negative feeling where the guy on the bottom rung has no one to take his frustration out on and finally goes home and takes it out on his unsuspecting dog. I see this all the time. SM is frustrated at some job not getting done, dumps on the SPL, who inherits the frustration and takes it out on his least favorite PL, who then dumps on Little Joey who's been slacking off in his duties of late. Is that bullying or "good management". Where in the process are PEOPLE considered more important than the duty roster tasks? Little Joey doesn't do his job assigned to him by his PL. He wanders off and sits by himself. (Tenderfoot Requirement #9) Buddy System. His buddy finds him and yells at him for not helping out, PL backs him up. Because the job was more important than Little Joey, no one bothers to ask him why. If they did maybe they would have found out his Grandmother passed a couple of days earlier, or his mom and dad just separated, or a thousand other concerns that overwhelm youth at a tender age. Tenderfoot Requirement #9 is the first lesson in true Leadership. It has nothing to do with guys heading to the latrine or trading post as pairs, it's one scout learning to take care of another scout, taking care of someone besides just themselves. Little Joey didn't get the water for tonight's dinner cleanup, Buddy John goes and finds him and instead of haranguing him sits down and says, "Wanna talk?" After Joey gets a chance to vent, Buddy John says, "You need get water for tonight's supper. How's about I help you with that?" The management of task gets done, and real Leadership tightens the bond between Joey and John that when PL selection comes up sometime in the future, Buddy John doesn't need to make some bogus political speech about how he's qualified for the position. Joey and those that John has taken the time to care already know it. Bully Bobby always makes sure the job gets done, but will gain the POR based on SM pet agenda and not on the boys looking for the right person to lead. Yeah, the analogy is a bit over the top and extreme, but to a lesser extent I see the dynamics in my troops working quite well. As SM I have two pet phrases that my boys tease me about. When they screw up something, they know I'll always say, "I bet you never do that again." and when they drop the ball with leadership, they know I'll always ask, "Is that how you take care of your boys?" So does it work? I have a TF PL right now that will call my "space cadet" older scout who comes from a poor family situation every week and remind him of the meeting. That's how he takes care of his boys. For a boy that was a Webelos cross over less than 12 months ago, I'm thinking his leadership learning curve is moving along quite nicely. Seriously, I only give an annual briefing to the new Webelos boys about bullying and how it won't be tolerated in the troop. I seldom have to revisit the issue and then it's for only minor infractions due to the learning curve of caring for others.

Eagle94-1A, I can see a LC set up that way, but with boys being assigned troop POR's it's a rather moot point to think the elections were of any real value. I like the idea that the older boys with spotty attendance would be in that group so as to not disrupt the operations of anther patrol of younger boys. My LC patrol operated similarly, but there were no restrictions. You had the POR you were in that patrol. On the other hand we did have another patrol that was an Honor Patrol of older boys that was by invite/election to join. I guess one could justify calling them the Venture Patrol. It did help hold the older boys in the troop. They didn't have to hold POR's (except the PL and other POR's that didn't impact the other patrols directly, i.e. Bugler, Chaplain Aide, any Den Chiefs, etc.) If the POR required direct interaction with the patrols, they were in the LC group. That would be the Scribe, QM, Instructor, TG, etc. It seemed to work out well for the boys, especially the older boys. The older boys could handle the discontinuity of the LC where the membership changed as the POR's changed. They were more functioning at an adult level of leadership rather than patrol method of learning to lead process. If left alone, the boys seem to figure this out on their own and do a rather good job of it for the most part. A few slackers and glory hounds slipped in on occasion but they didn't last very long before their buddies squared them up.

I'm with you Rick_in_CA, but personally I really don't like to eat with a hat on whether it be indoor or outdoors. So the cover comes off on that on a regular basis. (I wear hats all the time except while at home.... but if it's cold enough, I'll wear a hat to bed). We keep the house colder than most people at night. The only other time is when I'm in the sanctuary of a Christian church. In auditoriums I do remove my hat out of a courtesy to those sitting behind me. In uniform, I wear the hat as part of the uniform and whereas I wouldn't take my necker off, the hat is the same.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368645/ This film came out 40 years ago, people still haven't learned. Bullying is not limited to just the boys, it happens to every age group in every organization and most of it is tolerated because we have become so insensitive we don't even realize it's potential to hurt anymore.. Take a look at some of the posts on this forum, even Scouters fall prey to this unscoutlike behavior on a rather regular basis.