Stosh

Over the past 67 years I have returned many a wallet or purse. It was something I learned in Scouts. Every time I change a tire for a stranded motorist, they want to pay me for my efforts. I require they do a "good turn" for another stranded motorist they might encounter. Just yesterday, my son and I were eating at a buffet style restaurant and a whole family left the table to get food. Mom left her purse hanging on her chair unattended. I kept an eye on it while she was gone and when it came time to leave I stopped by her table and warned her about the possibility of it getting stolen if left unattended. She thanked me....but I told her she "owed" me. She needed to be telling others about this as well when she sees it. "Good Turns" cost me nothing. But I insist that sometime in the future the one I did a good turn for has to do one for someone else. They may learn along the way that the "pay back" really does not cost them anything as well. Until this process becomes common place, we as a society will not progress. I don't know what impact my efforts make, but I'm still going to keep doing it trying to change one person at a time. Morality is not something that comes from the situation, it comes from within in relationship to the situation.

No need for permission. I put out things that I do that work and everyone on the forum is more than welcome to adopt/adapt them for their own units. To-date, I have had only one service project stay in the trash can. Can't win them all. After all, when a clueless Scout Rank scout takes it out, everyone in his patrol knows they are all going to pitch in to help. One doesn't leave their buddies behind. It is surprising in the long run to watch these kids work and the benefit to it all is when the boys get to their Eagle project, they are every experienced both in helping out as well as leading. The "joke" seems to be that everyone gets to pitch in and help, but the Eagle candidate gets stuck with the paperwork. Nobody wants to "help" with that.

Sorry, I don't have any constructive comment to make on this. I have no idea why anyone, especially 1st graders, would tell a girl they couldn't join. Makes no sense to me.

As boy led, most of my Eagle candidates have had a lot of experience setting up service projects. The Eagle project is pretty much their "masterpiece" (and a lot of paperwork). As part of my SM minute I would have flyers of projects requested from various sources. I'd ask, "Who wants lead on this one?" If no one answered, I crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash. More than once the younger scouts who were to shy to speak up would retrieve it and do a fairly good job first time out. Of course it eventually become a bit embarrassing when the older boys were taking direction from the newbies, too. It worked out well and even promoted a bit of inter-patrol competition when the patrol members all pitched in to help the hew guys lo0k good..

The acidic nature of the pine needles will do the trick for plants with larger root systems. I can't imagine putting it on flower beds unless a good dose of lime also goes on it as well.

With my scouts I always encourage them to finish the EMB's before earning Life. That way they get to focus on the project and not worry about having 3 weeks before 18 and realizing they still needed Personal Finance MB.

Gee, I always thought the patch was given out immediately upon earning it and the card was presented at the COH. I must be old-school on that one. The boy earned it, he gets it immediately at the next meeting at the latest.

When one pushes the age of real maturity in the mid-30's and early 40's, one can expect the growth at the teen years to be retarded I like to compare it to the college students of my era (1960's) to today's college student. We protested a war, they protest having to pay off their loans. Kinda makes one wonder how far In a lot of countries the conference of adulthood is in the early teens. I can't imagine our 13 year olds going out and killing a lion to prove his manhood or a woman in her early teens giving birth to a child. There are cultures out there that think this as normal. I guess the big move to adulthood is moving out of your parents basement sometime after you turn 30.

In college I majored in business administration. In my finance class it was "common knowledge" that General Motors was the epitome of the business world and it's business GNP rivaled that of many nations in the world. It was too big to fail. Well 40 years later it did. What they dddn't realize there were other car manufacturers out there that came in and gave them real competition. They spent their time mimicking them. Ford did the Mustang, GM followed with the Camero. Ford did the Maverick, GM followed with the Chevette, etc.Japan step up it's game and the race was on. They had their day with the '57 Chevy and over the next 60 years they ended up "just blending in with the others". Toyota is the flagship in today's world for manufacturing acumen. Even non-car manufacturers are trying to catch up with the model they represent. The #1 lesson that people today haven't figured out is that by reverse engineering anything to see why it's successful it wastes time and the leader is long gone on to other things in the mean time. This is what the BSA is doing today. Instead of establishing and charting a course and sticking to it, they are merely copying the success of others and end up a day late and a dollar short. Had they stuck with what was working and building on that, they would have been miles ahead today. The programmatic panic of the 1970's changed the advantage of the BSA and they haven't figured out how to get it back except by copying the path of other more successful programs. This will do nothing more than keepng them a day late and a dollar short.

....unless it's the third Tuesday of the month, then you get 15 palms, a Mardi Gras necklace, two patches and a partridge in a pear tree.

Not an excuse, just an observation. Church youth groups of this age are co-ed and there is very little problem with "hormonal aggression". Being adult led, the adults deal swiftly and often times quite harshly with it. It depends a bit on the liberal/conservative nature of the church. Usually the more conservative groups tend to be more well behaved. Scout groups I work with Cub/Scout are not co-ed and I don't have to deal with it. We did have a problem with a female Venturing scout who wore short-shorts and tied her t-shirt and "waltzed" around among the boys until a female SM stepped in and told her to grow up and get dressed. In Venturing as an advisor, I didn't run into any male-female issues. Just had a nice bunch, I guess. The community youth groups I work with are the worst. 'nuff said.

As long as you are an OA member and the patch is for that lodge, (same for the council) any historical patch is okay. Or if one is too lazy to sew on a different temporary patch all the time, they can have a patch from ScoutFest 1993 on their pocket.

I still wear a uniform with the Jambo council strip on it. No one says anything about it. As long as it is for your local council I wouldn't have a problem with it. I wear the council strip issued in 1989 on my current uniform because I am too lazy to get a new one and sew it on. I also have a 1960's uniform with the correct community strip, PC incorrect lodge patch which was current at the time, and all the correct patches for the era. No one complains an I have loaned it out to others for special events. Put them on your uniform and wear them proudly and if anyone says anything about it, tell them about the thoughtful scout that gave them to you. If that doesn't satisfy them, ignore them. No problem in my book.

Probably because BSA didn't come up with the idea first.

If that works for your unit and is traditionally how it is handled, the boys know the consequences.... not a problem for me. I have worked with youth for over 40 years and yes, I have lost those along the way because they choose not to face up to the consequences or weren't allowed to. (I work with a lot of youth that are not BSA) But then again, I have had youth deal with their moral failures, overcome them and turn out to be decent citizens. I only offer that as an option they can chose if they wish. Scouting for me has always been a safe place to make mistakes. I try hard to protect that. I have had some boys screw up seriously, but in the end turned out to be okay. I have a couple of Eagle mentor pins that attest to that. Traditionally mentor pins are given to dads in our area. When they are given to a SM, it's for something very special. I can specifically attribute two of those pins to how I handled extreme poor behavior/choices they made on their Eagle journey.

I'm with @qwazse on this one as well. If BSA wants to make up new programs, they can. I can then choose to be involved with them or not. I have held positions as a scout, professionally, in Cubs, In Boy Scouts, Exploring and in Venturing. I found them all to be great programs. There was no melding mixing going on because each one met a particular need. To blend two of the organizations simply means one new one and two old ones go by the wayside. If I don't like the new program, then that simply means I have two fewer choices to choose from, or in total, now three. If they made unilateral changes to one program, such as going co-ed in Cubs, that's one less option as well, Going co-ed with Boy Scouts is another option gone. I have no problem with Venturing being co-ed, because it was created from the beginning as a co-ed program. If OA goes co-ed, even if Boy Scouts stays all-male, that again, is one less choice to choose from. What it boils down to is I am as a volunteer under no obligation to participate in any program I don't want to. If all that choices I would be interested in disappear, the choice of my participation has been made for me.

There's a fine line when it comes to censorship. Everyone is Constitutionally guaranteed free speech. Now, whether someone is allowed to speak at an event, or anywhere else for that matter, constitutes censorship. Free speech allows for censorship. But if the President is NOT invited to a traditional invite as Honorary President, it by no means restricts his free speech as to why he thinks the invite was denied. That would not bode well for the BSA. "We were afraid of what he might say in front of the boys." A Scout is Brave. Somehow the traditional grade school playground lesson of "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but nobody's words can hurt me," doesn't seem to have made it into today's PC culture. If people wouldn't make a big deal about this nobody would have cared. There weren't any protests within the Jambo as to the President's comments. A Scout is Courteous. Like the other thread Jambo Vent, it was more an issue of the parents and adults than the boys themselves. They had a blast at Jambo. So, what more can one expect. Sometimes silence is the best Free Speech! I didn't think what the President was altogether relevant to the boys,not necessarily harmful, but that's my personal opinion. I put this in because I am allowed Free Speech. What anyone wants to make of it,that is their problem, not mine. What I say is irrelevant to Free Speech, what others make of it is not my problem, it's theirs. They may go into a rant frenzy about it, but it still doesn't make it my problem.

It is my opinion that everything in Scouting should be a learning opportunity for the boys. We have Citizenship MB's, codes of conduct, Scout Law, Patrol Method structure, yet when something goes wrong, the adults step in, take away the leadership, send the boy home. What's the lesson in that? Should not the PLC convene? Should the PL determine the course of action? Are there steps that are taken similar to what would happen in "real life" outside of scouting? Or is the world of Scouting exempt from the world in which it exists? Yes, at first I would do the same knee-jerk reaction of immediately sending the boy home. But is that process the lesson I want to teach? Yes, I had a Scout steal at the Jambo I attended. I was 2nd ASM. The scout was one of the younger boys. It is my philosophy of disciple to do things differently than what most people do. When a child misbehaves badly, the parents usually scream, yell and maybe dole out of bit of corporal punishment or incarceration (time-out for the little ones, grounding for the older ones). Same hold true for teachers and others responsible for the welfare of the child. I don't do those things primarily because then the child doesn't know what to expect. It is "normal" for adults to scream and yell and kids learn how to deal with it. Usually they just blow it off as they get older. So, then, I don't scream and yell and it puts the child in a different position they don't know how to handle. Why isn't this adult yelling at me like adults are supposed to do? So I take the child aside and give them a long and uncomfortable silence. Then I let the boy know I know he did something wrong and that I'm sure he knows he did something wrong as well. This is followed by another long and uncomfortable silence. Then I quietly ask, "What are YOU going to do about it?" Almost always the child will dole out punishment more severe than what I would have done. In the case of the scout at Jambo, he sought out the person he stole from, returned the item, apologized for his indiscretion. Facing up to his "crime" was far more difficult for him than merely getting on a plane, heading home where Mom and Dad will just scream and yell at him...maybe. The boy was not a member of my local troop, but I did find out a few years later he did Eagle and was described as an excellent scout after that. I won that round, but alas, the method doesn't always work, but the majority of time it does. It is far more dramatic and effective to have the boy take responsibility, own up to his indiscretions, than it is to be separated from the consequences and move on. .

Maybe it would bode well if BSA just announced that Jamborees are not a Free Speech Zone. That way they can stop the speech and escort the President off the podium if he/she says something someone doesn't like. Oh? that isn't ever going to happen? Well one cant have it both ways. Either it's free speech or it's not free speech, there's no middle ground.

Yes, I do think there will always be those that seek the bling and put in the time and effort to acquire palms post-Eagle, but I'm thinking they are far and few between. After all, one can make a strong case for Eagle under the same circumstances, and mark college applications and employment resumes. This process has not changed for those scouts. If a scout hasn't internalized the Scout Law and Promise by the time he has earned Eagle, no amount of palms is going to change that.

I'm gonna have to ask the Mrs. about this one. Where I'm from pine trees don't have leaves. Maybe she can tune me into the finer points of what these are. Virginia? I'm a Yankee. What do I know about Virginia. I'm intrigued so I'll follow up on that. Here in the upper midwest, we don't put pine needles on anything, turns the soil acidic and about the only thing known to tolerate and even like needles is blueberries so my blueberries get heavily mulched with them.

Picking and choosing based on what someone might say is censorship. Especially with a 100+ year standing tradition glaringly obvious as to the rationale behind the choosing.

I relive my childhood every day. Just ask my wife, she'll fill you in. But about 95% of that is OUTSIDE the BSA program. That 5% is where I let my hair down and relax from being a scout leader, usually around the dying embers of a campfire after the boys have gone back to bed. I've stared into hundreds of campfires and they all look like they did when I was a kid. Those memories are a nice place to visit, but one can't go back and live there, life has moved on.

I totally understand the emotional reaction to the injustice of this change, but it leaves me uneasy how the Scout Law is torqued to fit by retro-dating the records. I guess I would be more worried about the message being sent to the scouts just to get a piece of bling for their Eagle ribbon. I guess it's just a slippery slope I don't want to be on.

Welcome to the forum @MrJim I'll bite... just what is pine straw? We have straw that is used for bedding in our farm communities, but that comes from the harvesting of oats.