MattR

I talked to someone a few years ago that ran an optional program for older scouts: 24 hours in the woods, tending a fire, no talking, only water to drink. I thought it would be great to do for older scouts. I talked to a few adults and they were not supportive. I think the scouts would have really gotten a lot out of it.

3x5 flag. The pole length depends on the room you're displaying it. If it has a regular ceiling (8') then a shorter pole is used. We do have two sets, one for meetings and one for campouts that stay in the trailer. All of our ceilings are plenty high so we have the 7' poles, I believe. Wouldn't a 6' long flag drag on the ground with a 5' pole? Even a 3x5 flag will drag on the stand.

Welcome to the forum. If you're still in rural Colorado, or just not a big city council, this is still the way it goes. If you're like me you'd prefer to work with the scouts. Definitely MB counselor. Find a troop that needs help, which is most troops. I'd start not too much larger. I've seen some people that can't say no and then they get sucked into so much that they burn out and walk away. If you just help a dozen scouts for 7 years then you will have made a huge impact.

I had the scouts first figure out what they wanted to do, then we figured out where to do it. Giving them lists of ideas helped a lot. Another part of figuring out what they want to do is also figuring out rough percentages of types of campouts. Is the idea to mostly be a challenge? Fun and games? A couple of our usual campouts? Without first doing that they would get stuck on an idea and all of a sudden they did that all year. They did the same for meetings.

Has anyone written, or does anyone just use in the back of their mind, a list of expectations for the rank scout spirit requirements? I'd like to write something for my troop that's a description of growth for each of the methods. Interesting things happen where some methods interact. One set in particular is Advancement and Ideals. Many of us have talked about the Scout Spirit requirement and this seems to be at that intersection. For example, what's expected of a scout as far as being helpful, looking out for others, being cheerful when the weather is lousy, etc, on average tends to increase as scouts move up ranks. Do you tell scouts, for example, "now that you're a first class scout you're expected to start looking out for others. You can't wait for someone else to ask you to do the right thing, you're just expected to do it." I'm not saying to make it part of the requirement, but just an expectation that might drive discussions with or among the scouts, or when to encourage a scout to solve a problem, or lead rather than wait for someone else to lead. Often I've told scouts something along the line of "that sure is a problem, but now that you're a Second class/Star/Life scout don't you think you can handle that on your own?" It just might help everyone to see those expectations. I realize they're hard to measure but we could still talk about them. Thanks

Better training? The current training only works for those that don't need it. Better understanding of the typical problems and good, honest, specific examples of how to solve them. Pushy or clueless parents. Scouts with challenges. Getting a troop out of a rut. Developing a program so scouts stay till they age out. Just my 2 cents.

Sure, but when sports teams have a few players with massive egos then some players will gravitate towards scouts. I was talking about when the activity is done right. When I was a kid I did both. I liked both at the time. Now, I see that I liked sports for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with any goals that any adult has ever brought up. But I'm still glad I did it. Scouts was somewhat closer but I will never forget the impact a couple of those adults (and one older scout) had on me. A bit of tough love. A bit of kindness at just the right time. I can't say the same about the coaches. My son did both. He enjoyed tennis. He wanted to play basketball but couldn't make the team. That's a problem with sports in a big school. The service aspect of scouts has stuck with him. Maybe different activities work better for different kids. I agree. It's also why scouts is high on the decision tree for what a kid will cut to make up for too many commitments. On the whole, what you say is why I've pushed for new scouts to focus on teamwork. Without that patrols have no hope and leadership is really difficult.

I think the difference between scouting and sports is fairly simple. At the most basic level, when scouts and sports are both done right, scouting is about learning to put others before self, gracefully, and sports is about learning to win, gracefully. Some parents see more value in one over the other. Some see value in both.

You shouldn't have to fight this on your own. Go or stay comes down to how many quality, helpful parents believe in you. Sounds like you have great enthusiasm and you're learning. If you're all alone then leave, you'd be wasting your time. If the majority of parents and a couple of good asms believe in you then talk to them, get their ideas, lead, and solve the problem. You did get voted down by the committee but I don't know if that represents the majority of the troop. Usually it's just a couple of bad apples that cause the problems. One solution might be that, after you share your vision, half the troop wants boy led and half wants adult led. Fine, split the troop. You don't need to be confrontational, just believe in your ideas and that there are those that don't.

For me, the fun to grief ratio was getting too low. I didn't want to end up angry at scouting. I tried a different job at the district and while the fun was great the grief was also great. So I changed jobs again. Now, it's kind of like when I started. I have fun doing scouty things with scouts. I have learned to let the bad stuff go. Cheerful and Helpful is my litmus test.

There's a difference between selling character development and selling eagle. Character evolves slowly in fits, starts and reversals. Nobody ever claims perfect character. Eagle is sudden, as soon as the final signature on the app is made. Before the signature one is just a scout, afterwards one is forever eagle - the epitome of scouting and as close to perfect as one can get. Equating the two is a fool's errand but many people are buying into it.

I always wondered why national would take more than 5 minutes to respond. Type the data in from the signed app, press enter, press print, put it all in an envelope, mail it. Better yet, have each council type in the data, scan the app, press send, wait for the return pdf file, press print. Honestly, I've never heard of national rejecting an eagle app. Anyway, it used to regularly take a month for all of this to happen but in the last couple of years it's been about 2 weeks. Maybe there's a rush of LDS scouts. BTW, congratulations.

Any chance I can join your troop and go with you? It would be cheaper. Better yet, can I join you for a European jamboree? It would still be cheaper than going to ours.

I don't think "whether or not checklists" is the right question. That's a question of how to implement something. The question right now is what that something should be. The crux of the problem, from my experience, is how to develop patrol independence. Independence combined with making it fun requires the ability to create a wide range of events. That's really hard for scouts. They can't just do advancement every meeting. It needs to be a mix of new skills, advancement, service, unique projects to build, places to go, and just plain silly fun. If that goal is given to a new patrol they're going to stare at the wall. It would be better to start with a simpler problem. For example, give them limited choices to pick from. Or have the PLC create a list of activities that patrols can choose from. Or they'll need someone to teach them how to do it as they walk them through it (have every patrol do the equivalent of a plc planning session). A troop needs to understand where their patrols are now, where they want them to be, and how to get there. As an aside, when I was SM we had one week a month for patrols to figure out their own activity. The PLC did create a suggested list of activities to choose from. That was a lot of work for the patrols. It was also a hard sell for the adults. They wanted efficiency and my ideas about patrol method were not convincing enough. A few adults got into it and helped out. Some patrols did great and some struggled. I'd do it differently but I'd still push for more patrol activities. After I stepped down the new SM tossed that idea and made everything troop centric again. Every month had a theme (which I was fine with) but every meeting had no time for patrols. Worse, most themes were wrapped around working on a merit badge. At the last spl election one scout said he wanted to change things back to patrols doing their own thing for one meeting a month. He said all the advancement was getting boring. It made me feel good. Unfortunately he didn't sell it very well and was not elected.

I'm not sure anything can be done for that. Think about it. The only place 50,000 people meet is in the center of a big city with the infrastructure to handle it. That many people at a stadium in a big city with several million inhabitants is no big deal. Place those people in the middle of nowhere and there's a big challenge to move all of them. There are 15 flights a day out of Yeager airport in Charleston (an hour away). Just for fun, let's say there are 200 seats on each flight. That's 3000 people a day. And some of them are the locals that usually use the airport. That airport is set up for a very limited throughput. From flight control to ground support, gates, and everything else. That won't work. Do this once every 4 years and nobody will find a motive to invest in the infrastructure to solve it.

Welcome, @Barkley421. I'm more of a minimalist. One row is fine. Of course, I'm now in charge of the group that decides who gets the DAMs yet I don't have one and am fine with that.

If it has a taste then it's gone rancid. Start over. My grandmother, who was known for many things other than her cooking, loved to make fruit cake in an old cast iron skillet. It always had this funky flavor that nobody liked and everyone joked about. She passed some 30 years ago. About 10 years ago I had a cast iron dutch oven that started getting that same flavor. Aha! I suddenly knew what it was. (It was too much oil left in it for too long) I put it in the oven on the clean cycle, smoked up the house, and started over with seasoning it. It still works.

Plastic tote. Steel pan (Lodge?). Cast iron griddle (Cheapo at walmart). A big light weight pot for boiling water-ish type foods. A little pot. Metal utensils. Strainer. Wash tubs. I think that's most of it. That's all they use, anyway. We got away from anything with a non stick coating other than patina from cooking stuff with fats.

I think this discussion, in the general sense, has not moved in years. On the one hand there's a possibility of kids getting hurt and on the other there's a loss of growing up. It's been stuck there. First of all, I think quantifying the risks and benefits might move things forward. Maybe the BSA has specific reports of scouts getting hurt when left on their own but we don't know how many and what the severity is. On the other side, there is no quantifiable information on the benefits. The entire discussion is Someone mentioned child abduction. How many scouts have been abducted by parents from a campout? Is it any? is it five out of the million scouts in the past 10 years? What number is reasonable? Roughly half of kids have gone through their parents divorce. I don't knot the percentage of ugly divorces but I've seen the results in kids that are totally messed up from it. Maybe these kids could benefit from the self confidence of camping on their own. Another aspect of risk vs benefit is comparing the scenario of no parents to untrained parents. The BSA is really adamant about having two adults around on a campout and yet a few weeks ago a bunch of parents had scouts make canoes from pvc tubing and Tyvek and take it on moving water. Moving water is one of those things the BSA requires certification for and camping is not. In the canoe incident that troop was really lucky some scout didn't get caught in a strainer. This brings up the topic of training. I'm all for good training. Rather than say no, you can't do anything, I'd rather see training that would allow scouters to take scouts, or let them go on their own, into different challenges. Challenges are one of those unmentioned methods, much like having fun, that should not be ignored for the sake of making it simple to reduce risk. The old saying don't throw the baby out with the bath water applies here. The BSA does seem to jump first to "not allowed" rather than "allowed if trained." If the risk of un trained scouters is too high to allow an activity then how about trained scouters to allow it rather than just denying it. The model for training is already in place and for the most part works well. Let's explore that route.

Thank you for ending this discussion.

I think there's another piece to this puzzle that might help and I saw it in spades at my last high adventure trip. We were on a challenging backpacking trip because it was high, cold, and snowy. Yet it was one of the best trips I've been on and this was due to the scouts. In a nutshell, good leadership is really simple if there's good teamwork. The leader said he "didn't have to do much" and yet he did the perfect amount. The key was everyone wanted to help. There was no complaining even though a number of scouts got cold at night, feet were sore. They helped each other and talked each other up. At the end they, too, noticed how good the group was. There ranks ranged from first class to life. Age ranged from 13 to 17. Abilities are good but nothing extraordinary. They have their share of busy schedules that pull them away for a season at a time. A few are quite shy but the leader is an extrovert. What the adults did notice was that they were all leaders with respect to scout spirit. They were all in the OA but one (and he was not eligible yet). They also were all up for a challenge. This group would be the model patrol. If my troop had a few more patrols like this then I'd be on a soap box telling you to just let the scouts be. About 7 years ago we had a group of scouts that had more than it's share of negative, or self centered, or just plain lazy kids join. It has been a huge challenge to get them motivated. They were there to make mom or dad happy. Well, they finally worked their way out of the troop and the result was this past high adventure trip. Anyway, maybe the question isn't how to develop patrols so much as it's about dealing with a lack of teamwork. I don't know if our culture is making it harder to find scouts that live the oath and law but that seems to me at least the underlying issue. One scout in a patrol that's not wanting to help out is a challenge for the patrol. Two is a huge challenge. Three makes it impossible. A lot of scouts are new to the idea of teamwork so starting them off with a challenging group is not an easy way to develop patrols.

The Ken and Barbie uniform. Sorry, but they look rather stiff.

Sounds to me like the council is broke and they're just making crap up. I've seen this before. Just ignore.

I think it should depend on what you want to learn about. That said, I thought I knew what I wanted to learn about but I failed. My ticket was mostly a waste of time because I was clueless and my "advisor" couldn't be bothered. So I'd say the question is who should you talk with about your ticket.

I think. It would be a great goal. Maybe hard to reach. Maybe a lot of adult guidance. Yet maybe a lot of room for scouts to take over.