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Somebody somewhere is tweeting shame on GS/USA for being patriotic and not partisan? My only public post regarding GS/USA is: "Hey, girl scouts, I have a door, and a phone. Your moms' cookie sells announcement mean nothing to me."

Talk to your troop committee chair and see if someone in your troop can sign up to counsel it. (You might have to share a copy of the requirements so people know what you're talking about. If not, ask at your district round-table for someone to volunteer to help your son. Anyone who does field surveys as part of his/her job would make a great counselor: biology/geology/anthropology departments at many colleges, museums, heck I know one guy who traveled the world looking for new plants at pharmaceuticals. It sounds like a fun badge, and your son is "paving the way" for other scouts to enjoy it!

Why not divide everything by 5 and make the scale that much simpler? Also, I think there should be away to incorporate the uniform inspection sheet ... Average score divided by 10? Anyway the proof will be in the pudding. I think you're close enough for a road test. Have the boys give it a try and ask them how they'd tweak it.

Works now! Regarding the PLC, you always need their buy-in. Most things in life are really a negotiation. In the examples I put forward, the SM might be seeing something getting in the way of boys achieving the pinnacle scouting experience, so he initiates the change. It's entirely possible that a boy sees the need for change. That happened with our troop last year. TG started bailing out the SPL, and I started giving him advice on being a better SPL. He pointed out that that wasn't his position. I made it clear that I advise according who I see doing the work, not who's wearing the patch. The SM moved up the election schedule, and no boys disagreed.

It's like I have an evil twin! As soon as I got handed that Advisor patch, I started getting cross-talk from untrained scouters on "how it's gonna be done." Two things that served as a sanity check: Council VOA and advisors who confirmed that I may be crazy, but I'm also right. The Area 4 Venturing Commissioner who told me to check out scouter.com.

Something about @@NJCubScouter's link was throwing it off. Cutting and pasting the edited link above seems to work. As far as I'm concerned, @@Stosh's process is still an election. An Israel-in-the-era-of-judges kind of election, but one nonetheless. Bottom line: BSA allows a wide envelope on how things should be done. I've encouraged our SM to be more flexible about the timing of SPL elections, calling boys on the carpet if they aren't showing up for their PoR's. On the other hand, imagine once @@Stosh's troop has about 40 boys, and if they turn all cynical and want to rotate a different boy through SPL every week ... I suspect at that point, he'll set the boys down and demand a little more stability. SM's should set schedules and qualifications based on what their boys need to achieve the pinnacle scouting experience of hiking and camping independently with their mates ... not on what parents are telling them Johnny needs to advance.

Give him a BSA Adult application and pay for his assistant scoutmaster training. IMHO, there is no greater honor than being entrusted to tend to the well-being of our nation's youth.

Hi DS. Long time no read! Never understood why last minute MB completion should stress anybody out. Either the scout starts and ends the badge in a timely fashion ... or he does not. I try to teach scouts and venturers backdating. (E.g., get some graph paper -- or even a real paper calendar -- and count back from their target date when they must take particular actions.) They trivialize the method, and as a result, some have not made Eagle. Their problem, not mine, not their parents'.

BPSA seems to have peaked as well. I gathered from their website there was a leadership transition. I certainly hope they gain a little momentum.

@@Jarmfam, welcome to the forums! General rule: Let the Boy Scout Handbook and the Scoutmaster's Handbook be your guide. If those documents don't give a restriction, it means troops have latitude. You most definitely want your SPL to be a lad the other PL's trust and someone who wants to continue to develop his leadership and management skills. So, yes, if an incumbent wants to ask the troop to allow him to retain his office, encourage him to do so. A boy on his second term (however long a term is in your troop) can learn more about tour planning, vision casting, and training his replacement(s). From the school of hard knocks: Never dole out leadership positions based on need for rank advancement. Ban adults from bribing boys to projects by saying "It counts for service hours." Merit badge classes during troop meetings: no. Meet the counselor evenings: yes. It's not a problem if it takes five years to become a first class scout. The advancement method helps with skills acquisition only. For skills retention one needs the patrol and outdoor method. Patrols need physical distance (up to 300' if you have an open field, their own rooms if your chartered organization is that generous).

One of our former scouts and his wife are taking a 6 week "fast" from social medial. In the process he has purged his "friends" list down to something over 100. Evidently I made the first cut.

Not there, but possibly along the way. Figuring out how to make folk's cells robust against radiation damage is as much part of cancer treatment delivery as it is of astronautics. Figuring out how to corral radiation around a "safe capsule" has even broader applications in development of medical devices. I'm not as glib as David CO about the supremacy of robotics. It's taken tremendous effort to get state-of-the-art probes to do a fraction of the jobs that manned missions could do. The "long road" -- i.e. being earthly minded for a couple of generations -- is giving us tools for very long journeys which will help our grandchildren be of some heavenly good.

@@NJCubScouter, we really couldn't. The dollars required to address Nixon's cancer initiative alone eclipsed several moon shots over the years. Remember the "can't even cure the common cold" phrase? Science fiction makes keeping space-bound humans happy and healthy look easy. But it really is rocket science. Radiation, dust (fun fact: the moon smells like cordite), meteor impacts, and water prospects are the main impediments. It's taken this long to solve most of those without actually killing our best astronauts in the process. (As it is, we lost enough getting them up and back from orbit.) Of course there is some truth to the fact that political will has gotten in the way, but the broader story is how the populace has extracted lemons from lemonade. Compared to the span between the Vikings and the rise of European circum-navigation, things are moving at a fairly good clip.

So is it doc LeCastor, now? Welcome back!

I am probably one who reminisced about how my troop worked. A few of us had to loose corners before we wised up. I've never seen a boy in my sons' troop get a card "cornered". They are either more compliant, or they do more video-gaming than whittling! Or, maybe thanks to video games, boys have learned to steer clear of other boys with knives. When talking to kids about the totin chip. I do encourage them to come to me and review the material, and I'll see to it they get a "fresh" card.

No specifications of the sort, although admittedly I have not cracked open the pamphlet in ages to see what might be described. If you are getting ready for camping in snow, you are necessarily preparing for a wide envelope.

We might not have walked on the moon since then, but we've enabled millions to survive a variety of coronary diseases and cancers (among other diseases). Worth the trade-off, I think.

It's a unique fellowship, Jambo troops. For years to come, those boys around council are no longer strange faces.

I assure you, my great nephews and nieces are having all manner of camping fun down in central FL. But, they are specifically asking for snow. To my knowledge they are doing so without reference to Camping Requirement 9B. They will be disappointed (but hopefully gracious) if we must provide them with substitutions. They are not asking because it is some extreme test. They are asking because they want to see and feel something inherently beautiful -- yet heretofore beyond their experience.

We are losing the forest for the trees here. The point is not an extreme weather experience. The point is to add variety to one's camping experience. By golly, if the snow ain't happening, do something else creative with the conditions you're given. A nephew is coming to visit because his kids are hankering to see snow for the first time. Hopefully the weather will turn for them. But if it doesn't, I'll find them (the boys, at least) a 1000' climb to hike and camp in. (FL is shy on hills as well.) I'm taking time off to ensure the opportunity. I'll leave it to their MB counselor to decide if following your crazy great uncle crew advisor into he wild meets the standard for "scouting activity". Nobody cares if it doesn't. There are four other ways they may check off that requirement with their patrol.

Later, when I was old enough to do the heavy lifting and help Dad clean out the garage, I learned that the goofy wooden thing with a motor on the side was a band saw my brother had made from scratch. 8) So much for teaching a man to fish.

Ship the block to some third world orphanage with the design specs and have their kids send it back. Maybe one day they'll get a crack at those manufacturing jobs we complain about everyone losing. i tell parents just give the kids markers and have them decorate the block. My oldest brother made my first PWD car. I'm sure he thought he was helping me, but I just watched him round out the edges using the saw in his wood shop and apply a perfectly even coat of paint. He let me nail the wheels on. Although I always appreciated my brother's care, I never did like that car and never was particularly proud of the 3rd place ribbon it got. The other cars I made: made with my pen knife and whatever paints me and my buddies could find.