Cambridgeskip

I have no idea how much you get charged for national jamborees but I would expect to pay more for a world jamboree. They are priced so that scouts from western countries are charged a lot more than those from the developing world, effectively subsidising them. If I recall right WOSM put each country into one of 5 price categories and I would assume that USA, along with the likes of UK, Japan, Australia, Germany, Canada etc will be in the top one.

For fixed camps at scout campsites we have switched over the last couple of years to battery powered LEDs. As well as being that bit safer* the big issue is durability. The attrition rates on glass globes used to be pretty high. LEDs have plastic globes so a lot more robust. At summer camp as well the kids quite like them over torches for those late evening moments where a few of them are just hunkering down somewhere away from our main sight for those late night teenager chats about whatever it is teenagers talk about and it's all (in their mind) a bit new and dangerous..... they often aren't allowed to light fires everywhere, particularly where there is peat soil, so a lantern is good! For more backpacking style events it would head torches all the way. *when I have kids camping without adults present the thing top of my risk assessment and the thing that has me waking up in a cold sweat at night is the idea of kid lighting any kind of flame inside a nylon tent. No kid has ever done it (that I no of anyway) in my charge and I trust them not to be so stupid as to do so but it doesn't stop me worrying!

Thanks! and yup, they can be professional scruffs when they want to Although they are going to have to smarten up for the theatre trip next week. As for super soakers.... We have a small arsenal of them owned by the troop itself. One of the first things to get packed for camps.....

Re venturing..... when the old Venture Scout section existed in the UK I seem to remember that numbers dropped when increasing numbers of 18 year olds started going to university in the late 80s and into the 90s meaning that venture units lost many of their older members for most of the year and they drifted away. At the same time though SSAGO (Student Scout And Guide Organisation) which is affiliated to WOSM but not directly to TSA or GGUK saw its numbers climb. Does an equivalent to SSAGO exist in the USA? It might be interesting to see what its numbers look like.

Just had our last regular night before we stop for Christmas. We have a trip to the theater next week but this was our last standard troop meeting. We gave the premier of "2015 - the movie". Thought I'd leave it here..... Enjoy!

There is an element of truth is what Stosh is saying here. When handling some kids there is little substitute for either many years experience or formal training. One of my ASLs (what you would call an ASM) is 73, he’s been at the group since he joined as an 8 year old cub and with the exception of 5 years off when he had very young children has never left. Those years of experience that he has are invaluable. He has a finely honed instinct for how to handle any given difficult character. He knows who and when needs to be taken quietly aside to just spend some time talking. Or not even talking. I saw him take a very angry young man from a difficult background aside one night and together they repaired a broken lantern. They didn’t talk about issues or his family or anything. They just talked about how to fix that broken lantern. Absolute magic. Equally I have seen him be that non moving brick wall that it did another boy the world of good to run headlong into and find that finally somebody was going to say no to him and put him in his place. The only other person I saw as good as him was a lot younger. She was an assistant cub leader but had trained as a social worker. Sadly we lost her when she quit to become a nun in France. She had that same instinct. I would say to Stosh though that by the sound of it you have an advantage not just in your experience but in the size of your troop. 5 scouts is small and you don’t have to divide yourself among very many scouts. If I’m at full strength I have 38 kids though the door. That’s an awful lot more young people that need a slice of me and my team. In a bigger troop the time will come that much earlier where the SM may have to look at whether it is fare on the rest of the troop to keep that scout in while they are disrupting the activities of the troop and also inevitably drawing more of the time of the adults involved. A final observation. Over 18 years as a scouter I have had my share of the difficult kids, boys and girls. Many of them I, my team, other young people and scouting generally have been a good influence on. I can think of the girl that was in almost continuous trouble at school but was a brilliant patrol leader with us. There have though been a small number where there was little or nothing we could do. They are few and far between. I can count them on my fingers and have some to spare. They were a diverse bunch. The roots of their problems came from a variety of places. Some had two parents, some had 1, some had siblings some were only children. What united them though was that they didn’t really want to be scouts. They came either because their friends did and they wanted to hang around with them or their parents wanted them to come. They didn’t want to hike, or camp or light fires. They weren’t getting anything out of what we were doing. And I think there’s a lesson in that somewhere!

Other side of the Atlantic but.... I had a disruptive scout who jumped before he was pushed. He wasn't a danger to anyone, it was the persistent low level aggravation and disruption. He quit after I sent him home one evening* after the way he spoke to me. A couple of months later he asked to come back. I let him and it was the biggest mistake I have made in my time as a leader. He hadn't learned a single lesson. Thankfully he quit again a few weeks later and this time didn't come back. *In 18 years as a scouter it is one of only two occasions when I have sent someone home on the spot. On this occasion it was for the way he addressed me in front of the whole troop. The previous occasion was a cub who had knocked another cub to the ground, sat on his chest and was proceeding to punch him repeatedly in the face!

Will BSA go that way? Looking in it would surprise me if it happened in the foreseeable. There has been enough going on in the last couple of years that I could see your national HQ pausing to lick their wounds before trying anything else controversial. If it does happen will it be ok? Probably. Reading through all these threads they echo more or less word for word what was said here before TSA went fully coed. I haven't seen a single differing argument on either side. When TSA did go coed (albeit it happened in stages) it was all perfectly ok. There was only one incident where one group refused to take girls. National HQ dismissed their leader team en mass and that was the end of that! It was a one off incident though. So yes I suspect it would be fine. Whether BSA choses to go that way is up to you chaps though. What is more curious is this. The first groups went coed in 1991. All new groups were coed from 2003 and all groups were coed from 2007. The proportion of girls has been steady at around 20% for some years now. So a minority but a significant proportion none the less. Despite all that time and the significant number of girl members a huge number of none members are still surprised to find that girls can be scouts. It still seems to be part of the national consciousness that scouts is for boys and guides is for girls. In time I'm sure that will change but for now it's a message that hasn't got across.

In the UK we do. In fact Girl Guiding UK has more members than The Scout Association. My group has girl guides using our building on a Friday night. There is considerable over lap between the two programs although scouting seems to have more emphasis on outdoors than guiding does. That said it does very much depend on which group you go to. I've encountered guides that spent huge amounts of time rock climbing but they are in the minority.

I can probably explain, one my house mates from when I was at university is the captain of a submarine in the Royal Navy. Obviously he can't tell me much about what his boat does but I do remember him saying that the use of "active" sonar (the ping) is extraordinarily rare, the vast majority of the time they use "passive" sonar which isn't actually sonar at all, it's sensors that are listening for vibrations in the water. That's because while active sonar is extremely accurate it immediately gives away your position. Once used you may as well advertise on the TV news where your boat is. So I'm guessing the first officer has to act confused because any use of active sonar is unusual and in the pressence of a potentially hostile other boat probably suicidal....

The Hunt for Red October?

Morning everyone. Good to see this site back up and running! Anyway I thought I'd swing by and report back from our night at the American cemetery. First up we were joined by two American airmen, Frank and Meghan, from RAF Lakenheath, about 30 miles from us. One of my scouts took it on himself to write to the base and invite them to send reps. They were very nice people! They got the scouts to fold the American flag with full military ceremony. Photo attached! We finished the evening with a wreath laying in the chapel. Alas we haven't got a single scout in the troop at the moment who can play the trumpet. We could have found clarinet, flute, guitar, violin, piano even a cello. No trumpet though! Thankfully we found a scout dad who does play the trumpet, so we were able to play taps afterwards. The acoustics in the chapel were incredible. I am no musician but even my tone deaf ears could hear that in that space it sounded pretty special. Very haunting. Frank and Meghan are also going to to try and put us in touch with the BSA troop at Lakenheath so possible more contact in the making......

Quick apology. Looking at this thread earlier today via my phone I accidentally touched the wrong bit of the screen and gave you the red -1. Purely unintentional! Sorry!

Halloumi (Got the spelling wrong before!) is a Cypriot cheese made specifically for cooking. You can theoretically eat it cold but it's like eating a salty lump of rubber. If you grill it, BBQ it or fry it it becomes absolutely delicious! It's popular among vegetarians as it's salty and fiberous in a way a lot of replacement protein sources just aren't. It was actually the scouts that introduced me to it when it started appearing on their menu plans. There's been no looking back ever since!

Food glorious food! Happy to oblige with a view from the UK..... Cooking in foil..... very common. Sometimes referred to as a "Cowboy meal". What we often do is put a slice of bread in the bottom of the parcel to stop the bottom of the meat or fish from burning. Most commonly done with pork chops or salmon steaks. Typically this is something used as an introduction to backwoods cooking leading onto more complex types of backwoods cooking using things like grass cuttings for steaming. Dutch oven - varies from group to group. It is less common now than it used to be. When I was a scout you would see it quite regularly but less so now. Hobo meal - not had that, sounds amazing and one I will be suggesting to the kids! Marshmallows - there would be insurrection if there weren't any marshmallows at camp. Personally I prefer jellie babies but the kids all think I'm a bit weird The kids though lap up the marshmallows. Smores are becoming more common. They are done by Girl Guides more than scouts, it's something we're seeing more and more of though. Skewers - Like you we'd do sausages. We also do dough twists. Popular with the kids are kebabs which typically have cubes of pork with mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes and haloumi. Catching and cooking fish is sometimes done at the coast. It's less common inland where the restrictions on fishing in freshwater are often strong and expensive to get around. Land owners typically charge a huge amount for a permit to fish particularly in rivers. Basic ingredients - As it happens this is something my troop are doing more of recently. We baked our own bread on summer camp this year and on other camps made our own pizza bases. The site we were at wouldn't allow us to dig and build a clay oven so the work around..... we put a fire grid over the fire, pizzas on top of the grid and then put a sheet of foil over the top to reflect heat down to cook the toppings. Photos towards the bottom of this page here. Other favourites..... chocolate cakes cooked inside an orange. Bannanas with chocolate buttons in them. Apples, cored and stuffed with your preferred filling. Traditionally raisens and brown sugar. You might also see them stuffed with mars bars. Anything involving haloumie! Does that help?

Some of them. A lot of them we found they weren't a problem in the first place.

Be careful what you wish for. While the UK modular structure and recognition of prior learning is helpful the actual content leaves something to be desired. Very little on practical scouting skills (other than first aid, the first aid training is excellent!) and a bit heavy on the admin side of things.

I used to be a cub leader where it's not something you have to worry about! When I switched to scouts (10-14 year olds here) I was slightly apprehensive about it but found that it just isn't a problem. For the handful of couples that we've ended up with it's been simple to deal with. We have troop rules, which are separate tents for boys and girls. We trust the kids to keep to it and they respect that trust. It honestly is that simple. On the slightly wider PDA* front the kids enforce discipline. On the couple of occasions that couples have become distracted from the program by each other the other kids have pulled them up on it and it has stopped. Talking to explorer leaders (14-18) they obviously see more of it. But again they deal with it on a trust basis and it works. Currently there is a male 16 year old explorer and 15 year old female explorer helping with our cub pack. They are a couple but at cubs and at their explorer unit you would never know. Over all it's one of those issues that I think gets worried about disproportionately. Similarly girls hygiene needs. We take a couple of packs of sanitary towels to camp with us. We tell the girls where they are kept and on the very rare occasions they are caught short (they are normally very good at looking after themselves) they simply go and help themselves. Again a lot of leaders worry about this prior to taking girls on camp and are amazed at how easy it is to deal with. I think the most difficult thing about coed scouting is ensuring that the typical leadership styles of boys and girls are both given a chance to shine. *Public Displays of Affection, don't know if that's a common acronym in the USA!

From working with coed scouts here in the UK I can see there is an element of truth to what you say but it doesn't tell the whole story. Yes girls are more likely to get it right first time. However when things go wrong my experience is that is when the boys are that much better. Its funny, but when the girls put on the uniform it's like the boys don't see them as girls any more, they are just another scout. Yes there's the occasional bit of flirting and very occasionally "boy meets girl" but nothing to really write home about.

Looking in as an outsider the glaring thing that stands out, beyond the management speak nonsense, is that nobody seems to have spoken to the scouts themselves. It is the scouts that go to school and mix with the non scouts. They are the best people to explain why so many kids don't want to join. They know why their friends are doing *insert other youth activity of your choice here* instead of scouts. So they will be the best people to ask how to get more of them through the door. And nobody seems to have asked them.

We too have seen the great care that Canadian's take over remembering their war dead. I referred further up to the trip to Amsterdam. The individual involved actually flew with a Canadian squadron, despite being British. We did some research and found that his squadron still existed. We wrote to their commanding officer to tell them what we were planning who wrote back with a lot of information about what had happened back in 1942. We assumed that would be the end of it. However a couple of weeks later we received a parcel containing a poppy wreath from the Chief of the Canadian Air Staff asking us to lay it on his behalf, It is one of the biggest honors that the troop has ever had. With this year marking 75 years since The Battle of Britain, it's a good time to remember those from other countries who fought alongside us. While the USA was not part of the war at that stage there were American volunteers with RAF squadrons. Something like 1 in 5 fighter British fighter pilots were not actually British at all. There were American, Polish, Czech, French, South African, Australian and a whole host of other nations who's pilots flew with the RAF. To fight for your own country's freedom is one thing. To go thousands of miles from home and fight for someone else's is quite something else indeed. We will indeed acknowledge and remember them.

Thanks Rick, I'd only ever heard it as a song. Traditionally Girl Guide troops finish their meetings singing Taps but something Scouts normally do. I've never heard it as a bugle call. I doubt we have a bugler but I suspect we'll have someone playing some kind of wind instrument who will do a job for us.

I won't promise that one! I take the Yoda approach to things like this. ie Do. or Do not. If they are going to sing they need to make sure they find time to practice and get it right. Taps isn't something we are familiar with! Absolutely, that will be a key part of it. (Although don't forget my girls as well!) A few years ago we took some scouts to Amsterdam to visit the grave of one our leaders killed in the Second World War and buried in a Commonwealth cemetery there. A long weekend in Amsterdam was obviously an exciting thing for them but when we got to the cemetery itself the noise level dropped very quickly indeed. When they found the grave of a 16 year old you could have heard a pin drop. The photo attached is from that trip. It was actually picked up by our national HQ and was used in some of their publicity at the time. It is not posed. It was simply a quick snap I took at the time that I think summed up the moment.

Thanks for the thoughts chaps, we'll see what we can come up with. Interesting to see that things moved away from 11 November for you where as for us there's been a move back towards it. For many years now the Sunday closest to 11 November has been used but in recent year there has been more of a tendency for schools and work places to have a 1 minute silence on 11 November itself. One year we had the cub leader from our neighbouring group come down. He was an army engineer during the first gulf war and spent many weeks following the war clearing minefields in Kuwait. A very interesting man to talk to.

So.... on 12 November my troop will be having its annual remembrance night, which we always have on the nearest troop night to 11 November (the traditional remembrance day in the UK). This year we will be visiting the US military cemetery on the edge of Cambridge. More about it here. As a group remembrance is something we take quite seriously. During the Second World War our group was home of Wood Smoke Rover Scout Crew. The 18-25 age range meant an inevitable appalling casualty rate with 7 young men killed, all of them airmen. While we will be including many of our own traditions as part of the evening eg laying a wreath of poppies and a reading the 4th verse of the poem For The Fallen we would also like to include some American traditions. And would of course like to avoid doing anything that might be considered disrespectful. Any pointers for what we might include or avoid?