Question for pre-21st Century Wood Badgers

[Eamonn]

OK, maybe more than one question.

1/ How skilled in Scout-Craft were you before you took the course?

2/ What skills did you learn on /from the course

3/How much time was spent cooking meals and clearing up each day?

Eamonn

[NealOnWheels]

1. Very - at least to the level covered in Woodbadge.

2. The eleven leadership skills.

3. About two hours if memory serves me correctly.

 

Why do you ask?

[SeattlePioneer]

1. Very skilled. I came from being trained by the Seattle Mountaineers climbing club in hiking, backpacking, rock and glacier climbing, cross country skiing and snowshoeing. I enjoyed rowboat cruising on my own, and had taken the Red Cross Mountaineering Oriented First Aid, which emphasizes realistic first aid problems with multiple casualties in a backcountry environment.

 

In addition, I had been an Assistant Scoutmaster for a year and Scoutmaster for three years at that point.

 

So learning Scoutcraft skills was not a major reason for taking Wood Badge.

 

2. Skills--- perhaps more than I realized. See below about dish washing. The major things I learned from Wood Badge were

 

a) the emotional experience of living life in a patrol/troop environment

 

b) the emotional experience of good ceremonies

 

c) A significant deepening of my commitment to Scouting which

contributes to my being an active Scouter 25 years after

taking Wood Baqdge in 1985.

 

a,b, and c made the experience very worthwhile for me.

 

 

3. Such tasks were shared by patrol members. The only issue about cleaning dishes I recall came pretty much the first day.

 

We were instructed in the approved Boy Scout method of washing dishes by Wood Badge staff, which included washing cups and table ware first and pots and pans last, and a "three tub" method of dish washing. Some patrol members thought that was absurdly arbitrary.

 

MAYBE it was. It was a good experience of how patrol members react to teaching by staff members and to "rules" that are laid down by authority exterior to the patrol.

 

In thinking about it later, I decided that

 

1. It probably made sense to clean the cups and table ware first, before wash water got greasy and

 

2. People come from a diverse range of habits and experience. Some habits may not be very sanitary. If everyone is encouraged to adopt a uniform method which IS sanitary, it will avoid illness spread through poor dish washing practices.

 

My conclusion is that there were good reasons for the rules we were taight by staff members, although they may not have been obvious right away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(This message has been edited by seattlepioneer)

[emb021]

"1/ How skilled in Scout-Craft were you before you took the course? "

 

Pretty skilled.

 

I was a Boy Scout (Life for life), and went to Wood Badge in my early 20s.

 

"2/ What skills did you learn on /from the course "

 

11 skills of leadership

 

Dutch oven cooking and cardboard box cooking. Had never done this in my troop. (philmont was the first time I had ever seen a dutch oven). And seeing stuff like this at WB was neat. Other stuff was no big deal (map & compass, basic cooking, setting up tents, knots, etc)

 

"3/How much time was spent cooking meals and clearing up each day?"

 

In total, probably about 2 hours a day. Sometimes the cooking was part of the lessons.

 

 

[Kahuna]

1/ How skilled in Scout-Craft were you before you took the course?

 

Pretty skilled. Eagle Scout, Philmont, Canoe Base, Scoutmaster, etc.

2/ What skills did you learn on /from the course

 

Learned a lot about leadership and the patrol method. Came home and reorganized my troop, including a month in which I turned the troop over to an ASM and acted as SPL for a month to demonstrate what boy leadership was all about. Made a total change in the boy leadership that lasted as long as I was SM.

 

3/How much time was spent cooking meals and clearing up each day?

 

Hard to recall exactly (40 years ago), but 2 hours might be right. I took WB at Philmont so the others in my patrol were pretty skilled and motivated.

[Kudu]

1/ How skilled in Scout-Craft were you before you took the course?

 

I had learned backpacking (the skill upon which B-P's program is based) in the 1960s from a friend who grew up in the Adirondack Mountains, 8.3 miles from the nearest motor vehicles.

 

2/ What skills did you learn on /from the course.

 

a) Contact method for making small kindling from hardwood logs. As a boy, we cooked on our own Svea stoves so we never carried a hatchet or made fires while backpacking.

 

b) I was already teaching the Nine Skills of Leadership. It was a Scout version of the Eleven Skills:

 

http://inquiry.net/leadership/9skills.htm

 

c) It was in Wood Badge that I first realized that a leadership formula is the same as the Creative Problem Solving formula (which I had studied under Dr. Sidney J. Parnes):

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Problem_Solving_Process

 

They both are OK "descriptive" summaries of a mysterious process but do not as a "proscriptive" tool make up for a lack of natural talent.

 

d) Most important thing I learned in Wood Badge is that "Real" Patrol Leadership is based on moving a Patrol through physical space.

 

3/How much time was spent cooking meals and clearing up each day?

 

A couple of hours. We cooked all our meals on fires, but used propane stoves to heat dishwater.

 

Yours at 300 feet,

 

Kudu

 

Traditional Wood Badge Notebook (Required before 1972):

http://inquiry.net/traditional/wood_badge/index.htm

 

[SeattlePioneer]

>

 

 

 

I must have been asleep when that one was taught....

[Kudu]

Our Wood Badge Patrols were spaced about an eighth mile apart, with the Beaver Patrol located on the top of a hill perhaps a mile from Gillwell Field.

 

The course also included a Patrol Overnight in which the Patrols were scattered to the far-flung corners of a very large Scout camp.

 

If it wasn't for these adult training experiences, I would not be...

 

Yours at 300 feet,

 

Kudu

 

http://inquiry.net/patrol/traditional/100_yards.htm

 

[infoscouter]

1/ How skilled in Scout-Craft were you before you took the course?

 

Moderately. But irrelevant - we slept in cabins & did no hiking or camping (But lots of singing)

 

2/ What skills did you learn on /from the course

 

Planning and conducting GREAT Cub Scout training opportunities

 

3/How much time was spent cooking meals and clearing up each day?

None - all meals were catered.

 

NOTE - I earned my beads as a member of the Bear Den of C-CS-3 Cub Scout Trainer Wood Badge.

 

 

[jr56]

1. Very skilled

 

2. The leadership skills.

 

3. About 2 hours total.

[Eagle69]

My course was a Walking(Backpacking) Course so that played a role in things.

 

1. Moderate to good. I am an Eagle Scout

2. 11 Leadership Skills, working together as a patrol, paying close attention to all announcements and being sure to pay attention when you were the PL

3. I don't remember, but since we were cooking on Backpack stoves probably not more than 2-3 hours since you only "cooked" breakfast and dinner.

 

We were constantly on the go. You would get up in the morning and have part of the crew cooking and part breaking camp since within a short time after breakfast was over you were in formation ready to start walking. We might walk for a couple of hours and then stop and have instruction time, then pick up and move on again. In some ways I later felt that had missed some parts of the WB tradition by doing a walking course instead of a static course.

[Eamonn]

"How much time was spent cooking meals and clearing up each day?":

 

" About two hours if memory serves me correctly."

 

" In total, probably about 2 hours a day. Sometimes the cooking was part of the lessons."

 

"Hard to recall exactly (40 years ago), but 2 hours might be right."

 

"A couple of hours. We cooked all our meals on fires, but used propane stoves to heat dishwater."

 

" About 2 hours total."

 

" I don't remember, but since we were cooking on Backpack stoves probably not more than 2-3 hours since you only "cooked" breakfast and dinner."

Wow!

Seems that I remember waiting a lot longer than 2 hours each day for a participant Patrol Member to come to the staff site and "Invite" staff members to join them in a meal.

You all must eat really fast!

3 meals a day, cooked, eaten and the clear up done in two hours?

 

One of the big complaints I hear about the 21st Century course is that it doesn't teach practical skills.

From what has been posted here, it would also seem that a good many of the participants had no need of learning these skills, as they already had them.

Does it matter if you learn or obtain these skills before the course or after the course?

 

When I look at what is being covered at the 21st Century course. A lot of what is in the 11 Leadership Skills is not that different.

Ea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[SR540Beaver]

E,

 

BSA has been refining and changing the program from the beginning. Many of the same principles from the old course carried to the new course, just worded and packaged differently. Times change, words change. Back when I was a Cub in the mid-60's, this was the Cub Acout Promise, "I ______ promise to do my best to do my duty to God and my country, to be square, and to obey the law of Pack." Ask a boy today what "be square means". Honestly, back in the mid-60's, I thought it was kind of odd. BSA changed it to be "to help other people" in 1972 which makes sense in this day and age. Looking back at my old Wolf and Bear books, they commonly referred to your friends as "fellers" or "fellows". Kids today wouldn't have any idea what that meant. Ahould we return to those books and Promise in an effort to be some sort of purist or because that's the way we did it and we liked it? I think not.

 

Much of the old courses theoretical is contained in other training such as Troop Committee Challenge, SM Specific, IOLS, Safety Afloat, etc. Register with a troop and begin camping and you will learn scouting skills from the experienced adults. In a year or two, you'll be the experienced person teaching the new registers.

 

WB has always been about leadership development, it has just shifted and changed with the times in relation to other training offered.

[Eagle69]

As I stated I didn't do the normal WB course. Some of what I've read, especially the part about teaching outdoor skills at WB sound more like what we did at the outdoor session of the old Scouters Basic Training course. Of course we did lots of course wide demos that weekend, but often times when the Patrol Counselors got into the campsites with the adults was when some of the real outdoor skill teaching went on. You might find that you had a few people with outdoor and scoutcraft skills, but a majority might be green as could be. When we found that then all the stuff associated with setting up a campsite became a time to teach.

[TAHAWK]

1. Fairly skilled after fifteen years in Scouting, twelve in a very active outdoor Troop.

 

2. I learned more about the eleven leadership skills or competencies that I had learned in White Stag as a 17-year-old. Also learned a lot about Dutch Oven cooking and eastern hardwoods.

 

3. Perhaps 2.5 hours a day - more at dinner than other meals.

 

(I was a youth assist ["Look cheerful and don't say anything."] at a course in 1959, and the time spent on meals was about the same as on the original WB course still being taught at that time as on the second course that I took in 1984. Very rushed, of course.)