Leatherworking Merit Badge # of Scouts in Class

[BigDale]

I was wondering what you think is the proper number of Scouts in a single Leatherwork Merit Badge Class should be?

Our Council schedules 20 per class and up until recently it was for a 3 hour class.  Now it is 4 hours.

At 4 hours, by myself, I am able to get all the kids done and signed off.  If I had an assistant, we might be able to get more Scouts through, but I'm not sure that is a good idea.

Any thoughts?

 

[ParkMan]

14 hours ago, BigDale said:

I was wondering what you think is the proper number of Scouts in a single Leatherwork Merit Badge Class should be?

Our Council schedules 20 per class and up until recently it was for a 3 hour class.  Now it is 4 hours.

At 4 hours, by myself, I am able to get all the kids done and signed off.  If I had an assistant, we might be able to get more Scouts through, but I'm not sure that is a good idea.

Any thoughts?

 

I think six to eight would be a good number.

[BigDale]

Wow!  I would love to have that few number of students.  I can see that at a troop event.  I'd be happy to get down to about a dozen.  

[ParkMan]

3 hours ago, BigDale said:

Wow!  I would love to have that few number of students.  I can see that at a troop event.  I'd be happy to get down to about a dozen.  

Our council recently had someone organize a merit badge activity for a small number of Scouts.  I'm sure that if you were to organize it and staff it, they'd be happy to get the word out.  Who knows, maybe you could find a few kindred souls and have a leather working merit badge session with multiple instructors.

I'm a huge proponent of quality over tradition.  If it makes sense to have 12, then don't get pushed into 20.  What are they going to do - fire you?

[BigDale]

We can get 20 through easy enough.  I think the main issue is that in a larger group there is less participation per scout during the discussion time.  In addition getting all the blue cards signed there is a lot of waiting around.

With an assistant or two, we would have the chance to work with the scouts that need to take a little longer (and I can assign the lanyard part to someone else). 

I really don't want to organize my own event.  What I may do is work at the troop level.  That way it could be from just a few scouts to the whole troop.  We may have to meet several times since most troop meetings are only about 1.5 hours.  

[TMSM]

I think the number of scouts and leaders all depends what the scouts are making. We make leather tripod stools that take about 6-9 hours and it would hard to have more than 10 at a time.

Also I don't think its a good idea to ever focus on MB for a troop meeting, Teaching a specific skilll that might lead to an MB is good but using all the troop time to do MBs might not be the right way to help scouts grow through the MB process.

 

[qwazse]

On 9/21/2019 at 6:07 PM, BigDale said:

Wow!  I would love to have that few number of students.  I can see that at a troop event.  I'd be happy to get down to about a dozen.  

Trust your gut. Limit it to one dozen per trained leader.

By trained, I mean that before the event your leaders will spend a half day with you working on the project that you're expecting the scouts to do. In the process you go over what must be covered, what could be covered, and what should be covered depending on how focused the scouts are. Then they can cover the discussion parts and help you identify the scouts who really aren't prepared and would need a partial.

This means that scouts who did a really good job earning the MB before could assist.  It is very likely that you will (or maybe already have) stumble on one or two scouts who already have this as a hobby and could handle a group of scouts in their own right. When you do this however, you want to make sure that you are free to roam around to each group making sure that all the necessary topics are being covered.

Edited September 25, 2019 by qwazse