Eagledad

>>Darn! Lost another recruit! Enjoy!

Its fine; scouting is a program for individual growth, so there is nothing wrong with self-motivated fast tracking. My experience is these guys usually slow down a little as they get more involved with the other cool stuff the program offers like leadership, troop business, OA, and so on. Watch to make sure they dont burn themselves out to where they hate the thought of advancement. On the other side, also insure they are learning the values that come from advancement as well like patience, follow-through, good planning techniques, communication, documents management and other life skills not

Either this is a fairly new rule or we just didn't know it because a couple of our crews in the past have had single person tents. I do agree that single tents do add weight and is a good reason to reconsider if you can. The bear and log suggestion is interesting, I always thought dirty scouts smelled like grub worms, now I have support. And, I guess that answers the question of what a bear does with logs in the woods. Beary

>>Further, around here at least, WB is still marketed primarily to troop and crew leaders, with minimal effort to reach out to cub leaders. No wonder they're not signing up in droves.

Complete the course now and your Council has one more resource for staff on their next course. Barry

>>Summer camp partials can be annoying. We tell the Scouts they must try to finish their summer camp partials by the next summer camp or they must try to complete them their. We've had pretty good success this way.

Thanks for the clarification. JLT has been used, in our council anyway, as a generic term for teaching junior leadership. I was the Council Chairman of Junior leadership Training (JLT) responsible for all junior leadership training in the council. Considering half our districts have their own courses that ranged from Brown Sea, Pine Tree, DJLT, and so on, along with units calling their courses anything from JLD to UJLT, it can get mighty interesting trying to force one name on all that training. We use JLT because it would otherwise be impossible to have a reasonable discussion in different un

>>Anyone know of any other AV items that could be useful?

>>In a sense I suppose that we would be using the SPL & PL handbooks as our sylabus. Does anyone know why the BSA has removed most information about how a troop runs in the handbook?

>>Sure Barry... I've heard that one before. Now we know the truth. Kudo is your alternate personality... :-) It's nice knowing both of you!

That did the trick, thanks Michelle. I wasn't clicking "Edit your Profile" the second time. OK, looks like we are back in business. Have a great scouting week everyone. Barry

Thanks Beav, I did try that and as you saw, I couldn't find anyplace to change the email address anywhere. Barry

Hi All I can't seem to find the information anywhere else, so I will ask here. I have a new email address, but how do I change that with Scouter.com without creating a new username and password? Thanks in advance for any an all help.

Whoops, In my hurry in the last post, I forgot to delete Kudo and sigh off with Barry. I Love this scouting stuff. Barry

>>I don't understand the meaning of that sentence, but I would point out that the big advantage of "Intensive Training in the Green Bar Patrol" is that the Scoutmaster himself trains his Patrol Leaders. >Where exactly does the BSA teach Patrol Leaders how to actually run a Patrol? And more importantly, where exactly does the BSA actually teach Scoutmasters how to teach a Patrol Leader how to actually run a Patrol?>I suspect that when most of us talk about "The Patrol Method," we are really talking about running Troop meetings, and that we mentally discount anything that would not b

Hi All After reading Kudus vision of a Council level JLT, I must ask; do we need a SM anymore? I think it is important that we understand who we are training and what they should already know when they come to the course and what do we want council to really teach. We ran into this very problem a few years ago in our council and we came up with two decisions for our JLTC course at the time; 1. JLTC was a course for senior scouts, so we assume that scouts already knew their basic scout skills and Patrol Method. 2. This was a course to teach advanced leadership skills to th

>>Troops generally have these adult squabbles when there's no shared "vision".Find a different program whose "vision" matches yours, and whose style is a good fit for your son. Or go to a current troop "suspending disbelief" and agreeing to be supportive even when you disagree. If you can't do either, then start one... but know that starting a troop is the equivalent of starting a small business.

>>The Winter Solstice is the "shortest" day of the year and ushers in the season of Winter.

>>A joyous solstice greeting to all Scouts and Scouters

All of your ideas are really good ones and I know your program will grow from them. I have a bit of experience in this area and I will throw a few observations that we learned over the years. The big weekend and little weekend is a really good approach. We had the attitude that everything can and should be fun. I wasnt one of these, sometimes leadership isnt fun kind of people. In that, we found that repeated JLT isnt fun for scouts. I am presently doing my annual Contracting Officers Representative training at work, and after four years, I hate it because it is the same thing over again.

>>The floor of a Army Reserve Center sleeps just fine after 12 hours on the road and it has a/c and hot showers.

You can do what we did a few years ago. We started doing short hikes into all our campsites (anywhere from a quarter mile to a mile). The PLC required the scouts carry everything in except food and tents. Our heavy car camping gear started getting replaced with lighter gear and the scouts got use to the idea of packing and using the backpacks. The gear we use on all our high adventure treks like Philmont and Northern Tier is the same gear the Patrols use each month on Troop campouts. Hiking from that point isnt such a scary thing then. I do agree that scouts can backpack as soon as they j

>>The parts of the training that got their attention and prompted the most discussion was the "Start - Stop - Continue" assessment of how the Troop was doing and asking them "What do you need?". We got a lot of good ideas on how to improve the program from these sessions and a list of new equipment and items to bring up to the committee.

>>Will this work? We will see. As for now, the boys are really looking forward to this, and they are taking responsibility to plan it.

This is good information, thanks for the report. Barry