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KoreaScouter

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Everything posted by KoreaScouter

  1. FB: I am humbled in your presence; that was magnificent! Can I come and join your unit? KS
  2. I've also been involved in planning a few of these "MB days". Properly done, they're not "cheats". I've never been able to offer Eagle-required MBs at one of these, however. They're all too involved to get done in a day. Even some of the electives we've done require advance work by the Scouts. If you can find out through advance signups who your Scouts will be, you can assign them "pre-work", done on the meritbadge.com worksheets. They may still end the day with a partial, but they'll be off to a good start. KS
  3. Thanks for all your perspectives. I'd like to share a couple of my own. First, regarding "deathbed Eagles" vs. younger Eagles. From what I've seen, the majority of the "deathbed Eagles" aren't where they are because they deliberately planned it that way. Does anyone honestly think that an adolescent boy reasons, privately or publicly, that he's going to wait to finish his Eagle requirements until he's nearly 18 because he thinks he'll be more mature, responsible, and better understand the concept of "giving back"? Please. Most of them got distracted by sports, girls, work, or peer pr
  4. Bamboo is light, and strong for its weight. However, it is very prone to splitting, and throws off some nasty splinters. We used it in a previous Troop, but got other wood staves and eliminated the minor first aid situations... KS
  5. I've been both a Cubmaster and Pack Committee chair (in that order). When I was a Cubmaster, our Pack committee bought copies of the helps for all the DLs, and told them all that "this is how we do it". We encouraged Roundtable attendance, our District RT Commissioners had it going on, and DL attendance at RTs was excellent. They got great ideas, and took them back to their den programs in the month to follow. The pack meeting programs followed the helps, too. We had incredibly low attrition, great graduation rates, and Pack sizes consistently in the 80s -- needless to say, QU every year.
  6. I've had some situations where leader attendance was contingent on a younger sibling coming too, usually due to circumstances beyond their control. It's never been a distraction, and hasn't opened the proverbial pandora's box of everybody's little brother coming along either. Good vols are hard to find -- I'll gladly take them with or without strings. As far as the Scouts are concerned, I've found that they're amazingly tolerant, and will go out of their way to make sure the occasional "little guy" has a good time. Let's remember, most have little brothers/sisters, know how to relate to th
  7. Your thoughts & experiences please. Scout earns his Eagle, then makes himself scarce. I mean, "put his picture on a milk carton" scarce. I've seen this twice now, in two different units. Two random events, or is this more common than I thought? I think we collectively do a pretty good job in our Eagle COH ceremonies of characterizing the Eagle rank as a "commencement" (...you are a marked man, etc...). Yet, in these two cases I've witnessed firsthand, the lads see it as a "graduation" (...I'm done and it's time to do something else...or nothing else...). In my SM conferences
  8. It's just a number, unless it isn't. If there's some particular tie-in with a CO, for example, such as VFW post # or something, then it's not just a number. In Far East council, the unit numbers are allocated in blocks by District. That can get unwieldy in a large Council, or in those cases where councils consolidate...then whaddya do? Sometimes the number really means something. We have a Troop 1 here, chartered to a an historic private school. I'm told they were the very first BSA unit organized in Hawaii -- those guys wear 90-year tabs below their CSPs...if anyone deserves #1, it'
  9. Reading the history in books is one thing - standing on the Yorktown redoubts, walking Duke of Gloucester street, and seeing the same thing from Jamestown the original settlers saw (okay, the nuke plant wasn't there then) is another thing altogether. I usually hesitate to mention what an absolutely fabulous town Williamsburg is; I don't want it to get too crowded or expensive before we get there! No place better for a college football game than at W&M in October, too. There's one home game every season they let Scouts in if they're wearing their uniforms -- what a day. Man, I'm hom
  10. I should probably give another example from my experience, and an admonition. Okay, the admonition first. Assuming the leader needs to go, if you're leading the coup effort, I hope you're willing to step in and take their place. Now the example. I was a pack Committee Chair, and the Cubmaster was mailing it in. Not isolated examples, but repeatedly. I went to see the guy, and he admitted that he was overwhelmed at work, and bit off more than he could chew. He just couldn't bring himself to bow out, since he volunteered. He was relieved I came to see him. The other shoe is that I g
  11. Ditto to those who say "recharter time"...unless there are safety, YP, or criminal issues involved. That's the great thing about this; it's "self cleansing". Everybody has to re-up every year, and your committee can opt not to, in the case of a problem adult... KS
  12. Ditto to those who say "recharter time"...unless there are safety, YP, or criminal issues involved. That's the great thing about this; it's "self cleansing". Everybody has to re-up every year, and your committee can opt not to, in the case of a problem adult... KS
  13. We use the 20 lb propane cylinders for car camps, with the lantern on top of the tree. The propane stoves can be fussy; one speck of dirt and we need to do meatball surgery on them. When we backpack, the lads bring their own backpacking stoves; they're a hodgepodge of white gas and canister. My last troop had a mix of white gas and propane. We usually took the propane stoves, and they worked fine even in Korea in January...and that's as cold as a penguin's posterior. We have storage issues with white gas we don't have with the propane cylinders. To me, it's a matter of preferen
  14. Well, if the skirt were part of the official uniform... KS
  15. Patrol cooking is one technique to teach and reinforce teamwork, and attention to detail. But, it's only one technique. There are many others, and they should all be used in some sort of balance. I think the BSA emphasis on cooking is where it needs to be -- part of the overall advancement requirements for First Class, and Cooking MB as an elective. In out Troop, our emphasis on patrol cooking mirrors BSA's. If we thought we needed more, we'd have more. I also happen to like the recent Cooking MB requirements change to include home cooking as well as patrol cooking. Just my opin
  16. I insist that little KS refers to me as Supreme Allied Commander...just kidding, relax. I'd feel like a horse's petoot if he called me anything other than Dad -- it's the most important job I have; I want full credit for it! I try to treat him like any other Scout though; I like to think that if you watched our Troop for a while and didn't notice the family resemblance (poor kid), you'd never know he was mine. The rest of the lads call me Mr. H... KS
  17. Some of my absolute best Scouting memories (as an adult, alas), are from the Jamestown/Williamsburg/Yorktown area. We've been to re-enactments at the battlefield in Yorktown, which is still virtually unspoiled from how it was 225 years ago, hiked all 26 miles of the Colonial Parkway between Yorktown and Jamestown, and my kids have gone on both school field trips and Scout outings to Jamestown. We love that area, are Heritage District/Colonial Virginia Council alumni, and if Mrs. KS gets her way, that's where we're putting down roots when I retire from the Air Force... KS
  18. Okay, I'm watching out... ...Hmm, still nobody here but us Hawaiians (even transplated ones)! KS
  19. I think the mess hall vs. patrol cooking at summer camp is a matter of the Troop's preference, and their needs. We patrol cook at our monthly campouts and district camporees. In my last district, we did mess hall meals at summer camp for several reasons, mainly food purchase and storage capabilities at the army training/exercise area where our camp was. It worked out okay, but you had to know going in that your Scouts weren't going to complete cooking advancement requirements at summer camp. We just made sure it was done as part of the Troop program. In Hawaii, the Maui council su
  20. Nothing in any BSA literature prescribes a policy on body piercings, and doesn't give unit-level discretion on it either. So, it's a parental issue. If the parents allow the earring, we bite our lips and press, no matter how we feel about it personally. One of my lads was at a meeting recently with a diamond earring the size of a peanut M&M. When he said he needed to get cracking to pay for summer camp, I quipped that he could auction his rock on E-bay and pay for the whole Troop. He leaned toward me and said quietly, and seriously: "...It's not a real diamond, Mr. H", as if I actual
  21. For patrol realignments, I'd let the lads determine that. I've seen it done twice in units I've been with, and it went more smoothly the second time, when the boys actually did that "list six boys you'd like to be in a patrol with" tool that's floating around out there. In my opinion, much better matches that way. Regarding advancement and whether we should care if they earn Eagle or not, I think we should, of course. Not to populate a Troop "wall of fame" or anything, but because if we're doing this right as adults, then the organizational skills, ability to set goals, attention to de
  22. Personally, I like the pamphlets as they are. They're sized right, and the level of info is right, too. Don't get me wrong, I don't object to even a paid BSA online subscription service that gave access to .pdf files of every pamphlet and pub, for reference purposes. But, for out in the field, doing the experiments, and so on, there's no substitute for the pamphlets. I hope BSA never does away with the printed pubs. The military has quit distributing forms and pubs; they're all online and you print them yourselves. The cost of paper, ink, and binders really adds up after a while, and
  23. Whoever wrote that press release at National has not been near a unit, or a District registrar, in a long time if ever. The release said that SSNs are not collected on youth members. Horsefeathers! Look at the current youth application, and what's right under the boxes for the lad's first name? You guessed it, the SSN! Even Jimmy Olson, cub reporter, will have the sense to get hold of one of our applications, if for no other reason to poke holes in National's statement. Doesn't anybody proof those things in Irving before they go out, or are they all too busy shrinking the cargo pockets o
  24. I'm reminded of an expression oft-repeated in my line of work: "Don't ask a question you can't stand the answer to...". In this case, if you ask a bureaucracy a policy question, the answer will tend to be the one that best avoids risk. I don't want Irving running my unit long-distance, and to their credit, I don't think they want that either. They're fun to bash, but by not strictly defining "active", they acknowledge that every unit is different, every boy is different, and it's best to let the unit leaders determine unit policy. I've related in other threads the example of a Scout in a p
  25. NIscouter: Your committee members need to be swatted with a rolled-up newspaper! You don't say whether you're a Pack or a Troop, but I'm guessing a Pack, because by the time these adults have been around long enough to be on a Troop committee, they should "get it". The uniform is not a hindrance, it's a method, just like advancement, leadership development, the outdoors, et. al. It cannot in and of itself drive boys away. In a few cases, the cost might (coming from a SM and a dad who just spent $45 on a pair of adult uniform long pants!), but there are "experienced uniform" options
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