MattR

Isn't it time for this thread to die? This SM is not working out for this scout. I agree with JoeBob, not signing the blue card is a good enough reason for me to leave. But that's it. Ever seen bad clergy? or a bad cop? or any of a number of other people we put on pedestals? Since when are SMs so wonderful that we've never had to deal with a bad one? Maybe he's stubborn and too proud and got himself boxed in and just wants to save face. He made a mistake. Maybe he is a jerk, but so what. Turn the other cheek. 14 pages of who knows what is only going to raise blood pressure. And if the scout is

I would absolutely hate to be the SM that has to deal with that protocol, @@Fehler. Any incident of bullying shall be reported immediately. Does that mean an adult has to be in every patrol at all times? If bullying is the repeated use ... then how many incidents are required before it's considered bullying, at which point it has to be reported? But wait a minute, part 4 implies that one incident triggers a response of throwing a scout out of an event. So what is bullying? Any stupid stuff kids might get involved in? And the adults have to deal with it. What if one scout is pushing buttons and

@@Stosh, I just finally read this. As a scout I camped at that cemetery. The mountains were not so great around there, but the history was amazing.

I like it. How about setting quality for each patrol, instead of the troop? If the PL needs a scout to do training to become the next PL, then it would be good for the troop to set that up. The needs of each patrol should drive the troop.

@@TAHAWK, how would you change JTE to improve the patrol method? This is not a rhetorical question. I agree with you that JTE doesn't help, but what would? Unfortunately I think the BSA is hung up on SMART goals and so everything has to be quantifiable. Unfortunately, I don't think leadership is quantifiable. Maybe different types of questions would help? I ask my scouts (and adults) who is solving what problems. Adults or scouts? Problems related to people issues, gear issues, calendar issues. As an overview, if the adults have a 2 hour committee meeting each month and the PLC has a 1

I think it was designed for low hanging fruit. It hasn't done us much good. I'm not sure there is a way to quantify what is inherently qualitative. Stosh will go nuts with this but in a way he's right. This thread could be tied to the other thread about losing webelos to other organizations that provide the outdoors without what scouts provides. That difference is what needs measuring. I'm just now sure how to measure it.

I never push den chief but any scout that asks gets my full support. An engaged den chief is a great way to get new recruits. We thought we weren't going to get many webelos this year so our backup plan was to go to the middle schools and recruit. Turns out we got 10, so we put that idea on hold. It seems that a lot of kids are way over scheduled in elementary school but that drops off in middle school because sports starts getting more selective. The end result is that there are more kids with more time in middle school than in elementary school. My hunch is it might be easier to get 7th

@@UncleP, your nephew is fortunate to have you around. I wouldn't wait until he's discouraged before you encourage him. You can encourage him greatly by taking an interest in what he's doing. If you want him to have fun then join him on a few campouts. Few scouts make it on their own. Ask him questions. Get him to talk. Be there at court of honors when he receives things. Just knowing that you care about his progress and fun and adventure, and that scouting is important to you will help him. If you know how he's doing then when he runs into problems, which he will, you might be able to ask

For some reason this is really amusing. Maybe because I've been there. Anyway, I think the best policy is to apologise when I slip up. It shows the scouts that I'm not perfect, but I'm trying. It also encourages humility, another good thing to show the scouts. I expect the same of the scouts. Apologise and move on.

@@qwazse, you're asking why would scouts want to be together and the common response is they have common interests. I don't see that as much as the scouts have common personalities. I have a patrol of quiet, focused scouts, a patrol of egregious scouts, a patrol of leftovers, .... within any of these patrols there is not much common interest. Friendships that have formed since tigers are the same thing. The scouts are good friends, and yet they may have few interests in common. Also, the idea that all scouts want to be in patrols of the same age does not hold with what I see. Some scouts

I'd say this scout is trying to get a laugh, but making a bunch of adults angry also can be fun. I recommend thinking carefully about what battles you want to get involved in. He's acting unclean, he's not being unclean. He's not swearing, he's acting like a fool to get some scouts to laugh. Yes, for a new scout this kind of joke can be shocking, but a lot of jokes are. At campfires there seems to be a limit on poop jokes and even boys cross dressing (because the skit needs a damsel in distress, or even a pregnant women) but the scouts like telling them. Now, does a scout cross dressing in

@@Grubdad, there are lots of scouts that move troops and they rarely move because they're happy where they are. The new SM wants to know what's going on with your situation as much as you want to know how he'd deal with it. Ask a vague question and see how the new SM responds. You just want to get him talking. See if they've ever dealt with similar issues. You know that Krampus has dealt with this before because of the detail he went into. If the SM doesn't have much to say about scouts that use bad language then I'd worry. Or if you get a boilerplate description I'd also worry. Dealing with t

Sorry to hear this.

We typically do separate ceremonies but they have limited boilerplate. The scouts put them together but I ask them to limit the ceremonial part to 10 minutes at the end and the first 20 minutes should be about what eagle means to them. This translates into lots of stories (some heard by adults for the first time), slide show, and open mic time for anyone that wants to share. The ceremony is typically the Eagle oath along with all the other eagles in the crowd, and presentation of the medal with the requisite crying/hugging/fumbling with the pins by mom. The most important part is the very end

I've also noticed entire campouts brought down by one or two really negative or bad apples. I've also seen one or two really good apples float the entire troop but that's probably a SM minute thread. A "stern talking to" is nothing but an empty threat for any kid that knows how to play people. The biggest problem scouts I've ever had are those that don't want to be there. If they want to be there then they want to be accepted on the terms of scouting and it usually doesn't take much more than pointing out their behavior for them to see the problem and try to fix it. Immature scouts that w

Have fun, and keep your mouth shut unless it involves a question or preventing bloodshed.

I don't use a vote so much as a poll, and I'd never use the result for a scout that didn't have time to fix it. This is all about encouraging a scout to do better, so nobody will lose out by one vote. It's up to me to do something about a problem scout long before he ages out. I've missed that a couple of times and had to hold my nose when I signed their app. One thing it does bring up is that if an older scout has been gone for 2 years and the younger scouts don't even know who he is, then that scout has some work to do. He shows up for 6 months, puts some effort into it and all of a sudd

Do the younger scouts look up to them? Within the context of a troop, that illustrates the second part of the scout oath because there's no reason they ever have to even talk to the younger scouts. Just as in society, there's no reason any of us have to look out for anyone else.

I see a bit of truth under that crankiness and it's worth another look. Maybe hypocrisy is just the wrong word. How about contradiction? We have a challenge running this program in our troops in that there's no good description of what we're trying to do. So we each come up with our own description. "Teach scouts how to make good ethical decisions." What does that bloody well mean? "Fun with a purpose." Sorry, but that's just stupid, said my son a long time ago. The whole point of fun is not having a purpose, don't mix them. It's supposed to be fun, no pressure, let the boys decide, yada yada,

Welcome back, @@cyclops

If the PLs and patrols don't have experience with setting up camp, cooking, and cleaning on their own then asking a PL to do that for an entire troop is likely not going to be successful. I'd start with that and skip having a PL run the troop wide activities for now. Then I'd work on getting patrols to organize their own activities outside of the usual cooking/cleaning. It could be that every patrol does roughly the same thing, as decided by the plc, on a campout but within that context each patrol might do something different. Different hike, different pioneering project, who knows. L

It's such a treat to have you back.

Sure, that's the goal but I'm not there yet because it's the PL that needs the prodding. What I was trying to get across is that boy led is not binary. It's not that one day a troop goes from adult led to boy led. I tried that a couple times and it fell flat. Rather, it's evolving. What I see is scouts learn from scouts, not adults. But scouts that haven't seen it done right before won't suddenly start doing it. That leaves a chicken and egg situation. My approach to solve that is to make small changes, and that might include prodding the scouts. Paraphrasing what @@Eagledad said,

@@Adamcp, I can attest to everything everyone here is saying. It's not just the scouts that get stuck in a rut. A few years ago my plc was based on a 6 month rotation, I decided who was in what patrol, scouts essentially played nose-goes to figure out who the next PL was, and you know, they just didn't really act like patrols. That's the troop I got and I figured it was the way was. But I did realize I wanted change. I had and still have no grand plan but I see the goal. I make small changes. The first was to get the best scouts as PL. Rather than me deciding who would be PL I did something si

Look at the accident rate for water skiing, snow boarding, or snow skiing and my guess is neck injuries are much higher for those sports. I found the following info in two minutes on google, so take it with a grain of salt. For water skiing the injury rate is roughly 1 per 100,000 people, half of which are head and neck injuries. 20-30 people die each year snow skiing due to head injuries. One study showed 1.3 injuries per 1000 runs at terrain parks, half of which were head and neck injuries. I'm not ignoring the risks, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. And,