qwazse

We really gotta stop worrying about the folks doing the bare minimum. Some boys were getting a "bare minimum" citizenship training so we created THREE SEPARATE REQUIRED BADGES all with clusters of bare minimum requirements that amount to oh-so-much bookwork and little skill acquisition. Some boys barely respected their home, so we required Family Life. Don't worry about the Birds, your Pioneering tower, Signalling, and other things that we know for a fact school, home, and church won't teach you. We're here to help take up the slack for institutions that aren't doing their job to make you into a great boy ... in the process you hazard missing out on becoming a great scout. But that's okay, so did the umpteen million other boys who looked at our advancement program and took a pass. First class should tell me you attained skills and vowed to live nobly under terms that you understand. Not that you've passed some bogus integrity check. Rant over.

@@Eagle94-A1, Cooking is listed under the new requirements (left column) ... just not under the current requirements (right column). For two years all have been trying to pound it into our 16-17 year olds that they have to earn Cooking if they want to earn Eagle. Even if it's not printed in the handbook, it is in the requirements book. But my scouts will take this document to mean "Oh, Mr. Q was talking out the side of his head. I won't need cooking as long as I am a Life scout before the end of the year." Why? Because they read "current" and take it to mean "right now, this year 2015, when this comparison document was circulated."

I got an explaination from Michael J. Lo Vecchio ... So, don't let any of your Life Scouts see this and get it into their heads that they currently don't need Cooking.

I've been telling you all. The day's coming when your uniform fabric will have electronic ink. Log that shirt into myscouting, and it will download your info making insignia and knots appear in the warp and woof of the cloth. Stay connected to the wireless, and MBs will appear as soon as the counselor signs the standard issue chip-embedded blue card. Tan fades to green as soon as the troop meeting adjourns crew meeting opens. Trained patches will fade away and be replaced with flashing "needs to update YPT" every two years. The MB sash fades behind the pockets when not in use or completely away when the O/A sash needs to appear. Some hacker scouts will figure out a way for the sashes to appear on smart-fabric uniform shorts as though they were folded over their belt.As a result, Bryan's blog will have thousands of replys to a Talkback Tuesday post regarding unofficial uniform apps. It will all start with epaulets that change color for cub unis ....

Welcome to the forums!

Starting in January troops are tracking, per boy, one new rank, six more service hours, multiple chats with the 'rents about cyber chippy thingies. The administrative burden builds from the ground up.

I have not used it for extended distances, but CalTopo.com as great tools to customize USGS maps and save them as .pdf's. I'm mostly compass because GPS has been foiled by valleys and dense foliage. But I learned compass can be foiled by gas wells. And I've made enough mistakes that I like the GPS on plateaus and open plains. GPS maps? Well, my boys will never let the SM hear the end of it thanks to the laurel thickets his lead us through!

I carry my signal mirrors in my sewing kit.

I think there's one error in the "current" requirements for Eagle: it does not list Cooking as a required MB. So, tread carefully if you are trying to nail down 2015 requirements.

Not being a fan of time wasted bean-counting, and believing that service should never be motivated by a reward, I think this is yet another step in the wrong direction.

This old football cheer has to be your line: "Push 'em back. Push 'em back. Waaay back!"

Excellent suggestion, @. Although public information seems to be sparse. Here are two paragraphs from (http://www.nesa.org/PDF/58-435.pdf page xvii) that speak to that period ... And in a sidebar on the same page: These paragraphs seem to capture the felt need to do scouting differently in the US. But, the detailed discussions leading up to the matter may very well be un-digitized or possibly lost to history. It's very easy for us to take a philosophy promulgated throughout our youth and adult scouting career, and project in onto someone who lived two generations ago. It's harder, but much more interesting to contrast how we view a thing today against how it was viewed in the past. This may or may not help us currently, but prepare us for future discussions about youth development and leadership.

@@perdidochas, I had the same experience. But I think it is because I used pocket knives more. More clothing comes with pockets than sheaths, so I was more likely to have a pocket knife at the ready (e.g., at ease before evening flags at JLT when I was obsessed with perfecting my toggle ).

I don't see us in a position of reopening this to adult leaders simply because of the sex bias. Worthy female venturers would see the opportunity to advance to first class while serving as ASM then vie for candidacy in O/A as a youth. Although some chiefs in the Brotherhood are on record as welcoming young women, the prevailing attitude among scouters has silenced all such aspirations. There are probably a half dozen other ways that adults being on the advancement track while women below the age of 18 are not would cause controversy. See, that's the interesting thing. There was a point where people didn't say that. The handbooks referred to the "scout" advancing. Then after 1950 the discussion is about a "boy" advancing with the implicit attitude that the adults are beyond that sort of thing! Ya sure, 'cause in the past 50 years, since they weren't occupied with their own advancement, adults have avoided mucking up the patrol method. Well, he lived only when adults could earni it. I'll leave it to those who've collected his speeches to provide any statement of his that would speak to the matter. It would be rather obtuse, since he did not seem to mettle in the design of other scouting organizations beyond encouraging them to press on. It may help to note that the age limit for Queen's Scout is currently 25. Not sure what it was historically. Whatever transpired to make us think so categorrically about youth vs. adult awards, I don't think it was any particular opinion of scouting's founders.

You owe him big time, Dad! Any stainless steel penknife that folds to the size of his palm should do. Still limit tools to a basic set. Simply because the more there are, the harder to grip. Get him a whetstone ... maybe some oil. And, a first aid kit!

I wasn't really trying to sort out the chicken vs. egg ... which is a mess because the idea was promoted over years, and, as you said, different parts of the country bought into two seemingly unrelated notions over the span of a dozen years. Those two ideas were: The advancement program is "for the boys" and adults in the program should occupy their time with other things (like, say, Wood Badge tickets?). This is a program "for the boys" and boys in the program need to reinforce some basic knowledge that they may not be getting from other institutions (school, church, home), etc ... All requirement changes, IMHO, are reactions to a sense of something "slipping through the cracks" (note that Family Life was made required in 1994 ... about the apex of "family values" rhetoric). I'm just wondering about what scouters in 1950 felt was slipping through the cracks. I'm also wondering if the few interested adults were free to go through advancement, would the increased "bookwork" badges have been tolerated?

For he first fifty years of the BSA, adults could earn Eagle along with their sons. Bryan's Blog posted Some clippings of how that played out: http://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2015/07/02/10-times-history-adults-earned-eagle-scout-award/ I've heard a few reasons why this practice ended. The position of responsibility requirements were added; however, adults hold official and unofficial positions in a troop. Likewise, leading a service project (also a novel requirement at the time) would be as challenging for many adults. One respondent to the blog cited a 1972 handbook: "it would be unfair to permit those over 18 to earn badges since they would be easier for them.†I noticed that this synchronized with a series of changes to the required list of merit badges from which Bird Study, Pioneering, Signaling, and Pathfinding were dropped. All of those were concepts that I've seen challenge adult and boy alike. The addition of bookwork badges to the required list could favor the adult unfairly. But, I'm wondering if the '72 statement is a reversal of causality. That is, without adults in the picture, did BSA have more freedom to add more material that paralleled school life? Was the removal of adult Eagles the first step toward a more indoor program?

We use it as neither. It refers to someone who his stuck in jaggers (i.e., briars, typically blackberries) so much that everyone else has to do his share of work. We don't use it around kids (or if we do, it is a veiled term of endearment) because, well, it is their job to pick blackberries so Ma can make us pie for desert. Oh, and how much you are allowed to use it is proportional to how much you've labored in or around the steel industry. If management says it, they can expect the union representatives to bring a grievance within the hour.

Remember these are Webelos age girls. So the camping is at their level.

@@Incorrigible, welcome to the forums. Sounds like an awesome crew with an advisor who is to foolish to run way when called upon to serve. There are some great posts in the venturing section, and yes, a lot of us fly by the seat of our pants. But it's not healthy ... Get as many of your adults to your councils next Venturing Leader Specific Training, the the council doesn't hold one, contact your area venturing commissioner, if your area doesn't respond, go regional. Feel free to ask questions. Most of us have screwed in similar light bulbs, and we're pretty free with our advise.

Yes. WIth staff cuts, work piles up. Usually on volunteers.

We use a mix of the following: Pump filtration is okay, but can jam after a few days of gritty water. So, you have to carry maintenance/replacement gear. Tablets are reliable -- especially with cloudy sources, but hard on the digestion after a few days. Gravity is easiest, but takes planning. The UV light weights about as much as tabs ... good for low-sediment sources, fast acting, but still creeps me out. Our boys are older so each can carry his own system, and we rotate through them over the course of a few days. Really and truly, given our location, chelating, boiling and distilling would be the best. Followed by rain capture and fired clay/silver nitrate gravity filter. Neither of which are conducive to patrols on the move.

Your reply: "Easy solution: camp more. 'Nuff said." But it hardly matters. They won't take it as a wake up call. They just found a scapegoat. Now, would I have gone through the trouble of inviting the rest of my den? No! That's the PLC's call. Even if there's this open invitation, if they did not plan this particular weekend to have Webelos, then your son should have asked one buddy and his dad, at most, to keep him company. Same rules as I have with the crew. It's not on me to muck about inviting the troop. That's the VP of program's job. What's up with needing to invite the den if your son has to come, anyway? If you have to take him to the pub on Dad's night out, do you invite the den? All that's not the pack's problem ... But maybe you did jump through the hoops with the PLC and that detail was cut in the process of making a long story short. Just making sure folks in Internet land get it.

An off-the-cuff-definition: Word choices that some folks in the group never want to use out of fear of offending their God, country, or Mamma. No, we can't dodge all choice words (otherwise, St. Paul's one-word depection of material gains would have to be excized from the New Testament), but we can keep them to such a minimum that more folks would be willing to hear what we say and maybe respond with something that we need to hear. Sometimes closing our mouths serves to open our ears!

That's my mode of operation on certain forum posts ... even ones that may interest me deeply. When it gets to the point that someone can be no more creative than to type a cuss word, I no longer want to associate my credentials (pseudonymous as they may be) with that discussion.