Twocubdad

Guys in our troop do it all the time. My older son too rifle shooting for a second time. The last day of the class, the counselor was handing out the safety test to everyone, and my son said he didn't want to take it. The counselor told him, "but you won't get the merit badge!" "I've GOT the merit badge," he said. "What? Then what are you doing here?" "It's FUN! I got to spend all week shooting!"

May be a good program, but it's hard to tell. As usual, the BSA website absolutely sucks. I tried to drill into some of the ditail but the two sites keep linking you back and forth to the other for detailed information. Our troop is headed in this direction from a current ban on electronic which works about as well as the 18th amendment. Kinda a loose don't-ask, don't-tell which is really more of a don't-hit-me-in-the-nose-with-your-phone sort of a thing now. We want to go to more of an "appropriate use" policy. This may be a good starting point, but what I'd like to see is a list of electronics etiquitte rules specifically for Scouting. Anyone have something like this in their troop? I'm guessing the annual renewal thing is so the third-party vendor supplying the stuff gets to clip you for another stack of cards and patches. Don't care. Our intent is to treat this the same as a Totin' Chip -- it's yours until you abuse the priviledge.(This message has been edited by Twocubdad)

Everyone else is giving good advice, especially to discuss this with your Scoutmaster. But here are a few trick to try with the chatty-Kathys: -- First, look at the program. Are you spending more that 20 minutes sitting and talking to the Scouts? You need more activity. If the boy are chatting through a 45 minute lecture from the SPL, the SPL's lecture is the problem. -- This on is hard for me. I like to make jokes when I'm talking to a group, but whenever people get a chuckle, their natural reaction it to turn to the person beside them and comment on it or make a joke themselves. Watch that. I'm also bad about asking rhetorical questions. People feel the need to answer them, which then turns into permission to start talking. -- When sushing someone, make sure you're not a bigger distraction than they are. "HEY, QUITE DOWN, YOU GUYS!" really doesn't help as you become as much of a distraction as they were. -- Learn The Stare. I'm sure you know what I mean. -- If that doesn't work, and your are the one giving the presentation, without disruption your talk in the least, walk over and talk directly to the guy who is being disrutive. -- If you're in a large group, get up and go sit between or behind the guys talking. -- If that's too subtle, put your hand on the shoulder (very gently, of course. No Vulcan death grip.) -- Last resort, quietly, and with as little disrution to the rest of the group as possible, motion for them to walk out of the room with you. Again, the key is to do all this without becoming a disruption yourself. Good luck!

I think you have a long putt, depending on the personalities of those involved. Your role as defacto COR is going to put you in the middle of a lot of committee stuff. Normally, an active, involved COR is a good thing, but at this point greatly conflicts with your goal of separating CM from CC functions. I think that's why CC and COR are the only two jobs which are officially allowed to be held by the same person. But that's where you find yourself..... Two suggestions, though -- first, your CC job description is too narrow. Start by thinking about what you want the whole COMMITTEE to do, not just the CC. Handle money, submit budget/financial reports, track advancement records, purchase awards and badges, handle recharter and membership recruitment, organize non-program side of campouts, getting folks trained, on and on and on. Sure most of that stuff should be assigned to subcommittee chairmen, but it's still the responsibility of the CC and depending on the size of your unit, may be the CC's direct responsibility. The real split you're trying to establish is between program and administration, not CM and CC. Secondly, leave your COR hat at home as much as possible. For example, since you have to sign adult apps as COR, the temptation will be for you to volunteer to collect the apps, too. Or recruit the volunteers. Don't. As CM you don't have a role in processing apps, so stay out of it. To help make the point, you may want to tell the CC to get the Institutional Head to sign the apps instead of the COR. It's also easy for you to assume campouts are program. No, what the Scouts do on campouts is program, signups, food, equipment, transportation, etc. are admin/committee functions. Make them handle it. Yeah, it's a little contrived and bureaucratic, but I think you need to clearly establish the job descriptions, or you will always muddle along with a weak committee structure and you running everything.

None to my knowledge. As your WB guy found, I think it would be hard to pull off, except as a Venture Crew or Explorer Post or perhaps a really quick, one-and-done band for a special event. Just too many other opportunities for band musicians these days. My younger son is a really fine drummer. Ramping up to the last jamboree, I saw something about a call for musicians to be in the jamboree band. My son replied, but was told the band was for adults only?!?!

The real Patrol Leader will have his boys go through the Tenderfoot, Second Class and First Class stages as fast as is consistent with thoroughness. He will have them move along all the time. That natually means that he himself must advance too. So troop leaders were being given bad advice/policy from National in 1928, too. Or perhaps in 1928 PLs and their adult mentors had different ideas of thoroughness. Or troops in 1928 didn't have a pushy, helicopter parents over their shoulder pushing boys to "finish" Scouts so the can focus on lacrosse, band or robotics (more likely, lacrosse, band AND robotics). Or maybe that 1928 PL had that Rockwellian Scoutmaster standing in front of the row of sleeping Scouts to help extablish what the standards needed to be, helping the Scouts get the most out of the program, not to get out as quickly as possible. And perhaps that Scoutmaster didn't have to contend with a lot of silly rules from national telling him that active means breathing or approving something only means to chat about it. Or maybe Scoutmasters in 1928 knew what good Scoutmasters in 2012 know -- that to run a good program and help your Scouts get the best from it, sometimes you have to ignore the silly pronouncements from the folks in national who are more interested in their organizational goals than they are those boys sleeping in the tents.

C'mon, Brewmeister, the thread was billed as "entertaining." Tampa has the spirit!

Except for some exceptions (e.g., camp gaget using lashings), haven't Boy Scout requirements have always been that way? Yes, generally the actual requirements are the same, the difference is we now have a national advancement team and advancement policy redefining common English words to make those requirements meaningless. The requirement to serve actively in a leadership position is basically the same now as it was when I earned Eagle 40 years ago (main difference being they were called "troop warrant officers" instead of positions of responsibility.) I can hear my Scoutmaster's bellowing guffaw now, had I suggested to him that I should get credit for other "Scoutlike" activities, or that I could assemble six months tenure over three years of spotty activity. ...Scouts think Star is a nothing rank... Now you're talking. Star IS a nothing rank, not just for the wimpy PORs, but because we allow boys to earn any merit badge any time. Therefore by the time they complete First Class most boys have two or three of the required MBs and have long-since blown through the two electives. Tack on one of the Citizenship badges and you're done. If one of the assumed new directions is to beef-up the outdoor program, that's a perfect place for my previously-described plan of creating a "optionally-required" list of outdoor oriented MBs (cooking, orienteering, hiking, backpacking, pioneering, wilderness survival, canoeing, whitewater, nature, bird study, etc.) So make the requirement for Star be to earn Camping MB, two other Eagle-required MBs and three of the outdoor badges from the list. That pushes the outdoor program at the Star level and in some ways creates a "masters program" of outdoor skills. As far as emphasizing testing goes, the issue is not that the skills aren't being spit back at a fixed point in time, but there is no long-term retention, i.e., one and done I'm no expert, but it seems to me one quality of mastering a skill is committing it to long-term memory. People never forget how to ride a bike because it has become ingrained. LisaBob and dkurt have the answer to that, which is to change the philosophy from "no retesting" to Green Bar Bill's approach that advancement is earned not for what a Scout has done, but what he can do. Make requirements cumulative -- Scouts at every level should know first aid. If an Eagle candidate ought to be able to rattle off the rules for safe hiking, describe how to orient a map, and explain the basics of the safe swim defense. I, personally, don't think a Scout should have to repeat every requirement from the beginning (but if a given troo wants to do that, it should be the troop's choice), but I believe Scouts should be responsible for the the cumulative material and subject to retesting as their unit sees fit. Making that change in advancement will force a change in programs. If Scouts and troops know knot tying may come up during a Life Scoutmaster conference or Board of Review, there will be a different approach to both teaching and learning the skills AND a different mindset among the boys as to the need to stay current. If the only time I need to know how to tie a taut-line hitch is when I get the Tenderfoot requirement signed-off, what incentive do I have to really learn it? Who knows, bnelon, maybe with that mindset you would have really learned that bowline?

Past behavior being the best predictor of future performance, I'm guessing we're in for another round of policies and guidelines which ensure every boy advances regardless of committment or effort. -- "Do Your Best" will be the standard for completing Boy Scout requirements too. Only the Scout himself will determine when a requirement is complete and will sign his own handbook. As with merit badges, once a Scout signs a requirement, the unit has no choice but to accept it as complete. -- Since troops are obligated to provide a First-Year-First-Class program, Scouts not earning FC in one year will be considered to be victims of their units' failure. Consequently, all Scouts will be awarded First Class automatically one year from joining. -- Scoutmaster conferences and boards of review will be limited to discussing three happy events in Scout's life. Since Scouts cannot be burdened with the responsibility of requesting a SMC or BOR, both will be held in the Scout bedroom. Adults should wait quietly until the Scout wakes up. Serving breakfast in bed is still optional, but will be added to the list of gold standards for Journey to Execellence. -- Time for active participation and positions of responsibility will count from birth, although the advancement team will publish articles buried on Scouting.org which defines "birth" as "any time in the past". -- In keeping with the philosophy that we are preparing boys to function in the outside world, trips to the mall will count as troop activities for the first and second class requirement. -- Merit badge counselors should make every effort to count school classes. Any passing grade in the following courses will be considered completion of the corresponding merit badge: PE>Personal Fitness; Social Studies>all three citizenships; Science>Environmental Science and Chemistry. Scouts who can earn, find or mooch $10 and contributes it to Friends of Scouting will be awarded Personal Managment. All Scouts who complete elementary school will be assumed to have completed Art, Pottery and Basketry. Since it is the obligation of the school to deliver quality educations to the students, students failing these classes will be awarded the Merit Badges anyway.

Only in an environment where everyone advances regardless of effort or commitment. We should have a merit badge for finding loopholes.

FScouter -- honest question, not being argumentative: How does a "standards plus" troop (to coin a phrase) which expects Scouts to master basic skills and maintain them gut the program of another troop? One could argue the advancement-oriented troops attract more boys away from the tougher units. But shouldn't boys and their families choose the flavor of the program they want? We do that now with troops which are more or less youth led, or that have more challenging outdoor programs. Why should advancement be different?

Funny, E. Your problem is you understand what it would really mean to be king. Us Yanks just think it means you get to tell everyone what to do.

Apparently no one understands the value of the meeting -- or may they do!

I generally like the changes in the new advancement guide, particularly regarding Eagle projects. Our council was one of the ones which required massive project PROPOSALS, so I appreciate the new approach. I think they went a bit too far in some respects, but I'd give them a solid "B" on the Eagle projects. Overall, however, there needs to be a complete overhaul of advancement philosophy in Scouting. It can't be done by tweaking the current policy. I'm coming at this with a couple basic assumptions based on nine years as a SM and a lifetime in Scouting -- 1) My first assumption is advancement is an important part of the program and a big part of what keeps boys coming back. Whether earning Eagle "looks good on a college application" or if they see the intrinsic value in the program, many of our Scouts are goal-oriented and enjoy the challenge and reward the advancement program gives them. 2) Secondly, is the push by far too many parents that earning Eagle is the only purpose of Scouting (See the other current thread regarding "journey vs. destination.") I've had parents flat-out tell me they want their son to finish Eagle by 14 so the can move on to other "more important stuff like lacrosse." Adults look at the advancement program with their perspective of a college degree, decades of career experience and an adult notion of "productive" and say, "hey, if we organize this right, double up on some stuff, WE can knock these requirements out in a year or two." Yes, YOU can, but you gut the program by doing so. I don't think the boys have the same "let's-get-this-organized-and-get-it-over-with" attitude many adults do, but every year I get a new Scout or two who are just all over getting requirements signed-off. Of course, learning the skill behind the requirement isn't part of their thinking. All they see is the check list and the award at the end -- more of the "one and done" attitude we've discussed, although I don't think the boys think of it in those terms. Rather, we've trained kids generally, and Cub Scouts in particular, that the goal is not learning anything, not mastering a skill, not sucking the real value out of the program, but that the ultimate goal is to get a set of initials in their handbook. 3) Third, is the trend from national to redefine common English words, to shave every possible procedure, to parse every requirement to the easiest possible intrepretation. Used to be Scout leaders had the dual role of both helping Scouts to advance AND being charged with maintaining standards. Now we're being told we're no longer gatekeepers, but just mentors. If we stand at the gate, our responsibility is to herd boys through, not to judge who has earned admittance. (See Advancement News, March 2012, page 4 "What's up with the Scoutmaster signature of 'Blue Cards'?" http://www.scouting.org/filestore/advancement_news/512-075_March.pdf ) That little nugget just redefined a Scout being "qualified and approved" to start a merit badge to really mean "he just wants to." The process of obtaining your Scoutmaster's signature is there only to provide the Scout and SM the opportunity for another friendly chat. Boards of Review can't actually approve or reject anything -- as Bnelon wrote in another thread, there are only a very limited set if circumstances where a BOR can turn down a Scout, mostly where the Scout glaringly omitted a requirement. BoRs -- or Scoutmasters, for that matter -- never get to make the subjective call that by the proponderance of the evidence, the Scout just isn't ready to advance. If the boxes are checked, he's done. And the new definition of "active" -- under which units supposedly can develop their own standards for active -- is bull. It's the same ol' non-definition as before with two more pages of smoke and mirrors. You can set your unit attendance goals any way you like, but then the advancement committee gets to comb through the Scouts life to cobble together just about anything they like to satisfy the requirement. Play football? "Physically strong" is part of Scouting, so football counts as active in Scouting. On the student council? Leadership is part of scouting so that counts too. Held devotionals with the other inmates in your cell block..... My conclusion from all this is for an active and enthuasistic Scout, we've turned advancement to Eagle into a three year program. Over and over and over I see kids who blow through to Life in a couple years. The best are the Scouts who then become in other aspects of Scouting -- high adventure, OA, leadership, camp staff, etc. -- but that usually requires a great deal of time and resources and doesn't always catch on. Even these Scouts essentially put advancement on the shelf for a couple years. Unfortunately, a good percentage of those young Life Scouts don't really catch fire with other program elements and just go dormant. Usually, we see them again in their junior year, when college applications show up on the horizon and they decide Eagle is worthwhile and come back to finish it. These guys never really re-engage -- all they want is to check the last few boxes. The folks at national charged with running the advancement program should be appalled at this. Are you telling me it's okay to take advancement off the table for four of the seven years a Scout is in the program? Honestly, I don't understand their motivation. Is it a membership numbers thing? Do they not want to deal with irate appeals? Or are the just part of the "everybody gets a trophy" culture? If it's the last two, they need to fire them all and hire people with spines. If the issue is membership, a change may result in a hit initially, but long term a more challenging program will BOOST membeship by keeping those Scouts focused on Eagle in the program longer. With all this talk about "protecting the brand" the folks guiding advancement policy now are giving the brand away hand over fist. Solutions? Advancement needs to be more of a challenge. The advancement program needs to challenge 16 and 17 year olds with something they couldn't do at 12 or 13. If all Eagle requirements are doable at age 12 or 13 (which they must be if any boy can complete any merit badge at any time), what's to hold the interest of a 17 year old? The first thing that has to happen is a sea change among the national folks. We can make Eagle look like a PhD in quantum physics, but without a change in thinking, the trophy-for-everyone crowd will eventually recast the process so that any 13-year-old can do it. The easy, top down approach would be to beef up the requirements. I would go so far as to add a rank. Eliminate the "administrative" PORs (librarian, historian, etc.) from the list for Life and Eagle. Require TWO PORs for Life and Eagle. Require more merit badges, but specify that the additional MBs come from a list of outdoor skills MBs (Orienteering, Pioneering, Wilderness Survival, Hiking, Backpacking, Cooking). And absolutely dump First-Year-First-Class. It only feed the one-and-done Cub Scout mentality. If I can complete T-2-1 in a year, why can't I finish S-L-E the next year? But what I would really like to see happen -- and I know this is anathema to the folks in Irving -- would be to return to the folks in the trenches, the unit leaders who know the Scouts, the ability to set advancement standard for their unit. National should provide a framework for HOW units set standards (documentation, communication, etc.) but allow the units to decide WHAT those standards should be. Years ago I taught a Scoutmaster position-specific course and one of the participants said in his unit Scoutmaster Conferences were retests of every-single requirement the Scout had completed to date -- including merit badges. He said conferences for Eagle could take 15-to-20 hours to complete! Okay, clearly that's nuts -- who the heck has that kind of time? But if that chartered organization and their leaders believe that's the best way to run that unit -- and if those expectations are made clear to Scouts and parents when they join the unit, why does that matter to the rest of us? Why not let market forces prevail? If you want a very challenging program for your son, there's your troop. If you want him to make Eagle at 13 so he can focus on lacrosse, there's a troop across town which will accommodate you. Let national standards be the minimum. If a unit is chartered to the local rescue squad and they believe that every Scout First Class and above should maintain Red Cross certification in first aid and CPR/AED, why shouldn't they be allowed to add that requirement. That's the flavor of that unit. If another troop is chartered to a local outdoor retailer and the CO insists the Scouts in their program have impeccable camping skills, that should be the flavor of that troop. Why does national insist that all troops be vanilla?

I'm good with JMs list. I may expand on his advancement plank and send everyone on the national advancement team to Moose's re-education camp -- or put them on the bus too. We've got to get rid of the check-box mentality (someone on another thread called it "credentialism"? Okay, sounds snazzy.) Everything I see coming from the advancement team redefines the requirements or procedures to the easiest possible level. The mantra is neither add nor subtract, but when was the last time you saw something out of national which made advancement more of a challenge or supported unit leaders who strive to set high standards for their Scouts? And actually, I really like what RichardB & Co. are doiing with programs like ATV and PWC. I hope/pray that the recent cluster-flub policy on tool use was pushed through by some moron in legal -- it's way out of line with the other program initiatives.

Funny that folks get all torqued up over mothers day, but fathers day seems like the perfect opportunity for dad to take the kids somewhere or maybe mow the lawn. I've spend many fathers day setting up or breaking down day camp. That doesn't seem to bother anyone. We scheduled a campout mothers day one year. The most common reaction was "HEY YOU CAN'T GO CAMPING THEN, IT'S MOTHERS DAY! I'LL BE left ... all ... by ... my ....... Ya'll have fun! Call and let me know when you'll be back!"

Yeah, I'm sure Bnelon is right. Following some piss-ant rule about filing paperwork is more important than celebrating this young man's accomplishment and allowing him to have his day to shine at Scout camp in front of all his buddies. Twenty years from now I'm sure that lesson in trustworthyness will be a memorable moment in his Scouting career. Since we're into bureaucratic technicalities, let's note the policy prohibits the patch being sold or provided to a unit not the individual Scout. If the Scout buys the patch, or certainly if someone loans or gives the patch to the Scout, he's well within policy. If we're going to be pedantic, let's be pedantic!

Maybe it's been so long since your troop had a good SPL, they don't see the need for a good one. If the job has become a joke, a jokester may be a logical choice. I was fortunate to have a three-year string of really good SPLs. So when the troop elected the class clown, it showed. The jokes wore thin and it was apparent the kid wasn't willing to do the hard work of making things happen. The coolest thing which happened was that two older kids who had been headed off to Eagle and retirement, decided the troop needed them and ran last time so we had three strong candidated on the ballot. I agree with E732 that boy lead doesn't mean boy run off in a ditch. Time for the adults to engage a little more and steer the SPL selection process a bit. That may mean counseling the candidates to understand what the job really entails (a lot of work!) and that perhaps to take a second look at running. Or perhaps the SM needs to exert his option to approve candidates. Some of the best advice I was given when starting as SM was that my job is to assess the abilities of the youth leaders and to engage them more and less depending on their needs.

Technically, the rules say not to present any of the materials until the application is returned from national, but the official date of receiving his Eagle is the board of review. Let the young man enjoy his accomplishment. Absolutely let him wear the badge to camp.

Kill the uniform cash cow? Honest to pete, I checked the date on the OP to make sure it wasn't posted April 1.

So, weblinger, sounds like next year you get another free weekend to spend with your family! Our gold standard for communication is what's posted on the troop calendar/bulletin board at teh Scout House or what is announced at circle up at the end of the meeting. Weren't there? Sorry. Think we need to send text messages? Smoke signals? Jungle drums? Fine. Be there at circle-up, take notes and send messages on any medium you like. We always appreciate diversity. We do use ScoutTrack as an online calendar and for automated email reminders. Too much? Too little? We're always looking for someone to take over managing it. It doesn't happen too much with Scouts, but is a constant at school -- the assumption that everyone has a smart phone. I mean, what's the point of sending an email at 3:45 cancelling a 4:00 practice? I'm on the way already, not sitting at my computer. Wasn't there an article in Scouting within the past year (and I think reposted here) which listed the percentages of homes with various forms of communications? Seem to recall smart phone use at 25-30 percent and a lot of stuff we all consider a given -- cell phones, email, internet use -- in the 75% ballpark.

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Question Brent -- how does it work when you remove inactive Scouts from the patrols. What happens when a kid shows up the week before a campout? Or just shows up for the campout? Seems to me that if showing up for one event resets the clock (and I assume reassigns the Scout to a patrol) he's only out of the patrol when he's not there. The reason I ask is whenever we reorganize patrols, there is usually a suggestion to put all the "inactive" scouts in one patrol. While I admit that has some appeal and I understand the feelings of the active Scouts who have to carry the dead wood, I get the image of Flounder and Pinto being shuffled off to the front room of the Omega house.

Don't have it in front of me, but in the past I've read that there is a distinction between commemorative council strips which are not for uniform wear and official council strips which are. I'd be surprised if many councils make the distinction, but you may want to ask your DE. (He won't care, as long as the check cleared.) Personally, I've got a drawer full of those patches and don't wear them myself nor would I give them to my boys. Just seems a little tacky to me. Off topic, but I used to collect council strips. Started when I was a Scout and would buy the patches any time I was out of council and could get them -- kinda like collecting national parks pins. I picked the collection up again when we joined Cubs and handed it off to my boys who added to it. But I've quit. Councils have ruined it by flooding the market with a CSP for every different event imaginable. Or creating insanely small issues which no one can possibly collect. Our council went decades and only had three different CSPs. They started doing FOS CSPs several years ago, but they weren't "official" patches, just tokens for the donors. But for some reason, during the centennial, the floodgates were opened. I bet the council issued a dozen "centennial" patches for every event -- centennial committee CSP, centennial Wood Badge course, centennial Wood Badge STAFF (of course), centennial University of Scouting, on and on and on. Of course the purpose is to separate the wheat from the chaff. What's the point of being on a committee or staffing a course if no one knows you are part of the elite? Used to be the purpose of council strips was to unify the councils with a common uniform element (and of course to save money versus producing a red-and-white community for every little pig path with a Scout troop). Now, CSPs serve mainly as money makers for the councils and to segregate the insiders from the unwashed masses.

Contact the camp and see if they can put you together with another troop. 11 or 12 of you shouldn't be too much to accommodate. They may also have an 18+ staff member who can "live" with you for the week. I also like the idea of putting it to the parents that they need to find a full-time-equivalent to go with you; calling in uncles and grandfathers to help. This isn't your problem alone. Maybe several of them together can cover the week. But "I'm busy" doesn't really cut it. There's no reason you should be the only one trying to solve the problem.