Twocubdad

... Home Repairs MB ....

"It comes down to the program you, your Scouts, other adult leaders and parents want. If you want to focus on 1911-style adventure treks and very strict youth leadership, it is your option to do so. I very sincerely think it is in the best interest of the program that troops like that are around for boys who want that." Yeah, BP, it's always my way or the highway.

Alright, guys, time to give it a rest.

Your bias, Kudu, is in your selection of requirements. Why not make the choice between learning to resuscitate someone by rolling them over a barrel versus by learning how to use an AED? Or do you want to memorize the 16 principle points of the compass versus how to use a GPS. But your are absolutely right, with they choice you gave them, learning to stop a runaway horse sounds a whole lot sexier than learning the EDGE method. But, if you read it, the horse requirement is simply "know the methods for how to help in case of a runaway horse" I can teach that in a church basement using PowerPoint and bore the dickens out of you. And I can take a couple Scouts to a Webelos meeting with me and they will have a blast learning and using EDGE to teach the Webelos. There is a little art to this Scoutmaster thing, you know. You ignored my question about the Eagle Scout who never walked in the woods with a back pack, which was really to the crux of my point. You take the 1910 written program and hold it up as if all 1910 units delivered that program perfectly. But you take the modern program and shoot holes in it based on how it could be misapplied. I suppose in theory a Scout could make Eagle and never use a back pack, but is that really a problem? Does anyone know of such a Scout? There are good and bad troops now just as I am sure there were good and bad troops in 1910. I've built a couple log cabins and done a fair bit of historic restorations over the years. One of the things I been taught is that when you are looking at a surviving buildings, you're likely looking at the best of the best. For a structure to survive for years and years, it was probably built with great care and craftsmanship. A cheap mill house or a pole cabin thrown up by some poor pioneer, facing the oncoming winter probably isn't around 150 years later for us to study. We draw false conclusion if we only study cabins with perfectly cut dovetail joints in white oak logs. There is a similar danger in comparing Scout programs. When I compare the 1911 and 2011 requirements, I'm struck by how similar they are. Truth is, there is nothing in the early requirements a Scout, patrol or troop can't do now if they choose to. Hiking, cooking, woods tools, fire building, first aid is all still there. No, some of the stuff isn't required through first class anymore, but that doesn't mean you can still do it. You can even earn horsemanship merit badge and chase horses, if that is something every red-blooded American boy yearns to do. If two Scouts want to go on a 14 mile trek, they have the option to do so, and can meet the modern requirements of hiking, backpacking, cycling or canoeing merit badges along the way. Seems to me the requirements which were dropped, like stopping horses and signaling, have gone the way of buggy whips anyway. But no one is stopping your boys from doing that stuff if they want. There are, however, a number of new things which I think are good additions. Like using the EDGE method to teach tying a square knot. Good grief, all that is required is to teach someone to tie a square knot. The real purpose of this requirement, and the ones to visit a civic leader and to participate in a short service project, is very simply to acknowledge in the early ranks the role of leadership, service and citizenship in the program. You may not think the minimal effort these requirements take is worthwhile, but I do. It comes down to the program you, your Scouts, other adult leaders and parents want. If you want to focus on 1911-style adventure treks and very strict youth leadership, it is your option to do so. I very sincerely think it is in the best interest of the program that troops like that are around for boys who want that. But as both a parent and leader I want more than that for my sons and the Scouts in my troop. I appreciate the more rounded program which has something to offer many more boys. I want my Scouts to learn leadership skills, even if it is just some basic managerial techniques. I want them to spend time with other adults of good character and develop lasting relationships with them (as I did as a Scout). I want the chubby, couch-potato kid to be able to participate, advance and thrive in the program, even if he can't or won't participate in all the physically demanding activities the other guys can. I want them to take seriously their oath to help other people through service and to do their duty to God and Country through good citizenship and as faithful young men. But I won't fall into the "log cabin trap" and assume that just because those things aren't listed in the 1911 requirement that they werent taught in early Scout troops, or even in a modern troop which follows the early program. As I said, there were good and bad troops then and there are good and bad troops now.

I don't really see a distinction, but I suppose Schiff's is as good as any. Trouble is it really doesn't define how Scouts interact with framework for the program put in place by adults, either nationally or locally. And it doesn't address the relationship between Scouts and adult leaders, which I suspect is probably more where EMB was headed with this. By Shiff's definition, our troop is both boy lead and run. But I guarantee a number of you would describe us as a plop camping bunch of parlor scouts. Sticks and stones. As a large troop (65), we are lead top down by the SPL and PLC. Our adults take an active role in working with the boys. At the same time, the Scouts are challenged to take on more and more responsibilities. Our goal is for each Scout in a position of responsibility to do more, do a better job and take more responsibility than the guy before him. It tends to be a two-steps-forward, one-step-back process, depending on the abilities of the individual Scouts. Our job as leaders to to recognize and assess those differences and to step in and out; to take a lighter or heavier hand depending on the ability of the boys we're working with. Consequently, at any given time, different elements of the program, even different individual Scouts may be more or less boy led/run than other elements or individuals. The Aardvark patrol leader may be out front, setting the pace as the best PL we've ever had while the Aardvark's assigned ASM drinks coffee. Meanwhile the Zebra PL is off in a ditch with the SPL and ASM over his shoulder, whispering in his ear.(This message has been edited by Twocubdad)

Why do some adults feel the need to make earning merit badges easy and convenient for Scouts? What's the motivation for someone to organize a merit badge university where scout can walk in and earn a couple merit badges in a day? Is it for the convenience of the adults? Are your Scouts so needy you have to throw them these kibbles to keep their interest? Is there a demand among parents that they get more bang for their bucks if their Scout earns a lot of MBs? I want my Scouts to WORK for merit badges. I want them to learn not just the merit badge subject, but that initiative and effort pays off. I want them to have to overcome challenges. Isn't that the purpose of the merit badge program? If mom drops me off at the scout house and I sit with my face in my hands through four hours of yacking, have I done any of that? We always tell Scouts, "It's not the destination, it's the journey." Does anyone really belive that anymore?

I wouldn't contact the counselor for love nor money. Why? So he can tell you, "oh,yeah, he completed all the requirements. If you want a blue card, send me one and I'll sign it." The boy may ultimately get the merit badges, but I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to fix the issues he's created.

And when did you stop beating your wife? Oh, please! You would have to be the most obtuse human on the planet to present that option to the troop. Why not present the question as, "do you want to learn more useless and arcane Scout trivia that you'll never need, or do you want to learn some leadership skills you can use to help your patrol be more sucessful?" Franky, that's a stupid proposition, too. But you can spin anything to reach a pre-determined outcome.

It's a shame, sasha, that your son was short changed in that way. What a great experience it would have been to have spend an afternoon with an experienced architect getting out of the car, looking at real buildings, talking about how they fit into the context of the site (or not), how the site affected the architect's design, the historical context of when and how they were built. There could be so much more to this than what's apparent from a photo of the front elevation of a building. Over the holidays I had a Scout who asked to do Genealogy MB with me. He's the first one in 7 or 8 years I've been registered for the badge. I met with him once after a troop meeting to go over the requirements and get him started. A couple Saturday's later, we met at the hut and drove into town to the main branch of the library which has a historical reference section. Of course, we went through the requirements. But I also shared with him some of the research I've done over the last 25 years. I've found some really cool letters my family members wrote home from the Civil War telling their parents about his brother's death. I have a copy of my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather's will (1773) I found in the state archive that the archivist let me hold and read the original document. We spent most of the day working his research. His family is from New Orleans, so doing research in Louisiana was a new experience for me, too. We had a blast. The library had a searchable database of all the US census records and we were able to take the information he had (which was mostly limited to his grandparents and a couple great-grandparents) and leap-frog back from census to census. We were able to find all his great-grand parents and most great-great-grandparents. We found on great-great-grandfather who seemed to have come to New Orleans from Missouri, something no one in his family had ever heard of. We found the parish records from the church where several generations of his mother's family attended and found birth, death and marriage records for that side of the family. One of his grandfathers had been killed in Vietnam and we found his service records which showed he had only been killed after only about six weeks in country by a mortar attack. I had family plans that evening and had to pry him away around 4:00. But yeah, he could have earned the merit badge with 12 other guys in less than half the time and with a whole lot of effort. But back to BuffSkip's OP -- you guys seem to be leaving out the part of the process where the Scoutmaster initially signs the blue card before the Scout begins the MB. I know folks disagree, but I believe there is more significance to the SM's signature than just giving him a opportunity to practice his handwriting. Since the Scout didn't start with his Scoutmaster, didn't get a blue card, apparently doesn't have a counselor and didn't come home with a signed card, I don't see that he earned the MB. And maybe my paranoia is showing, but this doesn't sound like a simple mis-communications. Sounds to me like the Scout fed you a line of hooey and intentionally blew off his responsibility as SPL at a troop activity in order to work on a MB.

Like Al, my dad's '72 metallic green Ford Pinto nicknamed "Fireball." One of the dumbest things I've ever done in my life was to get that thing up over 100mph. It was shaking so bad I thought the steering wheel would fall off in my hands. The first car of my own was a baby blue '76 Chevette named "The Mayflower" on account of all the girls who came across in it. Anyway, that's the story I told the guys and see no point in changing it 30 years later. At about 75,000 miles the brakes were gone, the clutch had been tightened as far as it would go, the tires were a slick as a baby's butt and finally the head gaskets went. It needed about $1,000 worth of work and blue book on it was about half that. When I found another car I wanted to trade for, I detailed the Chevette and parked it overnight at a McDonald's across the street from the dealer. Next morning, I filled the radiator up with ice water and coasted across the street to the dealership (if I let it heat up, water would start blowing out of the gaskets). At the dealership, I jumped out and took the plates off, figuring without plates, the dealer would only drive it around the parking lot. It work, they allowed me $2200 on the trade in. The car I traded for was an 1980 Honda Civic two-door that had 45,000 miles on it when I bought it. I put another 75,000 on it then sold it to my brother who put 100,000 miles on it before he gave it to his wife's nephew with over 250,000 miles. The dang thing is probably still on the road somewhere.

An important part of the merit badge program is for Scouts to experience working with an adult counselor; reaching out to an adult they may not know, setting and keeping appointments, working with that adult to learn a skill or subject in which the adult has a level of expertise, working to complete the requirements and, hopefully, learning something beyond what is narrowly outlined in the requirements and developing a relationship with an adult with whom they share a common interest. So-called merit badge universities subvert those elements of the program. Scouts register, usually through the troop, show up and are marched through the requirements. There is usually little individual attention and often requirements are met in by groups rather than individually. In our troop, we don't promote local MBUs and simply don't issue blue cards for them. When we explain our reasoning to parents, they are usually supportive. Of course some aren't. Only once have we had a parent who strongly disagreed with the troop's position. But if this is a deal breaker, there are other troops....

This is a pretty deep topic and I will admit it probably deserves more thought, so this is a bit rambling. My first reaction is that there are all sorts of hard-wired urges which civil society requires us to resist. Just because it's instinctive to the species doesn't mean we need to let boys beat the crap out of each other with sticks. Do we really want our sons and daughters pairing up and breeding at age 13 or 14 because they are hard-wired to do so? Most of that hard wiring developed over millions of years, whereas the requirements of civilized society have been around a few thousand, and modern civilization a few hundred years. There are bound to be conflicts, even, as packsaddle points out, conflicts between competing hard-wired urges. It also seems that hard-wiring changes with age. A 16-year-old may be hard-wired for adventure, challenge and conquest, but as we get older perhaps the instincts mature too, causing us to focus on families, homes and communties. Maybe one of the conflicts is our desire to see those adventurous, conquering 16 year old to live long enough to experience that more mature hard wiring. In more historic or pre-historic times humanity was more accepting of the idea that many young men wouldn't survive their adventures. We used to live much more closely with death and of course many parts of the world still do. If a third of your children didn't survive infancy and your first two wives died in childbirth, your 16-year-old son being killed on a hunt or being lost at sea may have seemed like a more noble fate. We have arranged our lives and societies so that activities which were once required for survival are now recreational. Being killed by a saber-toothed tiger while trying to feed your family is much different from getting shot by a drunk out hunting deer. Dying on the wagon trail leading your family to a better life is more worthwhile than dying trying to earn a Scout badge. Maybe risk assesment is one of those instincts which develop with age?

I've been reading this for a couple days trying to figure it out how to get rid of this guy without making him a martyr. While getting him out of the unit is vital, you don't want this guy at every district or council event trash-talking the troop and constantly sawing on you limb. That the kid and mom are gone is a blessing. I am assuming that as a DC he's not on the unit charter either. Good. That's the opening you need. The Court of Honor is one of those situations where you take a little short-term pain for the long term gain. While I can certainly understand if the troop doesn't want to ever see this guy again, you need to turn down the heat and give the a-hole an opportunity to slither away. But at the same time you need to protect the troop and make sure youre done with him. So here's my approach: Let the mom and son collect their things and leave. No reason not to, I'm assuming the boy just dropped off the charter and wasn't expelled. The dad's a different matter. Assuming he can behave himself for one night (and it sounds like that's probably not a very good assumption) let him do his WB thing and watch his son get his awards. If he steps one inch out of line -- including talking smack about troop -- get in his face and tell him he is a guest of the troop and can either act like one or leave. If he makes one more peep, call the cops and have him removed. Be sure you NEVER have any contact with this guy without another leader with you. In fact, it would be a good idea to let all the troop leadership know that they should only talk with this guy in pairs. If he makes it to the end of the COH, on the way out hand him a letter telling him that he is forbidden from any future troop activities. Find out what legal notifications are required in your state to trigger future criminal trespass charges and include that. At district and council functions he will be asked to stay away from your Scouts, leaders and campsite. If the council won't enforce that request, your troop will not participate in such events. And finally, point out that the troop leaders have engaged legal counsel and if he attempts to interfere with the troop or if he continues to spread false and malicious statements about the troop, you will pursue all legal remedies, both criminal and civil. Hand him the letter and walk away. Next morning send him another copy by certified mail so you have proof of receipt. Also give a copy to the Scout Executive. Make sure he understands that unless he wants to spend the next three years refereeing this mess -- including a possible legal and media mess -- he needs to solve it now. I think Beavah and the others have pretty-well addressed how to handle things with the council. (This message has been edited by Twocubdad)

5. Go pound sand. Question -- for those of you who advocate long-term status as a "troop visitor" what's your limit on that? I can see giving that a wink and nod in a special circumstance for a short period of time, but it seems to me there is a point at which you are simply subverting membership requirements. E732's special needs kid who was ignored by his WDL is certainly a reasonable exception. Same for a kid who has been a cub for 5 years, just missed a couple AOL requirement and turns 11 in a month or two. But I would not be comfortable making an exception for a fourth-grade 10 year old with no Cub Scout experience.

E -- had you missed your numbers you were going to have to work Christmas day? Gee, that's a tough council. I don't understand this. Are you guys saying it's taking your council months to process your recharters, or just to get the cards back to you? If it's the former, how does that work? Once your charter expires (plus a grace period) I thought your unit turned into a pumpkin or something. If it's the latter, who cares? I think 50% of membership cards are destroyed in the laundry weekly anyway.

BP -- Do you have any data to back up the "sharp increase" in accidents and deaths? Not being argumentative, but curious.

Hi, Mike, actually I think we met at the wood carving tent. I don't have much insight, we probably heard the same rumors. I did have an opportunity to talk with the Jack Furst, I think I have his name right, at The Summit tent. He's the head guy on the project. His vision for jamboree is very different from the current one. A couple things he told me he would like to see includes no merit badges at all. He also wants to greatly restrict patch trading. Campsite assignment would be by "52-card pick-up", not by council and region. Programming would be much more organized, with entire troops going off on daily high-adventure oriented activities together. No pairs scouts heading off to do what they please everyday. I shared this conversation with a couple old-timers at region headquarter and their comment was along the lines of, "yeah, good luck with that." Regarding the midway, their comment was that the current program is far too popular and supported by far too many Scouters to just go away. They thought randomly assigning troops campsites all over the site was nuts. Problems is that subcamps are organized by regions and areas and run by volunteers who work their local contacts to recruit staff. Scattering the troops would throw that into chaos. In otherwords, the guys on The Summit team had a lot of ideas for how they thought jamboree should be run, but that didn't necessarily mean it was all a done deal. The other thing I heard is, at least for 2013, the number of participants will be half of AP Hill, or about 20,000 boys. Consequently, stuff like the midway will be down-sized, too. Whether or not that's a permanent change is another matter. Again, that was just the word on the street last summer.

If a scout in my troop asked this question, I'd pull up a couple chairs, sit down, get comfortable, put my feet up and ask him, "okay, so what's going on?" Whether or not you can, the better question is should you? Is that really going to get the troop where it needs to be? Does it solve the problem or create more? The real answer is "it depends." Some troops have fixed election schedules. Some just informally shift leadership whenever it seems right. Our troop has elections every six months with a unwritten rule -- more of a guideline -- that you don't hold office the same office more than two consecutive terms. It would be highly unusual to have such a recall election and as SM, I would strongly counsel against it. I think it would set a very poor precedence on several levels. There are so many better ways to try to solve problems.

Secession ain't going to happen. First, a new council is out. National has spent the last 25 years merging away smaller councils. I don't think a new council has been created (except through the merger of smaller councils) in that time. Your district changing councils won't happen either. Districts don't really exist. They are only administrative subdivisions of the council. The council can decide to realign your district into oblivion today or as in E92's situation, tweak the lines to get rid of some squeeky wheels. And even if either option were practically possible, I believe it could technically be done only with the approval of the current council. You think they're going to give up the money and members? As Da Beav notes, your only real solution is to organize the CORs in the district. Having them show up for the annual council business meeting is the by-the-book route, but that won't get anything done. The results of those meetings have been pre-determined for weeks. If there is really the level of unhappiness in the district you suggest, the CORs need to organize and present a unified position to the council. I would suggest a letter to the council president and committee listing the issues/concerns/demands and signed by as many CORs as are willing to do so. Ask for a meeting with the Council president to discuss the concerns face-to-face.

I counsel Bugling, too, but I have to say I really don't understand your question. It doesn't seem to me bugling is something one could earn in a "session." The few boys I've worked with already played trumpet in their school band. I worked with them to help learn the calls. I suppose a fellow who is a pretty good trumpeter could learn the calls, Honestly, teaching a Scout to play the bugle from zero would be beyond the scope of what I'm prepared to offer. When a Scout has approached me about the MB, I've directed them to the Music/Bugling phamphlet for the music. I think VMI has on their web site the music for all the calls and the actual calls being played, in a number of file formats. It's really good for the guys who don't read music as well as they maybe should. When I'm actually working one-on-one with a bugler, I'm just helping them learn the music. Truth be told, of the three or four guys I've worked with, none have earned the MB, although two became fairly competent troop buglers, being able to call the troop to Assembly, Revelle, Taps, To the Colors, and the more common stuff.

Family finances shouldn't have anything to do with it -- especially if it's to the point you're uncomfortable talking with a Scout about it. I'm with Beaver on this. If the only possibility of income a Scout has is his allowance, he shouldn't be working on Personal Management. The real solution is for the Scoutmaster to exercise his descretion in issuing blue cards in these situations. If you are counseling the MB for a specific troop, you need to be talking with the SM to reach an understand about this. If you are a multi-troop, district counselor, you need to have this conversation with the district advancement chairman. Personally, if either of them told me their expectation was than any Scout could earn the MB, even with a 0-0-0 budget, I would counsel another MB. The 11-year-old view of this MB (or worse yet, an 11-year-old's parent's view) is "gee, I don't have an allowance so that really makes this requirement easy." Yeah, if your intent is to complete the merit badge come-what-may, you can meet the letter of the requirement by proposing a 0-0-0 budget,or even showing $5 allowance, zero expenses, $5 savings. But I would say that's disingenuous at best and totally subverts the intent and purpose of what is in no small part the guts of the merit badge. By high school, kids understand the social economics of pocket money. That your mom bought you a ticket to the movies doesn't help if what you really want is to buy the cute girl from geometry class a Coke and box of Junior Mints. Or if you want to show off your prowless in Black Ops to you buddies in the arcade. That's real. What you want to do is take that real experience and get a young man to see the long (or at least 13 week) view of it. Your buddies and the girl from geometry will be REALLY impressed if you show up driving your own wheels a couple years from now. If a kid is getting five bucks from his dad and stuffing it in his piggy, the requirement may as well be to play a game of Risk or Monopoly with your counselor.

No. Although it's been awhile since we debated this, I will tell you the argument comes down to whether or not the weekly lessons of thrift and responsibility are worth the time, effort and cash flow issues. Our troop has clearly decided in the negative. Back in the day, dues for my Cub Scout den were 10 cents per meeting. Maybe it was just my house, but my recollection is that it was a big deal for each scout to come up with the 10 cents on his own. The assistant denner was responsible for collecting dues, although I remember the den mothers (yes, they were all mothers) having a big hand in the process. As an eight year, that was a pretty big lesson. Even back then, my recollection as a Boy Scout was that dues were 25 cents (what ever happend to the cent symbol on keyboards?) but no one really worried about paying weekly. Everyone was usually behind, but you could pay a dollar or two to get caught up and ahead a few weeks. The running joke was a kid named Martin who was years behind. It was a big laugh one night when his dad finally paid up something like $30. I can't imagine weekly dues being anything but a pain for our troop now.

Will WB make you a superior leader? I doubt it. But I also doubt you can get a concensus on the definition of "leader" here. There will be those who argue leaders are born, not trained, so no training course will make you a better leader. The better question is, will WB make you a better Scouter? I think absolutely so. If you are like most folks and haven't been exposed to a lot of corporate training, you will learn a lot about how to lead an organization. If you have an MBA in management or worked for IBM or Xerox for 25 years, there probably won't be much new in that regard. Regardless, and at the very least, you will come away with a better understanding of the Scout program (okay, the current Scout program). You will also hear some methods, techniques and best practices for running a volunteer organization. You may have been the CEO of GM or the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, but I promise you there are things to learn about running a volunteer troop committee full of over-indulgent parents. Secondly, you will learn how to teach leadership/managment/organizational skills to boys. Granted, this isn't a big deal if you are a Cub leader, but like it or not, agree with it or not, leadership skills are a big part of the current Boy Scout program. While the skills themselves may be as old as humanity, you will learn techniques for teaching these skills to Scout-aged boys. And even if you don't care for acronyms like EDGE or formin', stormin', normin' and performin', they are a common vocabulary within BSA that your boys will see in Troop Leader Training and National Youth Leader Training. You will become really close friends with the other folks in your patrol. You will meet a lot of great dedicated Scouters in your council and make contacts which will help you deliver a better program to your boys. Just sitting around the campfire or crackerbarrel, you talk with other Scout leaders from other units which may do things differently from yours. You'll have an opportunity to learn from their experiences and to share your own. You'll spend a week in the woods (that's probably worth the course fee right there). You get to play Boy Scout for a week; sing silly songs, play games and make fun of the Bobwhite patrol. You will probably come away recharged and enthusiastic about Scouting. You will be required to look at your current position from a new, or at least fresh, point of view and come up with a plan for making it better. Yes, you need to go into this with a good attitude. And no, that's not evidence that Wood Badge is a cult. It means it's like every other similar experience. If you go on vacation with the attitude that everything is overpriced, full of pushy tourists and you'll die of skin cancer, you won't have fun. If you go to WB convinced you've already heard it all, that the staff are all idiots and that Wood Badge has ruined Scouting, you'll have a bad experience there, too.

Any idea what the issues are? I'm sort of a cut-to-the-chase guy. Call the guy out. Enough of the third-grade school yard crap. The best way to deal with a bully is to smack them in the mouth one good time. You may get your butt kicked, but chances are the problem will be resolved one way or the other for good. I would email the committee chairman (whether he or she is active and involved or not) and copy the CM, COR, all committee members and parents in your den. Tell them you understand a meeting is in the works to discuss "issues" within your den. That you look forward to such a full and open discussion. However common courtesy -- not to mention just plain ol' guts -- dictate the meeting take place face-to-face with all interested parties participating. Acknowledge that as a Den Leader you serve at the pleasure of the Pack Committee and Chartered Organization. If either feel the issues within your den are so aggregious that you need to be replaced, you will step aside. If that is the decision of the committee, you know that as honorable people the committee will reach that decision in a fair, open and Scout-like manner. But stick to that. If your services are no longer needed, or no one else in the pack has the cajones to stand up with you to this jerk, move on. Life's too short and your time with your son is even shorter.

Wait a minute pilgram, what's wrong with Bear Claw?