NeverAnEagle

I've found the best way to find a quality camp is to ask around. Every year at camp I check out the different council patches and ask the adult leaders what was the best camp they ever attended. you get honest information w/o a bunch of marketing crap this way.

We had to wait for our assignment to be released and for the letters to go out. I work in the Department of Commerce and do monthly surveys of the nation's economic conditions. The survey that was suppose to run in this area from October 1st to October 21st was on transportation, shipping, and commute patterns. That data set was supposed to be released October 1st and letters were supposed to be mailed to those selected for the survey. That obviously didn't happen, so there was nothing for me to do until people with a higher pay grade than mine got everything lined up. In the end that survey was canceled and everyone was moved over to working on the October unemployment numbers, since unemployment is deemed more important that commute patterns. Right now it looks like Octobers unemployment numbers will only be a week late, since they canceled our other projects this month and put everything into the Unemployment survey.

I would like to point out that just because the "shut-down" has ended, does not mean that federal workers are, well, working. The message at 800 number this morning reports that employees are not to report to work until contacted by their supervisor. I was ready to go this morning, but was told to sit on my hands.

jpstodwftexas: I don't like the idea of serving healthy snacks because with parents it tends to devolve into a competition for the "best snacks." It's not just scouting I've seen it in sports too. Parents may start out bringing carrots or orange wedges, but it escalates. I had to enforce a no snack rule where parents were showing up with coolers to make root beer floats; handing out huge slices of cake; and passing out "snack bags" with chips, candy, and soda. Then you had the parents who refused to bring snacks and tried intimidating/humiliating other parents in front of the kids. I had one mom loudly announce that she shouldn't have to bring snacks because her tax dollars paid for another mom's (single parent) food stamps! She insisted that because the other woman received food stamps she should be required to bring snack every week to pay back the tax money that the other parents contributed to her food allowance. I don't know whether or not the single mom received food stamps, but even if she did that other woman was out of line. The safest path is to stay clear of snacks, period.

http://www.parentingscience.com/homeschooling-outcomes.html Home-school kids don't always do better. Structured home-school kids tend to do better, but only homeschool kids with highly motivated parents take the achievement tests. unstructured home-schoolers and un-schoolers do not take the tests so results can't be used to compare the groups because of the bias in self-selection.

Count Baden-Powell among those whom as a boy valued hunting but hated classrooms. Against school rules, he snuck out to the Copse (a wooded area near his school) to hunt and cook rabbits. He developed skills of stealth to hide himself and his cooking fires from teachers paid to patrol the Copse and catch boys like him. When he got older he incorporated his anti-regimentation skills into a military program that riveted the world's attention to the Siege of Mafeking, and turned his military book Aids to Scouting into a best-seller. Become a Wood Badge Staffer to form and storm boys like Baden-Powell away from the Copse. To its credit, Leadership Development and the Merit Badge system has made great progress in cranking out Patrol Leaders who never walk into the woods with a Patrol at their backs, and Eagle Scouts who learn their citizenship from a book. We turn Scouting into After-School School: What every boy hates, has always hated, and will continue to hate until the end of time. Yours at 300 feet, Kudu http://kudu.net Kudu--Baden Powell as a boy may not have liked school, but I bet HIS parents still required him to attend and expected him to put forth his best efforts in all his subjects. In order to succeeded he had to learn more than how to safely discharge a rifle. In some of the readings I have encountered about him he also encouraged the boys to engage in critical thinking, debate, and to become skilled orators. Those are not items he learned while cutting class.

The lack of education in schools is only an excuse up to age 18. The lack of problem solving, literacy, and other skills in ADULTS has no excuse. Why, as adults, have Americans not taken the opportunity to educate themselves? I live in rural America where lack of opportunity is clearly evident, yet the library is free and open to all. Thanks to open enrollment online classes, anyone has the opportunity to learn from anyone, anywhere. The reason is that they don't value education. The question is why? You can't blame a teacher for your lack of desire to learn once you have exited the educational system.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/14/opinion/granderson-dumb-america/index.html?hpt=hp_t4 Here is another story on the same topic. My grandfather used to say, "The problem with the government is that it is representative of the people." I'd have to agree.

I was thinking of putting a sign on my door for the trick-or-treaters that read, "Due to the Government Shut-Down this house has no candy," but I think this will work better.

KDD: We keep a bowl of fruit on the table too. (Whatever is in season, plus they scavenge out of the garden.) I've always figured that if you aren't hungry enough to eat an apple you aren't hungry. My boys' tell is rhubarb; if they are digging into the rhubarb they are hungry enough to eat anything. Still, unless you have a kid with diabetes or something that requires them to eat on a schedule, they can go without the snacks. If a kid is hungry it's the parents job to feed them before or after then den meeting.

We had one family move away, but we still allow their boys to come on High Adventure Trips with us. Last Spring we took both boys with us to the Grand Canyon. It was like a reunion for the boys because they don't get to see each other much now that they are in different states. Next March we will be meeting their new troop and are planning to stop and let the boys have some activities together while headed to our Backpacking Trip in the Red Woods. Last summer we had one boy that couldn't attend camp with us because of family commitments. We arranged for him to attend with another troop in a different week. The lad had such a good time with the other troop that he is going to go to camp with them again next year. I think it's a good idea for the kids to be exposed to others units/ways of doing things. It also limits rivalry, which we have far to much of in our district.

If it's not on the inspection sheet they get to go commando--just ask my boys. Of course my oldest also asked a district official why he couldn't take a skinny dipping merit badge. Gotta love teen boys, can't live with them; can't turn them into newts!

BD: Have your boys do radio spots before Scouting for Food and announce that you will also be collecting old BS uniforms to be given to boys who can't afford a uniform. We collect several uniforms that way every year, all of which go into the uniform closet. Sometimes we get really old stuff (a lot from the 1960's/1970's) and once got a uniform from the 1930's. We put the older uniforms in display cases in the Scout Room so the boys can see how the uniforms have changed over the decades. One of my boys scored a pair of Knee High socks that must have been from the 1980's that he insisted on wearing with his scout shorts all summer.

BD: We don't charge for tree removal; its by donation. Some folks only give us $5 to haul away their tree, others have given $30. The average is about $10/tree. One apartment of young kids (18 to 20'ish) paid the boys with a bag of Hershey Kisses; I think that was their favorite house that year. LOL As I mentioned before, we do radio spots so people call in and schedule a day for pick-up, but as we are driving out if they boys spot any tree in a yard, ect. we stop and send a boy to the door to let them know we are removing trees for a donation. That's actually how we make the most money, just sending a kid to the door.

I will have to agree with you about politicians railing against those "over educated Ivy League intellectuals". I've listened to and read some of George Bush's gubernatorial addresses and they were far better than any of his speeches as president; they were clear, concise, and coherent. After he was elected as President and started pandering to the NASCAR crowd and rallying against intellectuals his speech changed so dramatically that I wondered (and still wonder) if he wasn't suffering from some form of Alzheimer's or dementia. If you watch movies from the 1940's there are lots of mentions of "professor" and science/education is portrayed in a much better light than it is in anything I've seen recently.

My favorite quote by George Bush is "I think I got a B in econ 101, but I get an A in keep taxes low." (And hurtling us toward a huge recession deficit. Of course he wouldn't have known that would have been the results of his tax cuts unless he went on to take econ 201.)

Um . . . The article I posted was about adults (up to age 65) not students. I beginning to wonder if this isn't an example of why adults are scoring below international averages in the US.

The link you posted talks about student scores, not adult scores. Also most of it's findings state that students in economically depressed areas score lower than students living in wealthy areas ( which again warrants a big "DUH."). The author states that if you compare students from wealthy areas they "score just as well as" the international averages of other countries . . . Unfortunately, we can't simply ignore the poor just because we don't like the test results--they live & work here too.

You've just discovered why nearly 40% of children in America are overweight or obese. Kids don't need to eat every hour, on the hour, yet society keeps feeding them. Snacks isn't really about providing food anymore, it's about competition among the parents, each trying to outdo the previous parent. Don't allow snacks at den meetings, it takes time out of the program &/or makes for longer meetings. If parents insist on feeding their child hourly, they'll have to do it in the car on their own time.

Then they're already several decades out of date Arguing that you use the inspection sheet and that's enough is not an argument against changes in uniform policy, since the inspection sheet you use now is different than the one that was used before it. The uniform inspection sheet already goes into minutiae like "the top button is never buttoned" and the insignia guide already goes into the over/under neckerchief question. It already addresses personal issues like combed hair. So if your vaunted inspection sheet already addresses minutiae, then you don't have a leg to stand on in using it to argue against tucked in shirts. What this boils down to is innate differences between how the sexes operate. Men gravitate toward abstract notions of justice (policies that apply equally across the board) while women focus on individual circumstance (but I'm a special snowflake). BSA could hire Michael Kors to design the best darn female uniform shirt on the planet and if he designed it to be tucked, there would be many women who still wouldn't tuck it, and if he designed it to be untucked, there would be many who would tuck it anyway. On top of this psychological difference you add in post-modern fluff like "I want to feel beautiful and confident" and "my body is so strange that I need a custom uniform" and there's your herd of cats. The most annoying patch policeman I know manages to annoy someone in our troop at least once a month, and I can't imagine even him bothering a woman under the special circumstances they keep bringing up because that's exactly what they are, special circumstances and people recognize/understand that. The other 99.99% of the time, a policy is a policy. And, like you said, they're the ones that asked. I guess I'm missing something. There are different uniforms for women? Our Scout store only carries one type of uniform, listed by waste size. Women here how have hips just wear a belt, but everyone is in the same uniform and I our troop at least everyone's shirt is tucked in, be it worn by a man, woman, or child.

Shirts tucked is a good thing, we always require that. And yes sometimes they are tucked into athletic shorts and look completely stupid; we take that in stride. Most of the boys in our troop are involved in some form of sport, so if they are arriving straight from practice or a game, we're just happy they came. Heck one boy arrived still wearing his shin-guards. The thing to remember is tucking the shirt in (even into athletic shorts) is about getting the boys into the habit of tucking the shirt in. Once it's automatic you don't have to nag them for not tucking at camp or other times when a full uniform is required.

I only read your opening post and was responding to that. You don't have to pay dues to any troop that you are not a member of, so it shouldn't be to expensive. I'd run from any troop that wants dues before you've become committed. Let your current troop know you are shopping; re-charter isn't due until December so dues can be put on until then. If they won't take maybe for an answer ask yourself, "Do you really want to stay in a group that won't work with you?"

I Agree with KDD, but why sell anything? Selling crap that nobody wants is a waste of the boys time and doesn't fit at all with "a scout is thrifty." We offer a Christmas tree removal service. It pays 100 times better than popcorn. We have the boys do radio spots after Christmas and all anyone has to do is give us a call and we arrange to come haul the tree away to be chipped. Some of the elderly and disabled in the area love the service and we can even send the boys to help them get the tree out of the stand. (Most people already have it out by the curve for us.) Another troop obtains a permit from the FS to cut Christmas trees and sells them; they make out far better than we do, bu this way we aren't direct competitors. Yet another troop makes their money by hosting a giant spaghetti dinner every February. If you get away from the dreaded popcorn, you will make much more money because 70% won't be guaranteed to leave the troop.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-adults-score-below-average-worldwide-test This lovely piece links education to national economic performance. (I suppose that warrants a big "DUH.") I think part of the problem is that our culture no longer values education. Kids don't pay attention in school because their parents don't expect them too and the attitude at home is that school is unnecessary. The same kids who are disruptive in school will sit perfectly still in my Hunters Education class, because hunting is something the family values and the kid won't be able to hunt if they don't pass. In my area it seems that there is a greater value placed on getting one's hunting liscance than there is on getting a diploma, though in the long run the diploma (and hopefully some post-secondary training) will prove to be more beneficial in the long run. Any thoughts on how this happened? What was the turning point when American's decided that education was unimportant? How can we combat this thinking and get children and adults to see education as necessary?

Why are you limiting your options to just two troops? With my oldest we made the mistake of going from the cub unit that was the "feeder" for the troop to the troop by the same CO, because it was expected. It turned out to be a huge mistake. When the second son was a Weblo I made a point of taking on a troop visit to every unit in the area that allowed "outside" denominations. When we visited our first "other" troop the boys were so impressed by the improvement that they insisted this was "the one," but I told them they were going to make an informed decision and insisted that they would visit the rest and that we could still join that troop if that was their decision after visiting all the others. The boys had to visit several troops before they found the one they are currently in and it wasn't the first "other" troop we visited. I guess that you should look at it like shopping for a new house; you don't buy the first one you come across that is better than what you currently have. Take the time to make sure it's a good fit for you and the lads.