.40AET

9 hours ago, RememberSchiff said:

I'm confused. Is this just a misunderstanding?

Yes Sir. I failed to use quotes when citing a news source. @CalicoPennsent me a nice note last night. The sun is shining brightly on the new fallen snow this morning and I have a new perspective. I generally stay out of politics and accidentally followed a feed into the forum. 

1 hour ago, CalicoPenn said:

Everytown for Gun Safety is quite clear on what they consider the parameters to be to call something a school shooting - you can disagree if you want but its rather disingenuous to claim they are being dishonest just because the numbers they are reporting which match their criteria doesn't meet yours or someone else's idea of what a school shooting means.

We can have honest differences of opinion without calling other people dishonest

 

My apologies. The bottom of the quote was from a news feed, not me. I am not calling them dishonest. Again, I'm sorry and will stay out of this. Today appears to be a bad day. I'm logging off. Best of luck to you and everyone else.

6 hours ago, scoutldr said:

You were surprised because it isn't true.  Fake news.

Crap, I fell for it. After some searching, it seems as though there have been 6.

Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun-control advocacy group responsible for spreading this bogus statistic, should be ashamed of its blatant dishonesty.

I was surprised to hear that this was the 18th school shooting of the year. (6 weeks into the new year)

9 hours ago, Back Pack said:

Actually it’s 50% of ballots cast. So if you have 51 scouts show and only 40 submit ballots your magic number is 21. So it’s not scouts in the room but ballots cast. 

Thank you for the correction 

There's more to the vote than the requirement of having 50% of the Troop present at the election. In order to be selected, a Scout needs to get 50% of the total number who are in the room voting. We have a big troop and both parts make it hard to send more than one or two scouts a year. 

102 scouts in the Troop. Must have 51 scouts in the room for the election. A Scout who is selected needs 26 votes to be selected. 

There's nothing more frustrating than seeing 6 of your finest Scouts get 22 or 23 votes. 

5 hours ago, HelpfulTracks said:

We have a nice solution for maintaining that knowledge/history/esprit de corp etc. Our "Committee" is made up of a large number former course directors.  They are not official staff, but they are part of our Wood Badge family and add so much to our courses. They are great as resources for participants, but even more so for the staff. They are our wise sages, advisers, storytellers, song-masters and cheerleaders.

That’s awesome. Our committee is made up mostly of parents who believe in MB colleges and don’t “do” much.

After reading for months on this site, I asked for 2 books for Christmas. These are the North Star to which my compass points. My wife gave them a special place on the fireplace mantle. 

5 minutes ago, ItsBrian said:

I’ve never heard of switching a SPL every time and making a new Patrol every time. I personally don’t like that.

The “new bright ASM” is just saying how it’s suppose or usually happens. There’s suppose to be “natural” patrols, but then for a small troop you may need to combine on  trips. There usually are terms for leadership. Troops do it all different ways, I’ve seen every 6 months, 12 months, and so on. 

How does your troop have PLCs? How do they run meetings? Who plans the meetings if there is no PLC? How do you have a PLC with new leadership every camping trip? I feel like the way your Troop is doing it must be a headache.

I don't like it either, and I've been busy looking for a new way. 

I'm excited to have a bright new ASM, he brings a new perspective to the Troop. We have been looking at things the same way for years and he brought a big idea right away. We have natural patrols, they just don't travel together. We have 11 patrols and if 3 Scouts from each patrol sign up for a trip, they can't function on a campout as a natural patrol. Thus, the SPL moves them into patrols for the campout. 

I didn't say that we don't have a PLC. 

For as long as I can remember in our Troop, the Scouts have never traveled as "Natural Patrols". An SPL is selected for each trip to offer an introduction to leadership for any Scout. The Scouts who signed up to be Cooks are spread out across each of the Patrols. The SPL and his 2 ASPL's will shuffle all of the Scouts into patrols for 6-8. This has worked and the Scouts haven't come up with a better way. We do the same thing with Summer Camp so that the SPL can assign camp and dining hall duties to each patrol. It's worked fine in camp as well. 

Last weekend I was talking about this with a one of our bright new ASM's. He suggested keeping the natural patrols intact as much as possible and simply combining 2 patrol fragments to make one patrol for the trip. I thought that this was a great idea and I asked him to propose it the PCL at the next meeting. I'm hoping that this is another small step towards the pinnacle of scouting. 

So we're going to Checzoslovakia?

All of the adventures are different. We did the Bahama's trip last spring and snorkeled 4 or 5 reefs while sailing all over the Abacos Islands. Like Quazse mentioned, you don't have to be a great swimmer to go. They provided life vests, mask, snorkel and fins. We had 2 adults who didn't really swim and after the first reef, they were the first to be suited up and ready to go. 

We fished off the back of the catamaran all day and night. Most of the fishing was catch and release, but we kept the big ones. We got rid of the barracuda, he looked to mean to eat.

The Captain took us to an area where we dove for conch and brought 5 back in for dinner. Great stuff!! 

Sailing is as much of an adventure as drinking coffee while watching the sunrise over the low lying islands. 

Good times!

27 minutes ago, walk in the woods said:

Make sure your wording is clear and you don't get a squirrel cook-off in iron :).  It's takes a lot of stew to cover the taste of squirrel.  Just sayin.

I felt that sharing some good stuff was necessary since I've already been on Amazon looking for squirrel door stops. 

The pebble of service tossed into the sea of life....

Congratulations!

I read this last night and loved it! We do an Iron Chef competition between the patrols every year and it's a big hit. The PLC decides on a theme for this year and the Scouts compete for the best dish. Bacon was a theme once that was a huge hit. Who would have thought broccoli cooked in bacon fat would be so darn good.

We have a Chile specific Iron Chef every so often. Getting the stoves out to cook gives all of the boys an opportunity to use a lightweight stove and check the requirement off during the event. 

13 minutes ago, Col. Flagg said:

And yes, I think they will use all the tools at their disposal to further water down the program to make it what THEY want.

Completely agree. Parents pushing their own personal agenda to make the Troop tailor the program to suit their vision (NOT the troop vision) is a daily problem. 

When my oldest Scout was young this happened to him often on campouts. As he got older, he and his friends got tighter and they didn't spend much time with the younger scouts. It happens with age and they need some time by themselves. I try to remind my wife that you won't always be there to pick all of the pebbles off of the road of life for our boys. Scouts have been the best thing for both of them because they can grow up, make mistakes, and learn from their mistakes without an adult telling them what they are about to do wrong. 

3 hours ago, qwazse said:

Wait a minute! You are telling me that this scout did nothing in the way of service in all of 2017? What kind of scout does no service approvable by an SM for an entire year? A one-minute good turn per day would net 6 hours in 12 months!

I'm hoping you mistyped the year of service. If this was a service half-day that the scout did in October, he was awarded Tenderfoot in November, and mastered his Second Class skills in December, I'd count what you have on the books.

If not, I'd look a little more deeply as to what the scout's been doing and see if there were contributions that really would have counted, but the boy just didn't think to keep track of them. The reason that so few hours of service are asked for is that the general expectation is that these ranks don't take a lot of time.

<insert standard rant about the general moral depravity of counting service hours>

1

Not a typo. As much as all of the Adults think that we have a very high functioning troop, when you get down to a granular level, there are a lot of things that need to be fixed. When I took over, last month, we had 22 first year Scouts that had not earned the rank of Scout. Yes, 10 months, and no rank. 

Thank you all very much for your help

We have a Scout who requested a SMC for the rank of 2nd class. He has participated in one service project with 4 hours of service in an approved event in 2016. The Scout applied 1 hour of that project towards his rank of Tenderfoot. 

Tenderfoot: 7b. Participate in a total of one hour of service in one or more service projects approved by your Scoutmaster^[1]. Explain how your service to others relates to the Scout slogan and Scout motto.

Second Class: 8e. Participate in two hours of service through one or more service projects approved by your Scoutmaster.^[1] Explain how your service to others relates to the Scout Oath.

The questions is, does the Scout still have 3 hours left to apply as he desires? Or should a scout participate in one service project for each rank?

Play the video below for the parents. Someone will be touched by it and want more of the outdoors. 

Philmont- A love Letter

10 hours ago, Back Pack said:

Wow I’m glad I finished scouts before the adults took all the fun out of it. Reading this forum I see a ton of stuff my leaders protected us from. I hope they can continue to offer my troop the fun I experienced. But if bsa continues down this path I doubt there will be much left. 

It is sad indeed. While I am not an OA member, I've seen some outstanding OA Tap outs. They were very respectful and awesome to watch. Closing campfire at our favorite summer camp was run by the OA. I'll be really sad if that changes this summer.

I asked for the 1938 vol 1&2 for a gift from my Scouts. I thoroughly enjoy reading them and taking notes. We will be getting back to the basics. The Scouts will also be learning who GBB was and his impact on scouting. The books feel like a time machine.

Great reading!

We have the same discussions. I'm having to deal with parents pushing the MB Colleges. They think that it's the best way to earn MBs. I asked my son if he would like to go so that I could see for myself what MB College was all about. He said that he would rather take MB's at Summer Camp with his buddies. 

On 1/11/2018 at 10:17 PM, BobWhiteVA said:

Some new info from TroopWebHost:

”

TroopWebHost will support the ability to transfer advancement data to the new Scoutbook Lite program.

The BSA has confirmed that Scoutbook Lite will provide the ability to upload advancement information from a CSV file, similar to the Internet Advancement upload function.   TroopWebHost will be able to produce a file in the required format.

We are in direct communication with the BSA IT group and expect to receive detailed specifications in plenty of time to allow our customers to make a smooth transition.”

Good News!!! Thanks for the update. One of the many great features in TroopWebHost is that the Scouts can login to their account and see where they are in their own advancement. They can also print a Scouting History Report which gives them a summary of everything they have completed. This has taken some of the work load off of our Advancement Chair. 

Thank you very much for posting the video.