Were the daily patrol self-assessments a good thing?

[Eamonn 61]

 

Just wondering if the adults who have taken the 21st Century course found the daily patrol self-assessments worth while?

 

Have you found a use for this in what you do with your unit/district/ council?

Eamonn.

[John-in-KC 311]

With the exception of a 20 year old wet behind the ears college junior who couldn't find his common sense with a map, a Magellan GPS, and a navigator on a good day (in other words, he'd have yet to have his first real AW, S@@@ moment in life) ...

 

NO.

 

Useless.

 

Every member of my patrol had 20+ years in the workforce, most of us in professional positions. We normed real quickly (we want to cooperate and graduate, we want to have our own fun in doing this), and with the exception of Bozo the Munificent (let me tell you what I really think...), we didn't storm.

 

The twerp had the unmitigated gall to tell us that we needed to think of this as 11 year olds again. BULL **** . Been there, done that, and been through Basic Training to boot. The last thing our patrol needed was someone trying to play the time pressure game on us, as as substitute for "not having had the opportunity to learn new skills" yet. Yeah, we stormed, on him. We humiliated the sonofagun. He proved worthless in weekend 2 (forgot the stuff he had promised to deliver as his share of the campout, fortunately, we all had "something" in our packs for such an emergency)... and he was the one person in our course who never finished his ticket.

 

No, the self-assessments were useless. They came at an hour of the day when we were naturally tired, and the best thing which would have helped us was another 30 minutes of sleep. They don't pass the so-what, who cares test.

 

Oh, yeah: We told our Course Director, and the SE of the host Council, as well...

 

Next.(This message has been edited by John-in-KC)(This message has been edited by John-in-KC)

[ghermanno 11]

Eamonn,

 

Personnaly, I did not. Like John, most of my Patrol had experienced leaders except for one gntleman with one year Tiger Cub experience. He still did not know the CS program very well and was lost in BS/Venture.

 

Personnaly, I wish I had attended the OLD WB course. I had GREAT respect for the graduates as they KNEW their program. Some new WB people do not even know their position that well, never mind the program.

 

I will step off the soapbox now with this: If I wanted a "Covey" type management course, I would have attended it. I wanted a top level Scouting Skills course but got Covey type. Oh well.

 

YiS,

 

Rick

[gcnphkr 11]

Daily self-assessments? What are those?

 

For the most part they went like this:

 

PL, "How are we doing?"

 

Patrol, "Doing good."

 

Okay, it was a bit different on day 2. About as close as we came to storming. Day 1, people had been tentative and holding back. By day 2 this had stopped and there was some jocking for who was top dog, regardless of who was the PL for the day. We had a bit of a discussion about that. We might not have had the talk if it had not been for the self-assessment. No telling what the result would have been, but it could have made day 3 very long.

 

[John-in-KC 311]

As I said, we were professional enough to recognize the fickle finger of fate for PL each day, and our collective decision was "the stuckee of the day deserves our support and friendship."

 

Wisdom = Experience gained with tears, so said my shop instructor and HR teacher in Jr High 40 years ago. Yeah, he was right, we'd all been there, and our collective decision was we wanted to have FUN.

 

You should have seen our menu for weekend 2. WE ATE GOOD!

 

We divvied our labor up for the patrol project. Couple guys had good carpentry skills, one had access to a plotter, one was great at research, and one was a speechwriter. So, we put it all together, and around the crackerbarrel, finished the job.(This message has been edited by John-in-KC)