How much of their lives?

[Beavah 205]

Yah, in da parent thread nolesrule was talkin' about meetings and what percentages of a boy's life are spent in scoutin'. It sounded like a fun puzzle to share in a less serious thread.

 

Let's take an active troop and an active lad. 48 meetings a year at 90 minutes = 72 hours. Ten weekend 2-day campouts at 48 hours each = 480 hours. Summer camp for six days = 144 hours. PLC meetings for an hour once a month, plus a one-day planning conference/TLT = 24 hours. Four Courts of Honor = 8 hours. Say four merit badges earned outside of camp, 10-20 hours each, call it 60 total hours. Packing and unpacking for events, buyin' food, sewin' patches, planning activities or doin' POR roles... gotta figure 100 hours or so at a minimum. Add in a couple of days of fundraisin'.

 

Gets me to 904 hours out of 8760 in a year. About 10% of a boy's life. If yeh correct for sleep time of 8 hours per day so we only look at waking hours, I get 696 / 5840 or about 12%. Toss in a one-week high adventure trip with prep trips/meetings and we are up to 15 or 16%. When yeh consider some of da "very active" troops and da hyperactive scouts who are involved in OA and such, we creep up even higher.

 

Dat's a lot of time da kids are investing in our program, eh? My guess is an average troop dwarfs most other extracurriculars. Take a season of a sport. Three months worth of weekday practices for a couple of hours, plus a game a week get us about 4.5%. Seat time in school, not countin' homework, is around 21% includin' lunch. A very active lad in an active troop can probably be givin' as much time to scouting as school.

 

Any way we count it, da lads are givin' us a major investment of their time and energy, eh?

 

We should always remember to honor their investment by givin' 'em the best program we possibly can!

 

Beavah

[Lisabob 13]

Yeah and on rare occasions when a boy says no to an activity just because he needs a little down time from scouting, maybe we should be a little more understanding!

[nolesrule 61]

Beavah, those are some interesting numbers, and I can certainly remember when my life was like that. Certainly more toward the begining of scouting career when I was much more active. Course, my mom sewed my patches... please don't hold that against me.

 

For those hyperactive kids in addition to the usual OA weekends, chapter meetings and possibly LEC/LEB meetings, you can also throw in hours/days for a national jamboree (I went in 1989) or NOAC, but that's not typical even for most active scouts due to the limited number of spaces and costs involved.

 

I was in the International Baccalaureate Program in high school, and for those that aren't familiar, it's essentially the equivalent of taking 6 AP courses for the last 2 years of high school. The homework was severely overwhelming and impacted my scouting time. In addition, I got involved in my religious institution youth group as a VP for our chapter, also stealing time from scouting.

 

Not to bring that other thread into this, but I just wanted to clarify that I was referring to directly observable time by the person signing off the requirement (not including summer camp, which by the time I was 14 had nothing new to offer me except a couple merit badges and BSA Lifeguard, neither of which I was interested in, but that could be yet another spin-off thread).

[fleetfootedfox 10]

I read recently that the average person spends 3 years of their life sitting on the toilet. So, if we could cut that down then maybe we'd have more time for scouting.

 

Regarding sports, you are not taking into account that these days boys can play some sports all year round and some teams have multiple practices per week and multiple games with tournaments that require some travel. And some boys play on more than one team at a time in the same sport or different sports with overlapping seasons. And the select teams and school teams expect 100% attendance.

 

Music, dance, karate and other activities can be very time consuming too depending on how devoted the person is to the activity.