Skills
Well-Wishes for a Great Spring Camporee 2018!
Best of luck to all attending and volunteering at the North Star District Spring Camporee this weekend. We know you will do Willie proud with your skills in Emergency Preparedness. Can’t wait to hear the tales of survival!
Roundtable – April 2018 Flyers
Please see links below for exciting camping and training opportunities – these are roughly in date order:
National Youth Leadership Training (several dates)
Wood Badge (Adult Leadership training) (several dates)
2018 Voyageur Canoe Training (several dates)
Indianapolis Indians game and Campout at Victory Field (May 11)
Cub Scout Fishing Derby at Camp Kikthawenund (May 12)
Leave No Trace Master Education Course 2018 (Aug 17-19 and Sep 13-16)
Boy Scouts Brickyard 400 Weekend Campout (Sept. 8 – 9)
Citizenship in the Nation MB Workshop (several dates)
District Spring Camporee: We need YOU!
From District Commissioner Stephen Heath, District Program Chair Mark Pishon and District Camporee Chairman Rick Aker:
CALLING ALL NORTH STAR TROOPS:
Show your Scout pride, carry your troop flag as you attend this year’s Spring Camporee!
The North Star District Spring Camporee will be held April 20 – 22, 2018 at the Indiana School for the Blind, 7725 N College Ave, Indianapolis, IN.
Join us for the peer camaraderie and recognition with your fellow District Scouts and Scouters. We’re calling on every unit to come and be counted among the best scouts and scouters in Crossroads of America council.
This year’s theme is WILLIE’S SOUND THE SIRENS – ARE YOU PREPARED?
Scouts will be working on Emergency Preparedness and the importance of planning for the unexpected, as well as many key survival skills.
The North Star District also invites all North Star Webelos for the day on Saturday April 21, 2018. Come join us, Webelos!
Pre-registration for all Scouts, Webelos and Adults is required at this link: 2018 North Star Spring Camporee.
Looking forward to an amazing adventure at the District Spring Camporee, don’t miss it!
District SPRING CAMPOREE Leader’s Guide and prep meeting 3/25!
To all North Star Units – please see the 2018 Spring Camporee Leaders Guide v2 (<== linked here!) for our Spring Camporee this year. Rick Aker (North Star District Camporee Chair) is planning on having another Camporee meeting this Sunday, March 25; email and/or blog post to follow with more information.
If you have any questions, Rick’s contact information is in the leader guide.
Looking forward to seeing everyone at our Spring Camporee!!
Female Athletes’ Emotional Development in College
In the Washington Post, from last year that I have been meaning to write about, a fascinating article about emotional isssues that kids in college are facing. The focus of the article that the title suggest the emphasis is on women’s college sports. The content is far broader, even though the persons interviewed are women’s college coaches and affiliate personnel.
One strong passage caught my eye.
Talk to coaches, and they will tell you they believe their players are harder to teach, and to reach, and that disciplining is beginning to feel professionally dangerous. Not even U-Conn.’s virtuoso coach, Geno Auriemma, is immune to this feeling, about which he delivered a soliloquy at the Final Four.
“Recruiting enthusiastic kids is harder than it’s ever been,” he said. “. . . They haven’t even figured out which foot to use as a pivot foot and they’re going to act like they’re really good players. You see it all the time.”
Some of the aspects emphasized apply equally well to scouters working with scouts.
It doesn’t take a social psychologist to perceive that at least some of today’s coach-player strain results from the misunderstanding of what the job of a coach is, and how it’s different from that of a parent. This is a distinction that admittedly can get murky. The coach-player relationship has odd complexities and semi-intimacies, yet a critical distance too. It’s not like any other bond or power structure. Parents may seek to smooth a path, but coaches have to point out the hard road to be traversed, and it’s not their job to find the shortcuts. Coaches can’t afford to feel sorry for players; they are there to stop them from feeling sorry for themselves.
Coaches are not substitute parents; they’re the people parents send their children to for a strange alchemical balance of toughening yet safekeeping, dream facilitating yet discipline and reality check. The vast majority of what a coach teaches is not how to succeed but how to shoulder unwanted responsibility and deal with unfairness and diminished role playing, because without those acceptances success is impossible.
Here is a key conclusion.
The bottom line is that coaches have a truly delicate job ahead of them with iGens. They must find a way to establish themselves as firm allies of players who are more easily wounded than ever before yet demand they earn praise through genuine accomplishment.
From this article we can draw a couple key conclusions:
- In our role as scouters, we can help prepare our scouts, boys and girls, for their college experience. We can teach them to deal with “unwanted responsibility” such as cleaning up after dinner or cleaning the latrine and with “unfairness” such as being assigned camp tasks too many times when others have not had their rotation.
- We can be the “toughening yet safekeeping, dream facilitating yet discipline and reality check” that is parents to provide for their own kids.
- We can be “firm allies” of scouts “who are more easily wounded than ever before yet demand they earn praise through genuine accomplishiment” such as rank advancement, BSA Life Guard training, mile swim patch, or high adventure.
How to Use Adult Leadership on your Resumé
So you were recruited to serve as an adult leader for “one hour per week.” Several years later you are amazed by not only what your scouts have learned but what you have learned, too. Do you feel like you have grown as a leader? Have you learned personnel management skills? Project management skills? Adaptation to adversity? Have you taken leadership training courses, such as Den Leader Specific Training or Wood Badge?
When you look at your resume for your next job application, have you included your scouting leadership positions like you would any other job? Why not?
Prospective employers want to see applicants that have challenged themselves and learned along the way. They want to see applicants that have learned lessons from failure, especially on someone else’s dime.
When you go back to your resume, consider the following topics for inclusion on your resume:
- Job description
- Risk management
- Team leadership and delegation
- Problems solved
- Leadership training and mentoring
But, don’t look at this only as a way to boost your resume. Look at resume enhancement as a means of recruiting new volunteers. When you talk to scout parents about their life experiences on campouts or during activity breaks, ask them what they do for a living and what their dreams for the future are. If they want to move up into management, suggest that scouting teaches those skills and is a way to get experience. Scouting is as much an experimental lab for adults as it is for scouts.
So look for scout parents who want to grow and recruit them based on what it can do for their careers (never mind networking with scouters who are extremely successful in their professional pursuits.
So make sure you know your scout parents’ resumes. It will work wonders for you.
The Shockingly Simple Way to Stop Helicopter Parenting – Let Grow
Scouters are some of the few parents in schools these days that push kids to learn independence. Lenore Skenazy, a mother of two boy scouts, has been pushing for schools to change the message sent home about how children should be raised. The results are dramatic and eye-opening.
It is so profound, that she has moved from just writing about the problem at Free Range Kids to developing a curriculum at Let Grow. It comes down to dealing with the problem of “helicopter parenting” that is so damaging to children.
We at Council should be looking at this as a way to get into schools. What happens if a bunch of scouters decide not to push to put a scout unit in the school, but instead approach the school principle or the school board one-on-one for coffee then as a group at school board meeting in uniform; the message is “we love scouting, but we encourage independent growth of citizens whether in scouting or through other programs.” The school leaders may be resistant. Yet, what happens if we can replicate Lenore Skenazy’s success with simple Let Grow curricula? Do we gain credibility?
Perception and Adaptation
In some of my reading on other subjects, I ran across some scientific research from the mid-1800’s that I think is fascinating in its potential application to scouting. I am going to go down some complicated paths in this series of articles, so allow me to set the context first.
The View from the Eagle Board
For those of you who have sat on an Eagle Board of Review more than once, you likely can confirm that the following scenario is common.
A 17-year old in full dress scout uniform walks in the door. He is often clean shaven (although beards are increasingly common). He walks erect even if slightly nervous about what he is walking into. He firmly shakes hands with each member of the Board of Review. He answers questions about his Eagle project in great detail. He has pride in his accomplishments. He looks the part of an Eagle Scout already.
As he sits through the Board, the Board members ask the Eagle candidate to reflect on his beginnings in scouting and his growth. The candidate describes his first campout in the rain. He reflects on his anguish and discomfort. He laughs about how those deprivations are nothing compared to the later discomforts of camping in the snow of winter amidst the howling winds. He reflects on what he learned about overcoming obstacles, adapting, and accepting his circumstances.
He has learned that slight discomforts at home are nothing compared to facing the elements and the discomforts Mother Nature offers.
In my role as District Commissioner, the BSA charges me with the primary mission of encouraging Best Practices in our units. In other words, I am responsible for being able to explain to leaders why BSA policies are in the best interest of the unit, its leaders, and its scouts. That does not mean that I agree with each and every policy, but it does mean that I should be able to articulate the rationale in the light most favorable to the BSA’s intent.
For example, I should be able to articulate why units that camp the most are the more successful; why units that allow the boys to experiment with the patrol method with guidance and boundaries from the scoutmaster corps are more successful than units where adult leaders run the program; or why units with Senior Patrol Leaders who work the Patrol Leader Council are more successful than units where Senior Patrol Leaders acts as the patrol-leader-of-all. Read the rest of this entry »
Training for New Year
As we bring in a new year, all scout leaders should have a resolution to become trained in their new positions.
University of Scouting is coming up in less than 2 weeks. This is a great opportunity to get Outdoor Leadership Training for Scouts (PB109) or Webelos. It will take the whole session of classes, but it will be done. BALOO for Cub Scouts is PC103.
New District Committee members should plan on taking the District Committee Training at University of Scouting. (PG112) This is only half of the required course. We may elect to offer both parts at Camporee, too, but we would prefer to offer other training if at possible.
Chartered Organization Representative Training is available. (MG121) There are also course for the unique characteristics in different denominations of churches (MG123-126).
Take a look at all the offerings. Look at your unit’s needs and encourage your adults and Den Chiefs to get trained at University of Scouting.
We are also considering what classes to offer at the Winter Camporee. If you have certain preferences, please contact District Commissioner Jeff Heck with your thoughts.
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