Author: Frank

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Ever try to cook an avocado?

One of the things I like to do in my spare time that isn’t taken up by Scouting is to cook. The Food Network has a lot of shows that I enjoy watching, and one of them is Worst Cooks in America. In this series,  two professional chefs each adopt a team of highly inept home cooks and work with them through the episodes to hone their skills to the point where they can cook a restaurant-quality meal by the end of the series.

The chefs teach cooking skills to their “recruits,” as they are called, by demonstrating how to prepare various dishes, explaining what they are doing along the way. They then turn the recruits loose in the kitchen to either replicate the dish they were shown, or ask them to prepare something similar. While they are cooking, the professionals watch over their trainees, giving them pointers along the way. Eventually, the amateur cooks develop enough skills that the pros can watch from the sidelines without having to interact.

Does this sound familiar? Continue reading “Ever try to cook an avocado?”

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So where does camping fit in?

Like the Scouts of nearly every troop, our boys recite the Scout Oath and Scout Law at the beginning of troop meetings.

How often do they – or you – stop to ponder what those words mean?

They are the essence of our movement, reduced to forty words in the Oath and twelve points of the Law: Duty to God and country. Help others. Be trustworthy, helpful, courteous, reverent… you know these things.

What do Boy Scouts do, mostly, though? They hold meetings and they go camping. That makes up, I’d say, 80 percent of their time and efforts. Continue reading “So where does camping fit in?”

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Order in the troop! Order in the troop!

You’ve heard the sayings.

Order is Heaven’s first law. (Alexander Pope)

Good order is the foundation of all things. (Edmund Burke)

Order is power. (Henri Frederic Amiel)

Henry Miller also had something to say about order:

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.

Clarke Green recently posted an article on his blog ScoutmasterCG titled The Jedi Scoutmaster in which he discusses the issue of boy behavior, our perception of it, and how to handle it in our troops. Continue reading “Order in the troop! Order in the troop!”

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Abolish “death by meeting”!

A while back I posted a series of articles on making your committee meetings more effective. These were aimed at the committee chair or meeting facilitator to help improve the meeting experience for everyone concerned.

Harvard Business Review had a short “management tip” article recently on ways for participants to, as they put it, save the meeting that’s going nowhere. It’s a very short article but it can get you to thinking, especially if you’re stuck in such a meeting.

My solution to these issues  is prevention, and that lies in the hands of the committee chair: Continue reading “Abolish “death by meeting”!”

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“So, what is it that you do?”

At a recent troop meeting we were welcoming a parent of a boy new to Scouting and discussing how the troop and Boy Scouts all works, and in the process of explaining which committee member takes care of dues, or membership, he asked me what my position was, and what I do in the troop.

This kind of took me aback, because most people in Scouting are familiar with the committee chair’s role, or at least knows what functions he or she performs. I blurted out “well, I’m kind of like the CEO of the troop,” and while I felt at the time that it was an OK answer, later I thought that it didn’t really describe what the committee chair does. Continue reading ““So, what is it that you do?””