By this time next week, I will be out in the woods with the guys. No internet. No TV. No news. Night will be dark with no electricity and morning will arrive early with the calling of birds. I will miss my comfortable futon and worry about my house plants but... in the end... it will all be worth while.
As with every year, my job will be teaching woodcarving and leatherworking merit badges and the nature requirements for the first class trail. The Scouts who take my classes will be doing their own work. What they take home at the end will be evidence of the time and effort they have put in.
Not long ago, I sat in a Board of Review for a Scout going for the rank of Eagle. I happened to notice on his form that he had earned the woodcarving merit badge and asked him what he had made. His reply was that he didn't remember. Huh? That badge requires that you carve one object in the round and one in low relief. Looking again at the dates listed, I found he had taken this class the summer before at a Scout camp. Then, checking his list of Merit badges, I saw that the same date, he had "earned" a total of eight badges and asking further, discovered he knew little of any of those subjects. I can not blame the Scout but I DO blame those who were "teaching" the courses.
Last summer I shared my craft area with a Scouter who was teaching insect study. I am always interested in nature and have taught that badge myself to a boy who now has a PHD in entomology. I looked up the requirements and see they have changed greatly from those days. I recall that Scout had to collect and mount a large number of bugs, I recall the stories of his quests and the process by which he learned to preserve his mounts. I remember his passion for bugs and seeing him stop an activity he was doing to help a fellow younger Scout learn about a critter he had found.
I was asked by the counsellor for ideas where she could get an insect for the Scouts to raise from larvae to adult. Well, I raise silk worms but in less than a week, that would not be possible in that length of time nor would a swallowtail butterfly work as it pupates over the winter. I went down to the drainage ditch and fished out some mosquito wigglers and asked if they would do and told her where the boys could go to collect some. However, in the end, the boys did nothing but look at those I had gathered and wait for them to become adults. Granted, there is not a lot of care needed to "raise" a mosquito but what might have been a good learning opportunity was passed over and signed off.
More and more I see leaders who do all the research and deliver it to a bored class in lecture form and sign off the blue cards that the scout has completed the requirements. Then I think of my own sons. The boy who took his environmental MB pamphlet to his HS Science teacher saying some of those requirements might be more fun to do than what the teacher was planning. That boy is now an environmental scientist. Or the other son who worked out a plan, listed his goals and priorities, and now is running his own business.
I owe a great debt of gratitude for what Scouting did for my sons and I hope my classes will do the same for the youth I work with. They will at least learn to use a knife safely without depending on Kevlar gloves. They will have no need for a kit but know how to plan a project and pull it off. They will go out into nature and use their own observation skills to identify plants and trees and birds and animals. They will tell me, not the other way around, and those skills will go home with them and serve them all their lives. I'll bet, too, when they sit for their next BOR, they will remember what it was they made for the badge.
