Quotes of the Week

Leadership is not about being soft or nice or purely inclusive or consensus building. The whole point is to make sure the right deicisions happen no matter how difficult or lpainful for the long term greatness of the institution and the achievement of its mission independent of consensus or popularity.

Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.

"It is not the critic that counts nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly...; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at his best knows the triumph of high achievement; and who at his worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
-Theodore Roosevelt

Meeting Reviews

September 15, 2008

This meeting went fairly well the primary focus was on orienteering. In our Troop currently we are going to have 4 nights of orienteering work with three being classroom sessions and the fourth being the field session with a course around town. The first night we worked on degrees and directions of a compass, and parts of a compass. it seems like that should not have taken the whole night but it did with the activities and games the leaders came up with for the night. After the regular meeting the PLC group meet for about 30 minutes to work on some leadership development issues. The focus for this night was communications. The reason why I choose this one first was because of the fact that it is one of the most basic skills a leader must master when taking on a serious leadership role in his Troop for the first time. This discussion went okay. In this topic we discussed the callout procedure for the Troop and chain of command. These sem too much like the military concepts but the truth is they are the foundations for having good communication.

September 22, 2008

This meeting was classroom session two of the Troops orienteering instruction. This time we had a review quiz game on degrees/ matching directions and parts of a compass. The majority of people remembered the majority of the information. A few struggled but everything went okay. After that the concept of taking a bearing and pacing was introduced. These are both critical concepts to be able to understand. This again took the whole meeting. The younger scouts especially this time around had a hard time get around the idea that percise degrees and percise bearings are important. It became very evident quickly who was good at be straight and who was bad at keeping a straight line. The leadership decided we will definitely have to spen another night on the concept of bearings and pacings before the field session. This night the leadership concept of the night was Be, Know, and Do. The second concept of the night was a acronym that I call stop-a. The letters stand for:

S- Stop
T- Think
O- Observe
P- Plan
A- Act

These two concepts were given to the leadership to think over the upcoming week. A discussion about one or both of these will occur this coming monday.

Yours in Scouting Service
Mark W
Junior Assistant Scoutmaster
Troop 1616