Five Things I Learned From the Boy Scouts - Foster Enthusiasm

All the other suggestions I had are work. Planing ahead, deciding what to wear, rejiggering your organization, and, perhaps most especially, getting kids to accept responsibility are all going to take sustained adult effort. My last observation is what makes it all worth while: foster enthusiasm.

I am often amazed at how regularly I have groups (and not just the students) that are honestly bored and disinterested in all the things Washington, DC has to offer. I get not wanting to travel or visit new places. I don’t understand shelling out a lot of money, including a fair amount for my personal services, when you don’t want to do be there. There’s a fair number of activities I have no desire to do, that’s why I don’t pay money for them!

Now my Scout group from this week had an easy time of it. They were off to an event only held every four years, the National Boy Scout Jamboree. It was something they had planned for years, and could barely contain their enthusiasm. Frankly, our little jaunt through Philly and DC was, at best, an amusing side show on the way to the big event.

Teachers bringing school kids face a different challenge. In many ways, this is simply an extension of school, an setting that doesn’t always help in encouraging unbridled enthusiasm. For understandable reasons, there is a direct relationship between the distance traveled and the enthusiasm shown. Kids from say, south Jersey may have been to DC several times before and are resigned to being dragged around sights they have already seen. Groups that fly in from the west coast have a much greater sense of adventure.

So what can we do about getting spirits up?

1. Be enthusiastic yourself: Eighth graders are tough to impress. They are cynical and sarcastic about everything, but without the life experiences to temper it. But it’s just a shell, put up to protect themselves. Show them that you are not afraid to be excited to see things. Trust me, it’s not like they’re going to think you’re anymore of a dork than they already do.
2. Have some fun: One reason I enjoy giving tours in New York compared to DC is that there is less pressure to be “educational”. Sure, they are still school trips, and I wax on eloquently about the City as a microcosm of the American Experience, blah, blah, etc. But, groups come to New York to have some fun, do some shopping, and give the kids a chance to let their hair down. Washington is often sold as the field trip equivalent of eating your vegetables, a facet that the monumental but ultimately sterile National Mall are reinforces. Throw some fun in your itinerary. Take in a ball game. Book a hotel that has a pool. Or even bring a frisbee and plan on down time on the Mall to liven things up a bit.
3. Crush the whinging: Complaining is contagious. Don’t allow it. Teach your kids how to properly bitch. “My feet hurt” - bad. “I have a blister on my foot, can we stop and put a band-aid on it?” - good. Most people just aren’t accustomed to being uncomfortable nowadays, why should our kids be any different. Encourage kids to suggest solutions and not just throw up complaints. Your tour guide will thank you, but more importantly, the other students will have a better time too.
4. Preparation:  Here we go again, with the planning ahead. Consider having class projects in the weeks before your trip help to sharpen the excitement. Some of the best tours I give are when kids can personally relate to what they’re seeing. One class made models of all the monuments. Every student couldn’t wait to see “their” memorial and tell their friends some of the nuances they learned about it.
5. Connect with DC: If your town has a connection to someone in DC, be it an student working as an on the Hill or a name on the Vietnam Wall, let your guide know early. I especially enjoy showing kids graves at Arlington that have a particular resonance, either a person they study in class or, more somberly in a few cases, a former student from their hometown recently killed in Iraq. Having a personal connection with the Nation’s Capital makes the visit that much more profound.

All in all, you can’t duplicate the excitement of 40,000 Scouts swinging by Washington on the way to the Jamboree, but you can do things on your own level to build enthusiasm for your annual trudge to Washington. You might find you have a better time yourself.

Five Things I Learned From the Boy Scouts - Uniforms Help

Uniforms? Really? You want kids on a school trip to DC to wear uniforms?

Well, not exactly, but hear me out. There’s an element of things to learn here. Let me kick off this discussion by noting that while I was once a Boy Scout, and spent a fair bit of time in the Navy, I’m not militant about kids walking around in uniforms all the time. Sure, as a parent of an elementary school kid I’m pretty enthusiastic for them, but that’s because I’m lazy; it’s just one less thing I have to think about in the morning. Uniforms are a great tool, and a time and money saver, but I’m cautious about them as well. I'm certainly not advocating for a militarization of our schools.

But there's some utility here for our tour groups. Obviously, Scouts come prepackaged in theirs, while the concept of uniforms would be foreign to many  school groups. Private schools wear them often, especially on picture day or if they have arraigned to meet a Congress-critter or something along those lines. But most groups do not come from an environment where uniforms are the norm.

More common, of course, is the group t-shirt, easily recognizable to any resident of Washington as a harbinger of spring in this area. As a tour guide, I’m in love with them. They make it easy for me to spot kids, especially as I, unlike their chaperones, don’t know them personally. When it’s time to gather up students, it serves to help the wayward ones (they see a bunch of red shirts in one spot, they wander over). I’ve even had it serve well as a safety feature. I once noticed an inappropriately older kid chatting up several of my 7th graders, easily identifiable due to his lack of proper shirt. And that he was five years older. Nothing too bad, but something a responsible adult should pay attention to. Fortunately, I was able to find one.

But there are downsides to the common t-shirt. Either you buy one for every day, or the smell factor on this bus rises. Plus, you’re going to look like a dork. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. As an adult, I’m comfortable with that, and frankly embrace it, but I remember being a teenager. I get not wanting to wallow in your dorkdom.

There are other options. One school I have breaks the days into colors. As long as you have a blue shirt on during “blue” day, you’re ok. It allows the kids a bit of individuality and still helps in the herding process. Hats also work well. They can be worn for multiple days and they’re not as stifling to those tender teenage psyches. Actually, they were the only way I could tell my Scouts apart this weekend, as kids NOT in uniform were the only ones standing out.

But uniforms proper have another advantage that, depending on your students you may want to consider. They raise the bar of student behavior. Knowing that you’re part of an identifiable institution reduces kids anonymity, which is the cloak that can enable all sorts of tomfoolery. I had a school group this year that required coat and ties for the boys and equivalent attire for the girls. Their behavior was impeccable, in no small part because they felt special. They were dressed up and held themselves to a higher standard.

Intertwined with this was the reaction we received at various venues. We were routinely complimented on our behavior, and part of me wondered how much of that was based on perception. They were well behaved, but so had been several of my other groups who did not receive that reception. In a town quick to label school groups as disruptive kids (with a good amount of reason), we stood out.

And I should note that this was a public school, not from an upscale area. These were kids not used to being treated with respect by strange adults. It was a very positive interaction for them. Requiring a dress code might be a consideration for you if you feel your students could use a little, shall we say, direction and focus.

Five Things I Learned From the Boy Scouts - Be Prepared!

Ok, this is an easy one. Nothing weird like making kids take care of their own. No fancy jargon or buzz words. Just the tried and true Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared.

Preparation is biggest single thing a group to do to make their visit to Washington positive. I’ll be exploring how to prepare for school groups in greater detail in the next few weeks, so let me focus today on a few simple items the Boy Scouts (and many of my “normal” groups) handled particularly well this weekend:

1. Water - With the recent heat waves, everyone who works outside, much less with kids, should be paying extra attention to keeping hydrated. But it’s not enough to just say “drink plenty of water”, especially with forty or so kids. It’s a great idea to bring bottled water, and plan on time to refill as opportunity allows. NOTE: The Capitol Visitors Center does not allow bottles, even empty ones. Feel free to pass out on their grounds.
2. Weather - DC gets a lot of rain, and wild, unpredictable summor thunderstorms are a regular feature, even if they are not the angry hand of God one we had this weekend. The time to ask “does everyone have a rain jacket” is not when you are about to get off the bus. Every single person needs to have suitable rain gear, on the bus, and not underneath, before you leave your home town.
3. Footware - This seems like a bit of unneccisary mothering, until I was guiding a group through New York City in late December. Believe it or not, several kids wore flip flops. In the slush. Got to see a lot of blue toes that week. Fortunatly, New York has a lot of places to purchase shoes at the last minute. Don’t plan on this on the National Mall. Plan for a trip to DC like you would plan to go hiking: comfortable, durable shoes; clean and dry socks; etc.
4. Sun Protection - A friend of mine remarked to me the other day that his main job as a guide is knowing where the shade so he can dash there from stop to stop. That’s a fair assessment when the heat index hits 105+. Every student should have sunscreen, and consider hats.

I know a lot of these seem “not your job” as a chaperone. And really, students are approaching an age where they can and should be responsible for these things. But I have seen each of these four items derail a tour (especially the dehydration issue!). Plan ahead, and a gentle reminder will usually suffice. Ignore them, and join me at the Emergency Room at 1 in the morning. Again!

Five Things I Learned From the Boy Scouts - Divide and Conquer

As a tour guide, I get paid to tell people about Washington, DC (or New York, or Philadelphia, or wherever).

Sure I do. What I actually do is herd people. Forty or fifty at a time. From hotels, unto planes and trains (and the ubiquitous bus), through museums and monuments, and to three meals a day. This is what keeps me hopping and where I earn my money. The blather coming out of my mouth? Heck, I’m not even sure what I’m saying some times.

So anything that makes that easier, and turns a mob into a crowd, or better yet, an organization, is a good thing. And one small technique I’ve noticed with my previously with some school groups crystallized with my experience with Boy Scouts this weekend: unit articulation.

It’s hardly a term most of us are familiar with, and it wasn’t one bandied about when I was a Scout. It wouldn’t be until years later, as a Naval Officer, that I’d come into contact with the term, and only recently have I pondered how it applied to guiding. It's one of those arcane military organizational terms, one of those they seem to come up with for fun.

Simply put, unit articulation is the concept of subdividing an organization into smaller parts, more or less permanently. In a Boy Scout Troop, this is a number of Patrols, in our case this weekend, 4 Patrols of eight Scouts each. In many school groups I’ve worked with, they’ve applied the same concept, dividing the group into various chaperone groups, with each adult responsible for a set number of kids.

So what? And why would this be helpful for a school group?

Well, first off, on the administrative side, many times on a tour you need to divide your group. Both restaurants this weekend asked us to send in smaller groups for seating purposes. It’s a lot easier to seat many batches of four that it is a herd of forty. Or you may have two guides at a Capitol tour. Or a half dozen other examples.

It also makes counting far easier (and oh, how I hate the counting). Each group counts their folks up and reports to the leader who only has to track four groups and not forty people. It seems small, but you may have to count your people a dozen times a day (or more). The difference between one minute and five minutes for a count adds up. Quickly.

Conversely, if a person is missing, this quickly identifies who they are, something not to be scorned. I’ve seen ten minutes go by where a group knows someone is not there but can’t figure out who.

Finally, as discussed yesterday, this allows for real leadership to be done by yet more students. The subgroup leaders will be responsible for their group in the same way the overall group leader is. The more kids doing things with real responsibility, the more engaged they are in the process, and the less disruptive they will choose to be.

Some of these items seem small, but making routine tasks routine is one of the biggest challenges in any organization. This tour is an organization, applying a little organizational skill to it lets you do the fun stuff. You can spend your time taking in the sights or you can spend it tracking down Bobby.

Five Things I Learned From the Boy Scouts - Put the Inmates in Charge

photo uploaded to flickr by kezee

Conceptualizing better ways to visit DC is a large part of why I run this blog, and hopefully it’s why some of you read it. I was struck by this, as a showed a group of Boy Scouts around Philly and DC this weekend. They were en-route to the 2010 Boy Scout Jamboree in Ft. A.P. Hill, Virginia, and I had the privilege of guiding them through Philly and DC before they went to the main event. We had a great time, and among other thing, I enjoyed sharing pointers with the young man who maintained their blog (focus on the part where he calls me awesome, not where he refers to me as Mike).

Now, on paper, this tour shouldn’t be a whole lot different from my standard school group tour. It’s a bus load of kids with a few chaperones seeing the same things (Arlington, Smithsonians, etc.). Sure, they’re all boys, but I have a fair number of all boy or all girl schools come through, so that shouldn’t make too much of a difference. And sure, I wondered about the age range, with Scouts ranging from 13-17. But even so, I didn’t think of this tour as being any different from my other school tours before I met them Saturday.

Wow, I was wrong. Despite the murderous, stinking, brutal, soul-diminishing, sweltering heat; this was one of the smoothest tours I’ve ever done, even with six buses. So what was different? I don’t think for a minute that your average Scout is any better behaved, any more responsible, or intrinsically a better person than my average student, but the overall effect of the tour was far more positive. How do they do it? And is there anything here that my non-Boy Scout groups can take away and learn from, without having to actually take their kids camping?

I’ll be spending this week examining some of the different ways my Boy Scout visitors did things that might make your average eighth grade field trip more enjoyable for all.

For today, let’s start with responsibility. I don’t know about you, but back in my high school, the student government was not a real leadership position, at least as I understand it. Once they won, the officers might be responsible for a few projects, putting together a dance or something like that, but would have no authority over me, a fellow student. The “Student Body President” wasn’t in charge of the student body, not even nominally.

A Boy Scout troop, on the other hand, elects a Senior Patrol Leader, who is responsible for getting the boys moving, keeping them organized, completing tasks, accounting for everybody, and all that leadership stuff. Obviously, responsible adults serve as Scoutmasters, but the nuts and bolts of getting everyone pointed in the right direction rests on the shoulders of a young man, chosen by his peers.

Back when I was a Boy Scout myself, I never thought much of this. The attraction to me was the opportunity to go camping. Lining up, counting everyone, getting my people there on time. etc. was just another task to do, like cleaning dishes and setting up the tent, borne for the greater good. But viewing it a decade or two later as an outsider, the differences in this system are noticeable and positive. As a guide, the kids themselves were reporting to me that they were ready to move on; I was not hunting them down to get counted. They policed themselves, courteously moving to the side, allowing others to pass, showing respect at war memorials and Arlington National Cemetery, and so on.

With real responsibility and authority, kids learn the hard way what a royal pain in the ass it is to get 41 people counted and on the bus. Nothing annoys me more than when students play around with the count, shouting out numbers and trying to sneak around me when I’m counting them up. This isn’t a game to me, and like all repetitive tasks, I just want it done so I can move on. Making sure I have my full bus before leaving is serious, not to mention that I’m almost always under a time crunch. But this was quashed, and quashed early, by the boys themselves this weekend. No longer was it their teacher or some strange guide performing a ritual they didn’t understand; it was now their mission, to be done as efficiently as possible. They corrected, quietly and firmly, any of the boys playing around.

It can be troubling to put some kids in charge of others. Visions of boys dancing around a pig’s head come to mind, and nothing I advocate here should be construed as lessening my ultimate responsibility of safely conducting a tour nor the chaperones heavy load of being responsible for other people’s children. In fact, part of what made the juvenile responsibility work is the supervision and coaching of the Scoutmasters. Allowing small failures, reviewing lessons learned, asking probing questions, and generally systematically tearing apart the whole canard that “leadership can’t be taught”. Done correctly, putting students in charge is probably more work for the teacher, at least in the beginning.

But the interaction between the boys was actually more positive when some were in charge of others. Roles were clearly defined, authority was delineated, and, most importantly, leaders were chosen by the boys themselves. Contrast that with what is sadly so often the norm of my school trips: cliquish groups whose behavior to each other can border on the vile. The uncertainty of status and the prevalence of dead time allows good kids to get in trouble. As Internet start-up guru (and my friend David’s personal hero) Paul Graham puts it:

That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

By giving students real responsibility, we avoid (or at least diminish) that trap.

So may I suggest, school leaders, give your kids real responsibility. Have them pick a leader for the trip, coach him or her on what their responsibilities will be, and hold them accountable for it. Expect them to fall flat, resist the urge to just do it yourself, keep their feet to the fire. In the end, the kids might learn something more important than the height of the Washington Monument. Which no one really cares about, including me.