Scouting Milestones

When a Boy Scout reaches the rank of First Class, his Mom also receives a rank pin. Here is R pinning his Mom as he also becomes an official First Class scout. It bears noting that, at this Court of Honor ceremony, R was awarded THREE ranks at once – Tenderfoot, Second Class and First Class. This is indicative of his having done the work, but not having turned in the paperwork J

Do you see Mom's beaming face? Lovely. Later that night, she was fondling her pin, turned to me and said "Can I wear this pin EVERY day? I'm so proud of him!" She didn't grow up with scouting in her house; she's starting to get the gyst of the program!

Regardless of R's administrative skills, it's interesting to do some math here…

• There are six ranks in Boy Scouts (Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, Star, Life and Eagle)
  
• R has earned half of the ranks in just under two years
  
• Boys who earn First Class in their first 18-24 months have a very high rate for achieving Eagle
  
• R now has eight merit badges, two of which are Eagle Required
  
• R can advance to the rank Star Scout in the Fall, provided he completes two additional Eagle-required merit badges
  
• R can earn the two merit badges this summer at camp.
  
• R can also add two MORE Eagle-required merit badges, and two non-required badges (Orienteering and Archery) over the summer
  
• R needs 12 Eagle Required merit badges and a total of 22 merit badges for Eagle
  
• If R just does 'clean-up' and adds the two merit badges from summer camp, he'll be a Star Scout with:
  
  • Six Eagle Required merit badges (50% to Eagle)
    
  • 14 merit badges total (65% to Eagle)
    
• He'll be one month past his 13^th birthday.
  
• That'll give him Five years to concentrate on earning about a dozen merit badges, and concentrating on his leadership skills within the troop.
  

Think Like a Wheel

The process of original thinking moves like a wheel. It definitely goes around and around, back-and-forth.

But that spinning thought needs to find traction against something in order to make forward progress.

What IS that something? And why is it that sometimes we can see our progress and sometimes we just can't?

Its a matter of perspective. For example, from the perspective of the hood ornament, the car moves ever forward (most of the time), taking the passengers and cargo onward. But from the perspective of the valve stem on the tire, things just go around and around endlessly... maybe even pointlessly.

One has to look at progress from the right perspective. If the wheels weren't spinning so redundantly, the car wouldn't move at all. But tell that to the valve stem.

Family life moves the same way. At some point, the meals and the laundry, and the house cleaning are all like the wheels. Endless if you keep your perspective inside the task. But they're necessary rotations to keep the entire family machine moving forward.

Take my son, R, for example. Today the school counselor wrote an email outlining how much progress they've seen in R over the last year and a half. Naturally, this email came just after we'd stayed up until 1am on a school night helping R get a writing assignment started, two days before the deadline - a project he'd had one month's notice on. I wasn't necessarily feeling like he'd made much progress, but obviously I'm on the wheel here, not on the hood ornament. I need to hear the feedback from the hood ornament to know we're making progress.

This says a lot about where my lovely wife is. So much of what she does is the spinning of the wheels. If she can't see the progress, then she feels ineffective. And yet, she's the wheel. If the wheel doesn't spin, nothing happens.

How can I possibly thank her enough for what she does? Short answer: I can't.

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear"

I'm watching my children grow. And I'm starting to see other people become their teachers. And I don't mean school teachers, coaches and dance instructors. I'm talking about people who step up to guide their development and their participation in the community. I'm realizing that many of us mentor others, but only on specific topics or in specific ways. Some by conscious choice (fencing coaches, for example) and others just because the child/person is poised for a breakthrough that we just happen to have the bandwidth with which to help.

I'd only ever considered the epigram in the title from one perspective: the student's perspective. In which, teachers magically appear from the ether when one is ready for a new enlightenment. I'd not considered where these teachers came from or how they knew to make their presence known.

Over the weekend, I had a couple epiphanies on this point.

What I notice is that there isn't a shortage of teachers. They're all around us. The trigger is whether someone is ready to be taught something. At *that* moment, the teachers step out of the shadows, where they've been waiting all this time.

Many teachers employ the 'pool push' technique. They're not particularly motivated to cultivate someone. But, if their path in life takes them past someone standing on the edge of a breakthrough, they may just shove the person a bit and push them over. Like nudging your buddy into the pool just before he decides to jump in for himself. These teachers teach when it's convenient. And sure to be effective. They conserve their resources. There's nothing wrong with that - they're being helpful.

Other teachers make their presence known earlier, and help with the preparations...cultivating growth in someone. These teachers fall a bit more often into the expected teacher roles: school teacher, professor, coach, scout adult leader, whatever... these teacher are more willing to invest, and to take the risk that their efforts may be without payoff...that the student being cultivated may learn *some* lessons and also never learn some others.

I think I see this in effect with my lovely wife. See, as her husband whatever impact I have as a teacher is as a cultivator. She cultivates my growth too - I can think of a couple lessons she'd like me to finally learn! Anyway, more than once I've spent weeks (even years) cultivating an idea for her, only to meet with resistance or a lack of acceptance (again, the same is true in reverse). Then, one day, she comes back from talking to someone else (the garden manager at the home improvement store, say, or a girlfriend she met for coffee) with this huge breakthrough in her thinking. Yep. That same idea I've been trying to communicate for such a long time. This experience used to frustrate me. But that was because I hadn't figured out the two different roles. See, that Garden Manager's idea wouldn't take root unless I'd done all that preparation. We had to tag-team. The Garden Manager gets all the credit because he made the big splash in understanding; but someone did the hard work of getting her step-by-step to the edge in the first place.

Now that I can see the difference in the roles, I'm more at ease with how this all works. I think I can release some of my need for attribution now.

So here's my big ah-hah: teachers are not rare or magical. They're in plentiful supply. It's just that not all will cultivate students; instead some are simply ready to help whenever convenient. Knowing this, it seems SO MUCH MORE LOGICAL to broadcast my emerging growth opportunities in order to more easily find those pool push teachers!

I now feel compelled to help my children to understand this point. Looks like I have something new to help cultivate in them... probably so someone else can conveniently push them over into the realization. But that's okay. I know my role here.

Oh, and in all fairness, my lovely wife was the one who gave me the nudge I needed to make this realization. Sometimes, a cultivator can also get to push someone into the pool!

Kevin

I'm doing this from memory, so forgive any baubles in the accuracy. But go with me now, in your brain, to that fateful scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail, when King Arthur happens upon a cloaked person mucking around in a ditch...

Arthur: "Old Woman..."

Person: "Man..."

Arthur: "Old Man. Who lives in that castle..."

Person: "I'm 37."

Arthur: "...what?"

Person: "I'm 37. I'm not old..."

Arthur: "Well I couldn't very well just call you 'Man' now could I?"

Person: "You could have called me Kevin."

Arthur: "I didn't know you were NAMED Kevin!"

Kevin: "Well you didn't bother to find out, did you?"

Ah, yes. Kevin's thirty-seven. Was then, still is now. Not me. I'll be FORTY-seven next week. Apparently, his Anarcho-syndaclist-commune lifestyle has a fountain of youth quality I don't enjoy.

On the other hand, the Omaha Steaks arrived yesterday. Kevin was mucking around in the ditch; I don't think HE had any steaks in the freezer!

Beefsteak Thanks

I've blogged about this before, the annual tradition of Omaha Steaks arriving for my birthday. They haven't arrived yet, but I was informed yesterday that they're on their way.

For the last few weeks, M has been flirting with vegetarianism. Omaha steaks will undoubtedly test the depths of her commitment. M likes steak, you see...

Jobs Getting Stronger

“Employers announced 71% fewer job cuts in April than they did a year ago, when 132,590 jobs were expected to be eliminated.”

[link]

How Disneyland Keeps it UNREAL

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/02/business/la-fi-cover-disney-20100502

You Cannot Ignore the Elephant In The Room

M's ballet performance went wonderfully last Saturday. I've dropped a couple quick status updates on my personal FaceBook page about this, but the blog is where we can keep the details.

M had been cast as a "pink elephant" in the Balanchine/Stravinsky production of "Circus Polka" for the SOBT annual school performance at Portland's Newmark Theater. By the time the pink elephants came out on stage, two minutes in to the four minute performance, there must have been 36 or so girls on stage, in three groups. The dance went wonderfully, and I was impressed when all these girls created three concentric circles and counter rotated each other. It was so impressive because it was so smooth and organic. Other times (at other recitals) I've seen similar things, but the always come across as deliberate...you can see some dancers hitting their spots early, while others strive to catch up. In contrast, with all these young dancers, the movement from place to place was both complex and fluid. I was truly impressed. M was easy to spot, even with all those girls. Her ponytail was by far the longest on stage, reaching way beyond her waist (and this is after cutting three inches off a couple weeks ago).

M had quite a support crew as well. Eight people attended to show her support and love:

Mom and Dad
Brother, R
Jin, our exchange student
Grandma M-A
Grandma Gin
Family Friend, Patti
Family Friend, Donna J

What originally started as a block of five tickets grew into eight seats scattered across the auditorium. We kept the original block of five, but also had two box seats over to the side on the second balcony, and a single front-row center seat on the first balcony...arguably the best seat in the house for sightlines.

So, we mixed it up. Different people sat in different places after intermission than they did to start the show. That made it fun. Personally, I was fortunate enough to get the single seat on the first balcony for the second half of the performance. M had already danced in the first half. Nevertheless, the excellent sightlines afforded me the chance to really study the technique, skill and athleticism in the dancers. It was very clear from those seats.

The Grandmas had a great time, it would seem. So, too, did the friends. Jin commented that he had expected a 'school' performance, but watched instead a 'professional' performance. He was very impressed.

As for the boys, we'd gone to the ballet in the middle of a Boy Scout two-night campout. We'd slept over with the troop, drove in, cleaned up, attended the ballet, dressed back into camp gear, and headed back to the campout in time for a snack and dessert.

Sunday, after the campout, we had a slow-speed day. We spent the afternoon exploring Saturday Market downtown, and tried to slow down and enjoy. It wasn't always easy... we've been pushing so hard recently that it's hard to stop, relax, and just enjoy. I'm probably the most guilty of this ... but, let's rewind back to Saturday night for a bit.

Saturday night, the boys headed back to camp. M and Grandma Gin stayed home and rested after a great performance. C and her Mom, M-A, headed back to the Newmark theater for the evening performance of the OBT professional company's performance. What was interesting to C, was that OBT held a post-show Q & A session. C and M-A hung around, and C shared that she asked a couple questions. C reported that she started by identifying herself as a parent for a student at the School of Oregon Ballet Theater, and that she had a two-part question. One question had to do with any ratio of rehearsal time to performance time (as in, do you schedule a certain number of hours for each minute of the performance or what, exactly?), and do the dancers still count the beats when performing at the professional level? The other question had to do with eating habits for dancers, implying that her particular dancer was coming up with crazy ideas about eating. The response to these two questions was very interesting.

First, Christopher Stowell is reported to have answered the rehearsal question by saying that the company rehearses to whatever space they have available, regardless of performance length. In other words, they just keep refining and perfecting until it's show time. No matter how long the program is. One of the dancers shared that counting is stll very much a part of her routine. Some musical pieces are rhythmic enough she can follow the musical clues, but Stravinsky (referring to Circus Polka) is complex enough that counting is always required. She also shared that, when dancing duets, she often counts both her part and her partners' part simultaneously in her head, while performing. I found that amazing to hear.

As to the second question, one of the professional dancers (who'd just finished her performance) answered the eating habits by making it very clear that she eats like an athlete: LOTS of protein (she was anxious to get out of the theater, in fact, because a big gloppy cheeseburger was next on her agenda) and calories of all sorts. She encouraged all younger dancers go approach the professional dancers and get tips on eating habits. "I don't know where these girls get these crazy ideas about food." she said.

To have the Grandmothers around, they got a chance to see how R has been changing in behavior now that we've changed his meds. He's more of a leader. He's more of a participant. He's trustworthy enough we can allow him to move about in a place like Saturday Market without fear that he'll get lost or distracted. His sense of humor is blooming with the rapidity, singular impact and grandeur of a spring rose. And they've seen it, too.

There's the old cliche used to discuss people in denial -- "ignoring the elephant in the room." And that cliche comes to mind as I think over the last weekend because ... well, because we HAVEN'T ignored the elephant(s), we've celebrated and confronted the elephant(s). Whether it be M's performance as an elephant, or R's performance as an emergent personality, to how our family has developed and matured as a unit. We all interacted with the elephant in constructive and progressive ways. We all stand together and hash it out as a team.

I'm glad for that.