The toolbox is full yet it's empty.
I am a strong believer of Learning by Doing and of giving our youth responsibility over themselves.
One of many manifestations of this is that in our scout group, we expect the patrols to cook their own meals.
During Jiingijamborii, one of our patrols was always slower than the other, so I decided to take a small chat with them figuring out what took them so long and giving them some hints on how to order the cooking of things better. Things like always starting with the potatoes or rice.
Their response was:
-- we don't know how long potatoes cook, nobody has told us.
I still think I'm right about giving my scouts responsibilities like we do, but we failed in giving them tools. Not physical tools, because we have given them everything they need, but thinking tools.
So one of my most prioritized projects this autumn is to create this cookbook as the first step of filling in the empty 'thinking' toolbox for my patrols.
Some side notes about Jiingijamborii
About the Program
First of all: Learning by Doing is important for all of us, and I don't want to complain about the results of the efforts to create a new program for Swedish scouting. The Jiingijamborii staff tried to create a new program and that's a great thing. Maybe they failed, maybe not, but we need all to try something completely new sometimes.
The one negative comment worth mentioning about the program I've heard from my scouts is that the program was too much like school. In my opinion, scouting shouldn't be like school at all. We don't need to do the work we already pay teachers to do.
Disclaimer of Learning
Since Jiingijamborii really was a once in a lifetime camp, I have decided not to analyse it too much, because many lessons learned cannot be applied elsewhere, for example, how to better approach cooking given the way food was administered.
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