Patrol Instruction In Second Class Work

On the parade night, each Leader will instruct his own Patrol. Except in a newly-formed Troop he does not instruct in Tenderfoot work at all. This is done independently of the parade night. The Second will probably be instructed by his Leader to call upon the prospective Scout at his own home and to teach him the necessary tests for the Tenderfoot examination. A recruit in many Troops is expected to be acquainted with these tests before applying for enrolment. The Leader will naturally be expected to give a great deal of instruction in the Second-class test. Even if all the Scouts in his Patrol have passed their test, the Second-class work should be constantly revised, and the same may be said about the Tenderfoot work also.
The principal object of the Patrol Leader will be to make the work interesting. He will, therefore, have plenty of variety, and will probably be wise in not sticking to any one subject for much more than half an hour on end.
He will never begin teaching any subject without first telling his Scouts what their object is in learning it. To know sixteen points of the compass is useless in itself, and is never wanted for finding one's way about in a Troop Headquarters! The Leader must therefore tell the Scouts to imagine themselves lost on the Yorkshire Moors or in Epping Forest. They may first imagine themselves with a watch and the sun to help them; secondly, with a mist and a church; thirdly, with a blizzard and a compass; fourthly, with starry heavens and a "Scout's Diary"; fifthly, with a map and a brainbox, and so on. Similarly, a Leader will not begin by drawing a bad circle on a blackboard with a piece of chalk, but he will ask the opinions of his Scouts as to the best method in which circles can be drawn. He will then call upon some other Scout to draw the circle before he shows them the required compass points.
On the subject of First Aid he would have a yarn with his boys about accidents before beginning to give them any practical instruction. He would also show them the picture of a human skeleton or try to take them off to see the real thing in a neighboring museum. He would ask each boy in his Patrol to pinch at least two of his bones every night before getting into bed, giving them their proper names. He would look out for interesting accounts of life-saving and of the practice of First Aid given in the "Scout" and other newspapers. He would not do all the talking himself, but, while preserving discipline, he would give other fellows a chance of airing their views. There is no space in this book to go through the whole of the Second-class tests, but the Patrol Leader will be quite competent to instruct in them if he has previously been given special facilities for learning by any of the methods suggested in the early part of these notes.