Surveys and Random Stuff

A few weeks ago, the Girl Scouts Voices Count surveys were sent out.  Both of my girls and I each received one.  A few years ago my oldest got a t-shirt for completing one!  Where’s mine?  Maybe it could read, “I FILLED OUT THIS REALLY LONG SURVEY AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT.” 

Anyway, there were couple of annoying things that I noticed about this survey.   It’s way too long.  It was very monotonous and vague as well.  Maybe that’s because I find surveys very boring after about the fifth page.  I can only take Strongly Disagree/Disagree/Whatever/Agree/Strongly Agree for so long.  Now that I think about it, I don’t even remember the questions – they were that vague.  But, it wasn’t the volunteer survey that I have the issue with – it’s the girls’ one.

My youngest daughter is in first grade and a 2nd year Daisy, so I read the survey to her and recorded her answers.  Good grief.  We BOTH got really antsy after about the fifth page.  Who wrote this thing?  Why wasn’t it written from a girl’s perspective so that she would understand it?  Instead, it was for a 9 year old going on 40.   Example:  “Girl Scout meetings are well-organized and purposeful.”  How would a Daisy know what that even means?  Brownies?  Nope. Maybe Juniors and up.  I’d say half the questions I had to answer myself because it took too long to try to explain what the question was asking.  It was twice as long as it should have been for girls.  Maybe three times.  My daughter eventually lost interest so I just filled out the rest of it to get the dang thing over and done with.

Then my oldest daughter filled hers out.  She is 11 years old and a second year Junior, so she’s old enough to read and understand it herself.  Or so I thought because I forgot how the last one went.  The email states that the survey will only take 15 minutes.  It took my oldest daughter 45 minutes.  Now she is not the fastest reader, but still – come on.  I let her fill it out herself while I went outside to work in the yard.  She came out about six times to ask me what a question meant.  Now how the heck would a Junior know whether they earned a Financial Literacy badge or not?  What’s she going to do – take her vest and the Girl’s Guide and match them up?  She said there were no pictures during the survey to help her (and I didn’t remember there being any either).  I had to explain what a Take Action project meant.  She also didn’t know what Journey activities we did since we mixed them in here and there between Bronze Award and badge work.

It also occurred to me that if parents tried to help their daughter, they wouldn’t know what Financial Literacy and Journey activities are either.  I realize survey results have to be taken with a grain of salt and you’re just looking at the overall trends, but I would think what I shared would have to affect a major portion of the girls’ answers.  I’m not sure how logistically this would work, but I personally would have created different surveys according to age levels and write them so that they are grade level appropriate.  If you’re going to get any kind of meaningful data out of surveys, they need to be somewhat engaging – and the Voices Count one sure isn’t.   BOR-RING!

MOUNTAIN MAGIC IN THE SPRING

Remember back during the fall when I wrote about how bummed I was that the Mountain Magic Leader Weekend up at Camp WaBak was cancelled due to a thousand year flood but it was rescheduled?  Yes, that’s this weekend!  (I have to admit I was still very skeptical that it wasn’t going to be cancelled until I received my confirmation the other day.)  Unfortunately, three of my favorite events are all happening at the same time – an orchestra concert, Mountain Magic, and my church’s annual retreat up in Flat Rock, NC.  I’m extremely bummed because I love our church retreat, but I had already made a commitment to playing in the orchestra concert (plus I only get the opportunity to play a few times a year).  So I’m going to MM during half of the day on Saturday, leaving for orchestra rehearsal and the concert and returning for all of Sunday.  It’ll be a lot of driving, but I don’t mind since hopefully I’ll see people that I haven’t seen in two years (MM was cancelled in 2015 AND 2014).  And I’m climbing Big Boy again!  For a fourth time!  Maybe I should just hike it every month at this rate.  Actually that might be kind of neat.  And make a calendar out of each month’s picture.  I was joking, but now that I think about it, that WOULD be a neat calendar.

HOURS – LOTS AND LOTS OF THEM

At the end of each year, our council sends out a survey that is not nearly as bad as the Voices Count one.  There’s always a question that asks you to estimate how many hours you’ve put toward Girl Scouts for the year.   I guesstimated 300 hours last year.  Out of curiosity, I started tracking them using MyHours, an online time tracker.  I set up categories for troop, service unit, delegate, and a few others to see how my time breaks out as well.  I’ll post the final numbers at the end of the troop year.  I started tracking in mid-October, and I just hit 300 with the rest of April and May still to go.  Ugh, maybe I really didn’t want to know this.