keytar04 wrote:i was recently elected SPL of my troop for the first time. (...)
1) a life scout in my troop that is a year older than me (he is 14 therefore i am 13) is behaving like a tiger cub, (...)
2) scouts begin talking when the troop is doing something, and other scouts join in.
First, Sean, please don't post your first and last names. It's a violation of this message board's youth protection guidelines.
How do you get a troublemaker on your side? How do you keep the scouts quiet when you need them quiet? These are excellent questions, and there are lots of issues involved. I'm going to throw some ideas out that might work, and you and your Scoutmaster can consider whether they would work in your troop.
1. Get Olderscout on your side. Can you make him Asst SPL? Is he a troop officer? Anytime you can make a troublemaker part of the solution you win. We had a troubled SPL a couple of years ago who had been quite a disruptive scout, and he really struggled as SPL. Now, as a 16-year-old former SPL, we hear him telling his friends to settle down and be quiet because, he says to them, "You have no idea how hard it is to be SPL."
2. Take Olderscout aside and ask for his advice on how to make the meetings more fun. Tell him that you respect his experience and think he might be able to help you improve your meetings. If he's a real hard case, ask your Scoutmaster to help you with this.
3. Use your Patrol Leaders to help you control the scouts. Good SPLs figure out that it is much easier to work through four PLs than it is 30 scouts. Make sure that the PLs understand that part of their job is to maintain order in their patrols. Get your Scoutmaster to back them up. Use your ASPL carefully-- he (or they) is not the boss of the patrol leaders and needs to understand that he isn't.
4. Make sure your meetings are fun. If you have the boys sitting still for more than 15 minutes per meeting, you're doing it wrong. They already sit in school six hours per day, they want to have fun at the Scout meeting.
5. Do adults stand around talking in the meeting room while you are trying to run your meeting? Get rid of them. I've seen dozens of times that adults talking encourages the scouts to talk. If the adults are not helping you run your meeting they should be in another room, out in the hallway, or outside. If they aren't helping you, they're distracting the scouts.
Remember that boys are by their nature active and noisy. You aren't trying to run a library reading circle. They DO need to be polite to you and other leaders, and work together to make the program go. Good luck, and let us know what you decide.
he is also non-trustworthy and apparently does not know that the scout law exists. in fact he doesnt even have the law memorized. 
since he is one of our older scouts the younger scouts look up to him, so he sets an example. what should i do in terms of handling him without making myself seem strict, mean, and/or power-hungry?
) since then, but how should i handle this if it ever happens again?
if only everything were perfect...