Thal, you're harping a little too hard on your banjo. The video was very well done. A lot of effort was clearly put into its production.
Effort without quality is a step backward. Do you think that either of those divers, who are supposed to be exemplars of leadership level skills, could pass the new GUE recreational course skills? Or even get a provisional for Fundies?
If it meets their needs, then so be it.
If it suits their needs they should use it, when they put it out in public for comment, analysis is fine.
You have a very unique training approach. I think that would be a fair assessment, no?
No ... what I have done is, over the last 40 years or so, take a very conservative (in the true sense of the word) approach to diving instruction. I have taken a holistic approach, form, and basic structure that was first solidified in the mid 1950s and continuously upgraded it to accommodate changes in gear and to incorporate the best ways that I learned, from the acknowledged masters of the art, to teach each of the parts of an integrated whole. That's hardly unique, I have just not been shoved by market forces, or those beholden to market forces, to take the great leaps backward that most of the recreational community has taken whilst pretended its all "new and improved" when its actually, "new and diminished."
I don't know of any other instructors that teach students to enter the water without a regulator in their mouths.
Let's look at that issue as an example. As I stated there are pluses and minuses to both approaches. The advantages of the snorkel approach include a (granted) minor lowering of embolism risk and a lessened chance of loosing one's mask. The advantage of regulator in the mouth is a lessened chance of drowning if you enter that water over weighted, with no air in your BC and your power inflator not hooked up or your tank not turned on. Since one of my goals is to assure that no diver that I train will ever do any one of those four things, it is really a non-issue. You see, once upon a time, not so long ago, entering with the snorkel in your mouth was SOP, that has clearly changed, but the truth behind the change has been obfusticated.
The change stemmed from three things: first and foremost was a desire on the part of some to cut the time for a course, first from 100 hours to 40 hours then from 40 hours to 18 hours; second was a similar desire, not just to teach people who have poor watermanship skills to dive, but to do so within that aforementioned 18 hour time frame; and third was a plan to reduce the requirements for becoming a diving instructor so that the costs of training (which like air fills had evolved into loss leaders aimed at selling gear) could be kept at a low level. These "goals" were well know, they were openly discussed, advocated by some and opposed by others. What it came down to in the end were two increasingly polarized camps that I'd style as the business men vs. the educators. It's pretty clear who won. And just as in any conflict the victors get to write (or should I say re-write) the history, and when the victors just happen to be those whose very core nature is to put profit ahead of truth, then great violence is done to reality.
Freediving skills, that used to be the backbone of quality classes, have been all but eliminated under the pretext of, "its a scuba class." Along with the elimination of freediving skills went any real knowledge of the finer points of snorkels. Since a generation of scuba instructors is born, fails to flourish, and dies inside of two to three years ... it does not take very long for something that was once common knowledge to disappear from the community's cognizance and human nature then transmogrifies the commonplace into the unique.
I've also never seen another diver wearing a snorkel the way you teach...and I'm pretty sure that every user here on Scubaboard has heard your opinion on the proper way to wear one
I guess you never looked at any of Fdog's photos, like this one from the Performance Freediving class he attended:
You see, your comment is illustrative of the very problem that I'm dissecting here, and please don't take my remarks personally, they're not aimed at you, rather at the milieu your diving has evolved in. You're GUE; a member of what is likely the most proficient segment of the recreational diving community. But GUE divers tend to have a blind spot, most of them can't freedive. It's not part of their mind set, they solve their problems with great care and concern over the gear that they use, how it is placed, and how it is used; yet, because a snorkel is (at best) a begruging part of their kit, they have no idea of how to wear one for optimal results.
The way I teach my students to wear their snorkel is exactly the same way in which I was taught to wear my snorkel by Frederic Dumas in the mid 1960s, I'd done it wrong for a decade because I had not thought about it, as I expect you have not thought about it; because you likely do not see a snorkel as a piece of gear that deserves, in terms of selection and thought, as much care as a even bolt-snap. So ... let's think about it. Dumas said to me, "Were does a whale breathe? At the tip of his nose or the top of his head? We connect the top of your head with your mouth with a short tube and you are part whale." That about sums it up. Proper placement clearly follows. I have not invented something unique, I have just followed a long line of people who came before and thought it out.
My point is that you do a lot of things in a unique way, yet I'm sure you do an excellent job in your classes. Allow other some leeway too.
I hope that you are starting to see that I am not really unique, I just appear that way to some, because they are, if I many use the term without offending, so provincial (or should we call it provisional?
).
I try to assure that there is nothing that I do in the water that does not make sense, that for everything I can trace a clear path, for as in the snorkel's tale, provenience is important too. How much leeway do you allow for where the bolt-snap for your SPG is placed or where your knife (and what sort of knife) is placed; or how an S-drill is conduced or which hand holds your light and where your instruments go? Well, believe it or not, there are a number of us who over the last half century, in our own quiet corner of the diving universe have put DIR-like perspectives into play in the careful and methodical design of diver training programs, not where we train people to "dive DIR" but rather were we use optimized, holistic and tested approaches to training the diver to be able to operate with a multitude of equipment configurations. Our success is clearly demonstrable, in over 50 years we have never had a training fatality; our bends rate is an order of magnitude lower than that of sports divers and people who trained in this fashion (which does not include everyone who might be called a research diver) have suffered but three fatalities.
I just watched the video for the first time, and it definitely had some peculiarities. The Octo and Air-II was interesting, and I would seriously question the use of both, but I wouldn't be caught dead with an Air-II in the first place, so whatever, the choice to use both seems only slightly more odd than why someone would want an Air-II in the first place. I do wonder if the decision was dictated by gear sales, but that's another thread. I also saw the tank, and yes, it was definitely too low.
The tank thing is classic. My interlocutor in this thread feels that as long as the tank doesn't fall out it's OK, but there lots of other ramifications, can you imagine struggling to perform whatever their equivalent of an S-drill is with the valve down in the middle of your back? Not impossible, but infinately more difficult and (once again) sloppy.
Aside from that, for better or worse, it seemed about on par with any of the videos I've seen with PADI's name on them.
I completely agree, but that was not the topic and you are now bashing PADI big time.
I also hate to admit it, but I think most (not all) of the CDs I've met would be the first to encourage having a student securely anchored to the bottom.
Most (not all) of the CDs I know can't do the skills in a hover themselves, so of course, if they can't do it, it must be way too hard to teach. Yes, it is way too hard ... in an 18 hour referral program, with students that you can not sure are well enough prepared to not rocket off to the surface in response to any unexpected stimulus.
I've even been failed on a couple of the Demonstration quality skills because the examiner wanted me on my knees so the students could better learn how they should be doing the skill. I'm not saying its a good thing, but it seems to be pretty much the standard.
We always had a rule that students could not touch the side of the pool or go to the surface without first signaling. On observing our class, Walt Hendricks, Sr. (then DSO for the Univ. of Puerto Rico) asked me why we let out students crawl along the bottom. We changed that the next night and discovered that not only was it a rather easy change to make, but that our final product was way, way, better than it had been. We were able to get more done in less time as a result of that change.
The only other thing I would add is that a demonstration quality skill isn't a perfect skill. If my tech instructor saw me take more than a minute to remove and clear my mask, I wouldn't have passed my trimix class.
That is where we part company, for me a demonstration quality skill is a perfect skill. If it takes you a full minute to demonstrate how to remove and replace your mask, I say that your wasting about 45 seconds. But then, when I'm teaching students how to remove and clear their mask they are already comfortable with the requisite component parts such as immersing their face without a mask and exhaling and independently controlling exhillation from their nose and mouth.
There are similar "losses of knowledge" when it comes to gear, for much the same reasons. Permit me to share this short story:
I issue a very detailed equipment list before each class that students where were accepted into the class need to purchase and show up with at the first meeting. The suits we were using at the time were, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, 5mm, skin two side, Rubatex GN-231N, attached hood, farmer johns, no zippers. I send my list to all the LDSs in the area and freely distribute whatever they send back to the students (this is a big deal, twenty full sets of gear with no selling or inventory required: take the order, take the money, deliver in two weeks).
One student did not go to an LDS, but rather to a shop near her home, about a hundred miles away. I got a call from the Instructor in the shop informing me, in a fairly emphatic tone, that, “No diver could possibly wear this suit. They could not put it on without a zipper.” Now, please understand, that I’ve been diving this suit design since the mid sixties, and the only people who need an inverted half zipper in the jacket are incredibly curvaceous women that are of petite statue. This woman was just shy of six foot and her blueprint could have been confused with a plan for a javelin.
Having nothing better to do (and considering that the woman in question was one of the brighter marine geology grad students), I drove up to the shop later in the day. I brought my suit with me. I showed the Instructor how easy it was to put on and take off, etc. We solved the problem, but the bottom line was that this Instructor, well meaning as she was, had not yet worn out here first suit and was repeating what her Instructor’s had told her. It wasn’t a marketing issue, the LDS could and did supply the gear (and nicely matched the prices of the LDSs that had sent fliers).
When it comes to dive gear, real information is hard to come by. Most of the opinions that you hear are biased either by being the only piece that class of gear that an instructor has ever used; or being a loaner that the expert tried out on one or two dives. Much of the "lore" has no basis in fact, its just a student repeating what the instructor said, who is just repeating what the instructor said, who is just repeating what the instructor said, etc., etc., etc.
In summary (and I've said it before):
Some people on the board here see what I do as "tough" because it is demanding, time intensive and intellectually challenging. But they forget (I know that I've said this before) that most of my students are way more nerd and geek than SoCal beach lifeguard. What I do with them is often the first physically demanding and "life-threatening" experience of their life. Focus and commitment are, indeed, key.
... almost anyone can do it ... but (at least in my opinion) short courses are not the answer, competence is ... and that takes time (and focus and commitment).
