Diving Education Today

[Kingpatzer]

Yes this can be measured. Previously a diver had to successfully Doff and Don his equipment (removing his equipment in 10 to 15 feet of water, returning to the surface and returning to the bottom to recover his equipment. The diver was blacked-out and placed under minor harassment during the excercise.


Bailouts were also necessary. These have been removed from the training program.

Injuring trainees is generally frowned upon these days. Endangering new divers by intentionally harassing them is both unnecessary and potentially dangerous.

 

[Kingpatzer]

Re: running away from dive tables. I really think this is a mistake. The issue isn't just that a diver can determine the pressure group resulting from a prior dive, it is also the ability to plan a range of repetitive dives. Sure, the computer will do the planning just as well but the diver doesn'r really get the same situational awareness they might have as they calculate the RNT versus depth for future dives. And the eRDP doesn't even provide RNT!

This I personally agree with -- except that divers simply do not do these calculations anymore. The average rec diver already trust their computer implicitly and does not plan their dives beyond the capabilities of the computer.

Recognizing that this is information the diver won't use is arguably the right thing to do. I don't agree with it, but from a pragmatic perspective it is already effectively the situation that divers aren't doing this.

Next time you're on a typical recreational boat ask the vacation divers how many remember how to use the tables. I bet that for those who have been certified for more than a year, only around 1 in 10 can do that.

 

[DCBC]

Injuring trainees is generally frowned upon these days. Endangering new divers by intentionally harassing them is both unnecessary and potentially dangerous.

Who said anything about injuring trainees? I've trained a few thousand divers (recreational, military and commercial) divers without any injuries.

The training is done at a controlled rate, the instructor is well aware of the diver's competencies and it does not progress to this point until the diver's deemed qualified to undertake the exercise. Realistic training offers a degree of risk, but the risks are measured and manageable. If an event is to occur, it's better to happen in a pool than in open water when a diver is newly certified without supervision.

Once the student surpasses the problems presented, they gain confidence. They don't have to panic and fly to the surface and realize they can deal with many difficulties. We also build confidence in a team, buddy breathing blacked-out, etc.. In open-water a CESA is performed from 30 feet with an instructor (regulator in the mouth). The advanced program is of course much more challenging.

 

[Kingpatzer]

The training is done at a controlled rate, the instructor is well aware of the diver's competencies and it does not progress to this point until the diver's deemed qualified to undertake the exercise. Realistic training offers a degree of risk, but the risks are measured and manageable. If an event is to occur, it's better to happen in a pool than in open water when a diver is newly certified without supervision.

Anytime you are harassing a student you have the potential to cause them unnecessary harm. Such training methods were set aside for both that reason and because students are interested in diving, not attending military school.

 

[Trace Malinowski]

Injuring trainees is generally frowned upon these days. Endangering new divers by intentionally harassing them is both unnecessary and potentially dangerous.

Injuring trainees has always been frowned upon.

Divers are not endangered when instructors trained to manage such harassment properly execute it.

Diving is "potentially dangerous" and what helps eliminate some potential dangers is thorough training.

I'm sorry, but as an instructor trained to manage the worst case scenario of a diver becoming out of control in a cave environment due to panic while being expected to teach a failures base class, I cannot rationalize how an open water instructor is not helping a student to be safer by creating such failures as:

1) Air Gunning - Using an air gun or regulator to mimic a first stage or tank O-ring failure in class will reduce the stress of a diver who actually may experience one in or under the water.

2) Leaking or flooded face mask - once a student has been trained to clear a mask and is proficient, a random skill drill of hovering over the students and pulling masks away from faces to leak or flood them will show the instructor that the student is comfortable with surprise mask problems. This is best done as an expected exercise. Once the instructor is sure the students can handle unexpected leaks and floods, unexpected loss of face masks is the next skill building exercise. This is the level that a student should be at for OW diving comfort and safety. To reinforce student comfort, after this has been executed to the instructor's satisfaction, the exercise can be thrown into the mix of other exercises once those exercises have been demonstrated to be comfortable and proficient. Example: Diver who is comfortable with unexpected loss of mask and who is comfortable with removing and replacing scuba can be challenged with a lost mask while replacing scuba.

3) Lost power inflator - unplug the student's power inflator during ascent and buddy breathing ascent skills to make the student proficient at going to the oral inflator. This comes after the student is used to unplugging and plugging in his own inflator proficiently.

There are other harassment skills, but these are three examples.

What I ask myself as an instructor is, "Is this student ready to handle the problems associated with equipment malfunction during open water diving and will this student be able to comfortably manage them easily and proficiently? Has the escape instinct been trained out and replaced with an automatic behavioral response that a diver should have?"

If the student does not automatically resort to comfortable and efficient underwater problem solving, diving is "potentially dangerous" for that student - especially if the student still has an instinct to escape.

 

[Thalassamania]

... And what are those skills?

Putting your gear together including checking your buddy's gear
Entering and exiting the water
Maintaining buoyancy control in the water column
Controlling one's BC (with, or without, the use of the power inflator)
Sharing air and ascending whilst doing so
Clearing/replacing one's mask
Simple compass navigation
Maintaining sufficient buddy contact at all times
and on.

Why isn't the entry level diver who can "reliably and comfortably" able to do these things a sufficient "product" of anyone's Open Water (i.e., beginning) class?...

Peter, there are so many critical items missing from that list that I barely know where to start, how about basic self and buddy rescue skills; how about being able to look out over a beach and know the general topography and current patterns; how about regulator recovery an retrieval; how about fining; the list goes on and on.

There is also the issue of how well the skills are done. It is simply not enough to for the student will be able to do the various skills in "a reasonably comfortable, fluid, repeatable manner" consistent with the abilities of an open water diver. As I have noted in the past, it requires a minimum of 17 repetitions for a student to be at a level that you can expect them to actually perform moderately complex skills like air sharing with 95% confidence that it will actually be accomplished. And that's under ideal circumstances, not when things have started to do south. Just calling it "mastery" don't make it so!

 

[Kingpatzer]

I'm sorry, but as an instructor trained to manage the worst case scenario of a diver becoming out of control in a cave environment due to panic . . .

Which is not the level of training a typical scuba instructor needs to teach recreational divers how to swim with the pretty fishes.

As for all of the rest -- where is the evidence that the extra time, cost, and risk in such exercises is worth the investment on the part of a typical diver who is going to dive a few times a year?

It comes down to a simple reality -- divers today are not the same group as divers of the '60s and '70s.

The problem is not the training. The problem, to the very small extent that there is one, is divers diving outside their level of training and experience.

 

[Kingpatzer]

As I have noted in the past, it requires a minimum of 17 repetitions for a student to be at a level that you can expect them to actually perform moderately complex skills like air sharing with 95% confidence that it will actually be accomplished.

Can you point me to where those values came from?

 

[rstofer]

Divers are not endangered when instructors trained to manage such harassment properly execute it.

I'm sorry, but as an instructor trained to manage the worst case scenario of a diver becoming out of control in a cave environment due to panic while being expected to teach a failures base class, I cannot rationalize how an open water instructor is not helping a student to be safer by creating such failures as:

1) Air Gunning - Using an air gun or regulator to mimic a first stage or tank O-ring failure in class will reduce the stress of a diver who actually may experience one in or under the water.

2) Leaking or flooded face mask - once a student has been trained to clear a mask and is proficient, a random skill drill of hovering over the students and pulling masks away from faces to leak or flood them will show the instructor that the student is comfortable with surprise mask problems. This is best done as an expected exercise. Once the instructor is sure the students can handle unexpected leaks and floods, unexpected loss of face masks is the next skill building exercise. This is the level that a student should be at for OW diving comfort and safety. To reinforce student comfort, after this has been executed to the instructor's satisfaction, the exercise can be thrown into the mix of other exercises once those exercises have been demonstrated to be comfortable and proficient. Example: Diver who is comfortable with unexpected loss of mask and who is comfortable with removing and replacing scuba can be challenged with a lost mask while replacing scuba.

3) Lost power inflator - unplug the student's power inflator during ascent and buddy breathing ascent skills to make the student proficient at going to the oral inflator. This comes after the student is used to unplugging and plugging in his own inflator proficiently.

There are other harassment skills, but these are three examples.

What I ask myself as an instructor is, "Is this student ready to handle the problems associated with equipment malfunction during open water diving and will this student be able to comfortably manage them easily and proficiently? Has the escape instinct been trained out and replaced with an automatic behavioral response that a diver should have?"

If the student does not automatically resort to comfortable and efficient underwater problem solving, diving is "potentially dangerous" for that student - especially if the student still has an instinct to escape.

This is crap!

These practices are absolutely out of the question. They are unnecessary and they are dangerous. There's a reason this type of training has been scrapped.

Kind of reminds me of the infiltration course with the M60 firing over our heads while some type of controlled exposions occured in pits around us. But that was serious; there was a war going on. You might have heard about it, it was in all the papers circa '65.

Did you know that the M60 barrel had to be replaced every 5000 rounds to keep it from sagging to the point the bullets actually got close to the recruits? And our cheap base (Fort Carson, Colo) didn't have enough money for tracers so we had no idea where the bullets were.

Anyway, I am dead set against any training program that includes any kind of harrassment. I can't believe anyone is doing this crap anymore.

Richard

 

[Trace Malinowski]

Which is not the level of training a typical scuba instructor needs to teach recreational divers how to swim with the pretty fishes.

As for all of the rest -- where is the evidence that the extra time, cost, and risk in such exercises is worth the investment on the part of a typical diver who is going to dive a few times a year?

It comes down to a simple reality -- divers today are not the same group as divers of the '60s and '70s.

The problem is not the training. The problem, to the very small extent that there is one, is divers diving outside their level of training and experience.

King,

The whole point behind PDIC training is to create an active diver and not just a diver who dives a couple of times each year. That is in the PDIC instructor manual. A great example of the success of such training is that most of the GUE instructors that began with the organization were PDIC recreational divers and instructors.

Bob Sherwood, Andrew Georgitsis, Marcus Werneck, Dan Mackay and Jarrod Jablonski, himself, were among them. Although JJ became a PDIC instructor later, through Bob, all 4 of these other educators with a world-class reputation started as instructors with PDIC.

I believe Marcus started from scratch at OW. Bob came to PDIC after a poor OW class. I don't know if Andrew or Danny started at the OW level or not. SEveral of Marcus' guys who began at the OW level with him became both PDIC & GUE instructors.

I find it interesting that so many of the world's best technical and recreational instructors started their professional careers with PDIC and there are a lot of their students from PDIC recreational diving that have gone on to be active in both endeavors.

Most of the students that I have had at the recreational level are not just active divers, but active dive leaders with PDIC and with other agencies. Personal experience tells me there is merit in such training and such trainers.

Are divers really different? Or, are the dive leaders? I think the industry and the instructors have lost faith. I have never sat at PDIC HQ or attended an RSTC meeting or WRSTC meeting and looked at any evidence that divers are different. Where they are being led certainly is different! I wonder, are we alienating those people who would be active divers, by trying to sell the sport to those who "try" rather than those who "do"?