Ah yes. 16 hours is for the whole course, not for the mask skill... LOL
small detail there.
<small hijjack>
Jim, how do you see the issue of drilling skills that the student gets right away? I've noticed that most people get maybe 80% of the skills/material naturally without a whole lot of drilling. For example, showing cramp removal or towing a tired diver I don't focus on a lot of repetitions to see if they understood it... just 2 or 3 times on different days of the course.
For some skills I do, for example, mask skills, air sharing, and buoyancy control, to pick a few examples, get huge amounts of repetition, for some students more than for others, depending on their needs/performance. These are what I see as "core" skills". Do you guys make a distinction between core skills and non-core skills and focus more energy on the core skills or do you see all skills as equally important and subject to equal amounts of repetition?
Also, do you tailor you approach to the needs of the student or do they all go through the same number of hours?
I'm asking to get a sense of why you take 16 hours in the water with students. The PADI system is more "performance based" and I've had students who were naturals and could probably have learned to dive without an instructor and people who have taken considerably longer than 16 hours to reach a level of comfort that both they and we were comfortable with (I think the record to date for our shop is a little over 30 hours--maybe a *lot* over 30 hours, with some people we stop keeping track...LOL)
I'm curious how you see this
</small hijjack>