What's the hardest class you have taken, and what made it hard?

[mdb]

All skills, not just diving skills, can, quite obviously, be broken into components and learned with repetition.

I was very fortunate to have quality teachers, basic and advanced for all my SCUBA classes. Fun learning and good
diving thereafter.

 

[beanojones]

"never hold your breath," is "learned" both through lecture and reading or e-learning, and is supported in those formats with gas law topics and examples, IT IS NOT LEARNED IN THE WATER, and it does, I believe, "count for something."

You and I have talked past each other on this point to a degree, but there is also a completely different stance on what counts as 'having been learned' in terms of diving.

It simply does not matter (to me) if someone can repeat any scientific knowledge of any kind about diving. It's in the course, and we test for that, but that is basically bookkeeping. In fact, it only matters if, in practice, the rule of behavior involved is followed in practice. The only place where learning about gas expansion matters is in the water, because that is the only point at which there are consequences to the facts.

You may say it is learned somewhere else.

I will still insist that saying someone has 'learned' it simply is immaterial outside the water, since many people who have 'learned' this, still hold their breath the first time they take the regulator out of their mouth, some still fail to watch their ascent rates. You say they have learned it on land. I say (and say always) land experience and knowledge, and lecture and briefings, etc. don't count for anything except to the degree to which they result in correct water behavior. You miss my main point: Lecture and briefings may well help some students. But there are a lot of instructors who pour focus into lectures and briefs who long ago simply stopped focusing on the details in the water, which is the only point at which being an instructor matters at all.

If the above were not true not we could all get cave certified by reading good books, because that would mean that learning outside of the water counts for something. You say it does, I say it doesn't. It is an necessary evil, but nothing 'learned' above water counts until it is demonstrably put into practice in the water.

This goes similarly (with a different emphasis) in the discussions about the complicated exercises of a rescue class. If exercises are being repeated with mistakes when they are put into practice, how can they be said to have been learned before the point at which they are done (repeatably) without mistakes? Doing something once without mistakes might just be an accident. Doing it every time without mistakes is the only point at which something can be counted as having been learned, because the correct behavior is actually being (repeatably) demonstrated. Diving is a physical activity. And a statement about having learned something can only be justifiably asserted when it is repeatably shown to be part of an established behavior. Previous to that point it might just be accidental coincidence of circumstances. An instructor who lets one repitition count as proof something having been learned is missing that fact.

 

[beanojones]

Beano,

You missed my point. And you made incorrect assumptions. I actually feel that my instructor was excellent, and he DID do each small item by itself until I could do it properly. But when I put it all together at first, I was dwelling on some things, and forgot to do other things. My point was NOT that I didn't come away from the course with the course material learned. It was that some students need more practice to acheive muscle memory. I feel that my instructor put in alot of extra effort to see that happen, and it eventually did. He pointed out things that could be improved, and gave me the opportunity to work on it, for as long as I wanted, with him as the victim.

I want to correct one thing in my former post. "Shout" is a relative thing. When someone's mouth is right next to your ear, because they are the victim that you are towing, it does not take much volume for it to be a little strong. I used that word incorrectly, only because that was the affect that it had on me, to push me to put in a little more effort.

I have had bad instructors, and this one was a good one.
.

It is simply a fact that most divers admire the instructor of the course they consider the 'hardest' as having been the best instructor, because those divers see the chasm between their own poor performance and the instructors effortless performance. Despite a demonstrated gap in the rescue class organization (being made to do full exercises before the correct patterns were fully ingrained into muscle memory) , you still refers to that instructor as admirable. Why were mistakes made?

As I said, the fault being made the students, not the instructor's. I am not saying that the instructor was a bad person. I am saying that the example you gave is a pretty good example of 'less than perfect' organization and 'less than perfect' attention to detail on the part of the instructor.

Everyone makes mistakes. My point is that with more attention put on things outside of the water, an instructor who fails to notice that "I was dwelling on some things, and forgot to do other things", is more likely to have spent up his error free performance quota out of the water.

Nothing matters but the students performance in the water, and any instructor, providing they are laserfocsing their attention the student, will notice these problems.

 

[lowviz]

It is simply a fact that most divers admire the instructor of the course they consider the 'hardest' as having been the best instructor, because those divers see the chasm between their own poor performance and the instructors effortless performance. ...//.....

That is just plain stupid. I value instructors that have advanced me farther and faster than I ever could have on my own.

 

[beanojones]

I do agree that dismissing classroom and on-land education out of hand is going much too far. I've said it before, that I believe there are different kinds of learners, and although the kinesthetic learner will do best with hands-on corrections during execution, visual and auditory learners may do better with more lecture or more video. I have found video feedback to be one of the most valuable things anyone has done in my diving classes. SEEING what I am doing, and being able to correlate it with my own proprioceptive information, has helped make faster, bigger changes than being tapped on body parts or doing land simulation drills.

But I will totally agree with this statement: I worked with my Fundamentals instructor for a year and a half after my class. I took a second class, Rec Triox, from him, and I just could not pass the thing. My buddy and I went out time after time for reevaluations (all done at no charge, so there was no profit motive in holding us back) and just couldn't quite reach the bar. I eventually went off and took some "diving lessons" from a different instructor. My Fundies teacher subsequently contacted me in what I still think was an amazing e-mail: He said, "I have given you feedback in your classes on how you have done and what you could improve; now I'm asking you to do the same thing for me." He wanted to know why I had changed instructors. And I told him -- he was very good at telling me the "what", and showing me where I didn't manage it, but he wasn't helping me with the "how", and I just wasn't having any luck figuring it out on my own. Practicing diligently does not result in improvement, if the same mistakes are being made repeatedly.

The new instructor helped me a great deal with the "how". For example, he immediately spotted the fact that, when I got things out of my left pocket, or reached for my left-hand valve, I rolled my body to the right and vented my dry suit -- this resulted in buoyancy problems I'd have to fuss with in the middle of the drill. Just learning to inhibit that roll got rid of a ton of instability.

I think a lot of instruction is about the what. I would like to be better in helping the students I work with with the how.

If the first instructor laser focused his attention on the student's performance in the water, you could have saved a year of time.

I am sure that instructor's lectures were excellent.

I see a cause and effect there. If instructors treated everything outside of what a student does in the water as just something that had to be done, then you could have gotten where you wanted to go quickly. It's not that the first instructor was incapable of noticing details, it was just that the limited perfection of effort was poured into the (for me) wrong area.

It is not that lectures and briefing should not be done. It is that diving is a physical activity only. Lectures only serve to put a teeny tiny foundation under a huge mass of behaviors. Necessary evil. Both necessary, and potentially, and usually evil. In that, as Thal stated above, instructors can consider learning to have happened out of the water. Since learning for those instructors learning can happen out of the water, their teaching job might be considered done before they hit the water, and all that is left is evaluation in the water.

I firmly believe that to say that any learning of diving matters can be said to take place outside the water is lining the path to 'hard' courses, because, in fact, nothing but in-water behavior matters. The bigger the stack of notes an instructor uses for lecture, the smaller the stack of notes they have amassed for in water become. We all have limits to our focus and attention to detail.

Student behaviors are all that matter. Your post is a perfect example of how an instructor's misplaced focus (and not the material covered) made a course 'hard'. I am sure his lectures were excellent. Most instructors pour a bunch of effort into them, and the results show.

 

[TSandM]

beano, I think your good message is getting lost in what seems to me a bit of hyperbole. I don't think anyone would argue with you that the final evaluation of the success of the teaching is in whether the student can dive well or not, and that means execute and think properly in the water. For an OW diver, there is not a lot of academic material (especially now that the tables have been taken out of the class). In other classes, there is more -- Fundies had a fair amount about decompression, and Rec Triox had that and a discussion of sequences for handling failures. My cave classes have had information about marking protocols, as well as education about caves themselves. All this information is, I think, valuable to being a thoroughly educated diver. There is more to diving than training physical responses -- but a diver with a head stuffed full of information, who has no buoyancy control, has not been well-served by his classes.

My Fundies instructor, who I honor to this day for his patience and his generosity, was only very newly certified to teach these classes when I took them. He had a good idea in his mind of what he wanted his divers to look like and what they should be able to do. He did not have a very big tool kit of methods to help them get there, and I'm sure he would have had more over time. I know that, as I have watched Peter over the last year, he's learned and adapted, and adopted a lot of ideas from things he's read here on SB. I would love to come to Hawaii some day and watch what you do, because I think you have some strategies for improving stability that could be very useful to have at hand.

But you are verging upon the shrill in dismissing ALL instruction which takes place out of the water as useless. From my personal experience AND my observation of fellow students, it is not.

 

[Peter Guy]

Beano, you are just wrong with this last post. The ability of the instructor to lecture (which in my opinion was pretty bad, but) had zero to do with his inability to correct the "what." He could do many things very well -- for example, he was excellent IN THE WATER at correcting "foot work." He just wasn't good at identifying and correcting this particular issue which was purely an IN WATER thing.

I'll take a different sport -- skiing -- for an example of how a "lecture" can make huge differences in the physical activity. I was getting ready to take my instructor's exam and the two lead instructor's for the ski school saw something in my skiing they wanted to correct. So we went skiing. In fact, we did "coordinated" skiing -- as in, they stayed within a few inches of the tails of my skiis -- watched and then "shouted" corrections (right hand too low, right shoulder dropped, etc.). This virtually instantaneous feedback was critical to help me overcome habits I'd learned. In one trip down the mountain like this my skiing changed.

What made this particularly powerful was that I KNEW THE THEORY of what to do so I understood why their statements were made. As I changed this and that I could also FEEL THE CHANGES which the theory that I had already learned told me I should feel. It is my belief, based on my experience, that the integration of "feel and theory" makes the whole learning experience easier and more lasting.

I can't help but believe this is true for Scuba also.

 

[beanojones]

I know there have been physical skills which have been difficult for me to master -- reaching my isolator, for example, which turned out to be more of a problem of exposure protection than anything else.

Here's the salient question: who solved the difficulty of reaching your isolator valve? As in who figured out that it was the underarm fabric pull (my assumption) that was restricting your movement?

I should be easy for any instructor to see these problems if they are looking with enough focus.

 

[TSandM]

I figured it out when I went for the first dive in my Fusion, and reached up for my valves and realized that reaching them was utterly trivial.

I don't think it was the fabric on the suit; I think it was a combination of that and the bulk of the undergarment. In laminate suits, I'm not sure how easy it is to see what the actual problem is, unless it's clearly bad technique on the part of the diver.

 

[lv2dive]

It is simply a fact that most divers admire the instructor of the course they consider the 'hardest' as having been the best instructor, because those divers see the chasm between their own poor performance and the instructors effortless performance. Despite a demonstrated gap in the rescue class organization (being made to do full exercises before the correct patterns were fully ingrained into muscle memory) , you still refers to that instructor as admirable. Why were mistakes made?

As I said, the fault being made the students, not the instructor's. I am not saying that the instructor was a bad person. I am saying that the example you gave is a pretty good example of 'less than perfect' organization and 'less than perfect' attention to detail on the part of the instructor.

Everyone makes mistakes. My point is that with more attention put on things outside of the water, an instructor who fails to notice that "I was dwelling on some things, and forgot to do other things", is more likely to have spent up his error free performance quota out of the water.

Nothing matters but the students performance in the water, and any instructor, providing they are laserfocsing their attention the student, will notice these problems.

That is just plain stupid. I value instructors that have advanced me farther and faster than I ever could have on my own.

I don't know what snarky comment got edited out of lowviz'es post above, but what was left is something with which I completely concur.