this thread is funny...
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New Divers Beware: Sketchy dive shop in Cozumel puts profits over safety
- Thread starter bvana1
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this thread is funny...
markmantei
Contributor
A little off topic, but is it standard practice to mix confined and open water dives? Should confined water dives (where skill should be "taught") not be completed prior to the OW dives (where skills should be demonstrated in real diving conditions)?
Mark
It's not like that at all. Construction materials are inert with no will of their own. I'm not saying that there aren't good and bad teachers, but if a student is disinclined to learn, the best teacher in the world won't make much difference. The learning process happens in the mind of the student and the student runs the process. Horse, water, drink.
In locations where you can do OW right away, that's pretty standard practice. The skills that would be "evaluated" during OW dives would of course need to be preceded by the "teaching" of those skills in Confined Water. So you have to do the relevant CW session prior to doing the OW dives. Prerequisite for OW dive 2 is to have completed CW 1, 2 and 3, as is described in the "Day 1" plan above.
In Alberta (at least in Edmonton area), it's far more common to complete all the CW work prior to doing any OW dives as OW isn't as readily available. Having said that, we have had a few students doing a 6-week pool and classroom session where we went to the lake part way through to do OW dives 1 and 2, then again to the lake after completion of pool and classroom for OW dives 3 and 4.
kari
Hank49
Contributor
Does anyone really use Valsalva technique? I never realized it until I took the Performance Free Diving course, but I've always done the Frenzel technique (used by fighter pilots), using your tongue to force the air in your mouth up your eustachian tubes. Valsalva is hard and takes a lot more air....which isn't a big deal for bubble blowers but...
Yes, but in that analogy, we "bring the horse to water." In one of the posts quoted above, the student diver was sent on his own to do navigation, and "was lucky" to find his instructor again. That's more like saying to the horse "there is some water around here."
OW students require "direct supervision" for most activities. Having said that, just because the student didn't know where the instructor was doesn't mean the opposite is true... but I don't agree that when students fail to learn things it is all their fault. I also think there is a difference between students engaged in training and certified divers. Maybe only a day or so, but one is a work in progress, and one is a "finished product."
nodakdive
Contributor
Those of you that have been training people, and that's almost everyone in one way or another, understand that every so often you run into a student, or a trainee, or a customer that is capable of acknowledging their understanding of the concepts and can demonstrate their ability to apply the concepts, but aren't able to execute when it comes to actually putting the training and concepts to work on their own. It happens.
I'm working with someone like that right now. The kid spent many years in Iraq and Afghanistan and he's back home now. He was hired by the company I work for. Really, really nice guy. Trying his butt off to pick up my current line of work. I felt like Peppermint Patty for awhile because I had to keep explaining that he didn't need to call me "sir". Ya just wanna grab the kid and hug him. Though I don't think he's actually been diagnosed, if he's not suffering from PTSD I would be shocked.
In any event, the concepts have been explained and demonstrated, over and over. At the time, he gets it. He can apply the concepts and I make him demonstrate to me that he can apply the concepts. As soon as he has to do it "on his own", the bottom drops out. It happens. It's almost as though he gets it when the responsibility is not solely in his hands, but as soon as he has to do it on his own, he forgets everything he knew and was able to do the day before. I have begged him, for months now, to call me if he has the tiniest question about anything. "C, you can call me at 12am or 12pm or anytime in between. If you ask me about something we've already discussed, even if we've talked about it many times, you're not going to be bothering me. We can go over this and over this as much as you want and that's OK. I won't ever get angry or be disappointed. Please just call. About anything." Been begging him constantly and it has taken months for him to start doing so.
Is it my fault that he's able to demonstrate the understanding and execute it in front of me, but when the time comes he's lost, or is it his fault? I don't think it's either of our fault. It just is. Sometimes you can have a "student" that appears to get it, can demonstrate the understanding in front of you, but as soon as you move away from the specific task to something else, the information and the ability to execute the task disappears. It can be very tricky to teach someone like that, because you have every reason to believe that he "gets it", but when the rubber hit's the road, it's clear the person doesn't "get it". Sounds to me like ocean dive number one for Bvana1 was just such a situation. Deeperthoughts, maybe this is what you were referring to in an earlier post. Sometimes when communication fails, there is no real villain.
For the record, Bvana1, I appreciate, commend, applaud, and respect you for rescinding your complaints. Your original post would not have been my first action and the same is probably true for many others, but sometimes, especially in new frontiers, people make mistakes because they really don't know the environment yet. Anyhow, Thanks for stepping up to the plate and doing the right thing.
I hope the rest of your diving is without any problems. Long ago I was given some very sage advice, and I put it to use constantly, even to this day. "If you don't know, don't do. Ask."
Anytime I hear someone say "I'd rather ask for forgiveness than permission.", I cringe. LOL.
-Blair
I'm working with someone like that right now. The kid spent many years in Iraq and Afghanistan and he's back home now. He was hired by the company I work for. Really, really nice guy. Trying his butt off to pick up my current line of work. I felt like Peppermint Patty for awhile because I had to keep explaining that he didn't need to call me "sir". Ya just wanna grab the kid and hug him. Though I don't think he's actually been diagnosed, if he's not suffering from PTSD I would be shocked.
In any event, the concepts have been explained and demonstrated, over and over. At the time, he gets it. He can apply the concepts and I make him demonstrate to me that he can apply the concepts. As soon as he has to do it "on his own", the bottom drops out. It happens. It's almost as though he gets it when the responsibility is not solely in his hands, but as soon as he has to do it on his own, he forgets everything he knew and was able to do the day before. I have begged him, for months now, to call me if he has the tiniest question about anything. "C, you can call me at 12am or 12pm or anytime in between. If you ask me about something we've already discussed, even if we've talked about it many times, you're not going to be bothering me. We can go over this and over this as much as you want and that's OK. I won't ever get angry or be disappointed. Please just call. About anything." Been begging him constantly and it has taken months for him to start doing so.
Is it my fault that he's able to demonstrate the understanding and execute it in front of me, but when the time comes he's lost, or is it his fault? I don't think it's either of our fault. It just is. Sometimes you can have a "student" that appears to get it, can demonstrate the understanding in front of you, but as soon as you move away from the specific task to something else, the information and the ability to execute the task disappears. It can be very tricky to teach someone like that, because you have every reason to believe that he "gets it", but when the rubber hit's the road, it's clear the person doesn't "get it". Sounds to me like ocean dive number one for Bvana1 was just such a situation. Deeperthoughts, maybe this is what you were referring to in an earlier post. Sometimes when communication fails, there is no real villain.
For the record, Bvana1, I appreciate, commend, applaud, and respect you for rescinding your complaints. Your original post would not have been my first action and the same is probably true for many others, but sometimes, especially in new frontiers, people make mistakes because they really don't know the environment yet. Anyhow, Thanks for stepping up to the plate and doing the right thing.
I hope the rest of your diving is without any problems. Long ago I was given some very sage advice, and I put it to use constantly, even to this day. "If you don't know, don't do. Ask."
Anytime I hear someone say "I'd rather ask for forgiveness than permission.", I cringe. LOL.
-Blair
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I guess I've just never, in all my years of teaching, come across a student who met the course prerequisites but could not master the material.
As long as you do not exhale into the water Valsalva takes no more air than Frenzel, but it does permit mask equalization at the same time.
Yes, there are people who simply can not learn certain things, more-often it is a matter of being unable to make the extension from the specific to the general and then down to a different specific, but usually this involves problems with their brain's executive function centers or phobia based panic responses. These are detectable and thus the problem is avoidable. In you situation, however, you have no control over who your student is, and you're right, the student may not be capable of learning what you have to offer. But I' suspect that if it were presented in a rather different fashion, one more suited to his cognitive process, he just might be able to.
I see this all of the time in my classroom. Many students can demonstrate understanding when they know exactly the skill or problem solving strategy they need to use. When they are required to make decisions regarding which strategy to use, their proficiency level decreases, even when they have seemingly mastered that skill in a different context. These are often the same students who struggle to apply previously learned skills to a new context or synthesize their skills into new understandings. For example, a student can add and subtract fractions with regular success. If they are engaged in a contextual problem where they must decide if addition or subtraction will solve the problem, (rather than just being presented with numbers) I will sometimes see this very same student's ability to add and subtract fractions decrease. They will make errors in their computation that they would never make if the problem was just numbers on a page. This is why I always try to teach skills in context, rather than as pure algorithm. Then the skill is learned with the greater flexibility to use it in more applications.
It is the nature of learning as well as the nature of teaching.
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