OW failure, advice?

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@MyEarHurts,

To give you some context for why so many instructors here are incredulous that your class of eight students spent a total of three hours in the pool, it may help to explain a few things that are supposed to happen in a pool session and how long it takes to teach eight people to do them right.

Waterskills Assessment: Each diver is required to do a 10-minute survival swim/float and either a 200-yard continuous swim or a 300-yard swim with mask/fin snorkel. With a bit of a rest between the two events, that's a minimum of 30 minutes.

Gear assembly. The standards require OW students to assemble and disassemble their gear five times before they finish their pool work. How quickly can eight people get out of the water, doff their gear, break down their gear, swap tanks as needed, re-assemble their gear with progressively less help, get their gear get back on, and get back in the water? Ten minutes would be an amazingly efficient pit stop. That's assuming nobody needs to go to the bathroom, eat a sandwich, warm up, or check messages. Add two minutes per transition for the required pre-dive safety check on all five dives. That's a minimum of 60 minutes just for gear assembly.

So between the waterskills assessment and gear assembly, half of the three hours would have been used up before anyone got underwater.

Hover (30 seconds) Oral inflate/hover (60 seconds): The performance requirement calls for students to hover without kicking or sculling. In confined water dive 3, students have to do it for thirty seconds without kicking or sculling. In dive 4, they have to orally inflate to become neutral, then hover for 60 seconds. OW students almost never perform either of these skills successfully on the first attempt. Either they rise or sink, or else they work their arms and legs before reaching the required time. These skill pretty much require full attention by the instructor on one student at a time to re-start the timer every time they lose buoyancy or use their arms or legs. To run eight students through these two skills would require at least 30 minutes.

That leaves just one hour to learn mask skills, regulator skills, regulator snorkel exhanges, scuba kit removal and replacement at surface, scuba kit removal and replacement underwater, weight checks, no-mask swim, descents or ascents, air depletion exercises, simulated horizontal CESA, emergency weight removal, disconnecting and reconnecting the LP hose to the power inflator, a bunch of other skills, and oh yeah, learning to dive, practicing not coming into contact with the bottom, and so forth. All of these skills have performance requirements, and students have to perform them well enough for the instructor to believe they can do them consistently well--that takes additional reps.

I don't see any way that session could have been completed for that many students in the time you say without either skipping skills entirely or not making students fulfill the performance requirements.

I generally allot five hours for the pool work in a private or semi-private class--but the clock is never the boss. We work on every skill until both the student and I agree it rates a smiley face. Sometimes it takes longer. Sometimes it takes a lot longer.

You stated somewhere in your comments that you thought you successfully performed the skills. You may have done them as well as the other students were doing them, but I am skeptical that you received the training you should have--and that's not counting the way your injury was handled.

When you get a clean bill of health from the doctor, I recommend you get a referral to have another instructor somewhere else finish your training properly.

Best wishes,
Where we skipped or "saved time":

Gear Assembly/Disassembly: Done in classroom a few days before the pool.

Hover/Oral Inflate Hover: Didn't really do these the way you describe. We weren't required to perform for any specific time, we just went underwater for a couple minutes and tried it out.

Air depletion/regulator skills/mask skills: These were done really quickly kneeling at the shallow end.

No simulated CESA, no emergency weight removal (we did remove and replace the weights, but it was like a side note and took 1 minute), not much of a surface kit removal (we took a five minute break out of our kit which they kind of tied into that).

Most alarming: No time spent on practicing buoyancy or equalization. Students were also allowed to kneel or lay down the whole time when it was convenient.

It's like we touched on nearly everything in some way, but did not dedicate time and reps to anything. It was right onto the next thing. What took the longest was the underwater remove/replace BCD, which is the only thing that was done one at a time.
 
How does the calculus change with 8 students and 3 instructors?


Not much.

And that’s assuming all three really are instructors. In a group like that, it’s common to have one instructor and two DM’s or DMC’s.
 
Not much.

And that’s assuming all three really are instructors. In a group like that, it’s common to have one instructor and two DM’s or DMC’s.

Just curious, as OP said three instructors, which may decrease the time involved, if that were truly the case? 3:1, 3:1 and 2:1.
 
Not much.

And that’s assuming all three really are instructors. In a group like that, it’s common to have one instructor and two DM’s or DMC’s.
The time a class takes could be significantly reduced if you actually had 3 instructors compared to 1 instructor and 2 DMs.
  • In a class of 8 students with one instructor and 2 DM assistants, the instructor demonstrates a skill and then evaluates each student's performance on that skill while the assistants watch to make sure nobody drowns.
  • In a class of 8 students with 2-3 instructora and 0-1 DM assistants, one instructor demonstrates a skill and then the multiples instructors evaluate each student's performance on that skill, meaning that the evaluation time (which is a a big part of the class) is cut at least in half.
 
Where we skipped or "saved time":

Gear Assembly/Disassembly: Done in classroom a few days before the pool.

Hover/Oral Inflate Hover: Didn't really do these the way you describe. We weren't required to perform for any specific time, we just went underwater for a couple minutes and tried it out.

Air depletion/regulator skills/mask skills: These were done really quickly kneeling at the shallow end.

No simulated CESA, no emergency weight removal (we did remove and replace the weights, but it was like a side note and took 1 minute), not much of a surface kit removal (we took a five minute break out of our kit which they kind of tied into that).

Most alarming: No time spent on practicing buoyancy or equalization. Students were also allowed to kneel or lay down the whole time when it was convenient.

It's like we touched on nearly everything in some way, but did not dedicate time and reps to anything. It was right onto the next thing. What took the longest was the underwater remove/replace BCD, which is the only thing that was done one at a time.

What was your impression of certification? An intro to skills? Or to certify you've reached some proficiency?
 
Just curious, as OP said three instructors, which may decrease the time involved, if that were truly the case? 3:1, 3:1 and 2:1.
Sorry, I haven't been clear here. I don't know the difference but I know they were all three of different "ranks" however that works
 
What was your impression of certification? An intro to skills? Or to certify you've reached some proficiency?
Some proficiency. It's hard to describe but I feel I should have at least enough practice at every skill that all of them can be done easily under controlled conditions, and are somewhat automatic rather than things one must think about fully each time.
 
Sorry, I haven't been clear here. I don't know the difference but I know they were all three of different "ranks" however that works
We can figure it all out easily. How many were actively instructing and evaluating student skills? How many were mostly observers who did gopher-type activities?

EDIT: I just realized that with the standards violations identified above, it would not be beyond expectations for assistants to instruct without the proper certification.
 
It really doesn't matter if it's theoretically possible to conduct proper confined water instruction in three hours with a 3:8 instructor:student ratio because it's clear that this operation did not.
 
Some proficiency. It's hard to describe but I feel I should have at least enough practice at every skill that all of them can be done easily under controlled conditions, and are somewhat automatic rather than things one must think about fully each time.

That was kind of my impression too, but ultimately, it felt like an intro to new skills, so that's what I took with me going into AOW, the attitude that I would get introduced to new skills and practice a tiny bit, but I would need more practice to be proficient.

After you've healed and gotten certified, I hope it'll be easy for you to have more practice. I've signed up for more "pedestrian" dives, where it's shallow, no current, not much to see, just so I could concentrate on trying different skills, different ways of doing things.
 

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