Advanced Open Water Disappointment

[Eric Sedletzky]

Is that you solution to fix the current issues?

“Let’s see who can come back up with 20kg of lead …” * *waves* *

Survival of the fittest …

Ha ha ha, lol! no that’s not the solution by todays standards.
‘Throw them in with just a tank’, “SWIM OR DIE SUCKER!! Lol Shut their air off and tie their legs together too, make it more fun.
I’m just sayin, in theory that would be a serious wake up call to how to be properly weighted: if you have no mechanism to overcome overweighting. It would be more like how freedive weighting is done.

 

[The Chairman]

we do not always know who to pick as our mentor(s).

It's quite obvious when you see a good diver. At least it was for me. One of my mentors was Reggie Ross. He was a part of my NAUI IDC and I remember seeing his frog kick in the pool. Wow. Monkey see, monkey do. I was hooked. I thought his concept of weighting divers just right was awesome. Then I learned Dr Bob Atheridge's weight titration that compensated for an empty tank before the dive. I was really hooked.

Here's the conundrum. I was also taught to control my class through having them kneel. perfect weighting and kneeling just don't work. It took a year or two to realize that I was having a problem getting my students off of their knees that caused me to bypass that all together. I was told I couldn't teach this way. I even had one class reported to NAUI, but they couldn't see any standard I had violated.

My other mentor came from that NAUI IDC too. Michael Brady or MB here on SB. He taught me to assess everyone I taught. To be aware that everyone learns a bit differently and to accommodate that. Both he and Reggie are gone. Dr Bob might be too.

 

[pauldw]

Mostly, I teach classes of 2 or 3, unless it's a family. I really don't like more than 4 and I think having big classes often results in me wanting to take short cuts and not giving everyone a great time.

As far as successful teaching is concerned, I'd suggest that small class sizes with more one on one teaching has a vastly bigger effect than using this teaching method or that. When I was a high school teacher, I taught in an alternative high school, difficult kids, in classes of under ten kids per class. I later taught in a regular high school, regular kids, in classes of over thirty kids per class. That made me miss the first school, where you could sit down with one kid and accomplish something.

 

[chillyinCanada]

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[scubaozy]

I think it's because the "law of primacy" is tossed around like it is, well, an immutable law of learning. It's not. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that the the law of recency is in fact what's at play.

Biased mind will find an excuse to interpret irrelevant events as evidence.. Making arguments is not evidence, as you read earlier on, I explain root cause certain observed behavior completely different than other person.
A typical dive session is 45-60 mins and there are not that many skills that can be taught on the knees per dive, so, if the instructor chose to teach on the knees, this should not take more than 15 mins of total time, is that sufficient time to establish bad motor skills?
Our brain is single threaded, so, we are not very good at doing several things at the same time. I see also experienced divers stopping when clearing their masks. Someone who is negatively buoyant/overweighted does the same; they just slowly sink when clearing the mask and usually end up on their knees, as oppose to lying on the reef, which make sense, noone would like to touch the ocean floor with their chest. Evidence would have been that a beginner diver deflated their bcd and kneeled.

 

[The Chairman]

Evidence would have been that a beginner diver deflated their bcd and kneeled.

Yeah. I've actually seen this happen more than once with different divers. They're the ones that usually complain about all the water in their BC too.

 

[scubaozy]

Yeah. I've actually seen this happen more than once with different divers. They're the ones that usually complain about all the water in their BC too.

Never seen.

 

[The Chairman]

Never seen.

I lived in Key largo for many years. Holiday divers don't seem to give a crap and it always irked me to see that sort of thing.

One of my friends was leading a night dive for the first time as an instructor and he asked me to show him how I do it. There were three groups/classes on that boat and we all did our own dive briefings. We were the last group in and I was the first in our group to splash. Imagine my surprise to see 11 divers, including at least 2 instructors, standing on the bottom.

Standing on the bottom. Absolutely disgusting.

I had already addressed the issue that we don't sit, lie, or stand on the bottom with our group, and as they splashed, they all did their best to stay off of the bottom. The other groups were starting to swim off, and I made the conscious choice that we would go the other way.

 

[boulderjohn]

if the instructor chose to teach on the knees, this should not take more than 15 mins of total time, is that sufficient time to establish bad motor skills?

One of my observations in my early instructing career that led me to move toward neutral buoyancy instruction was that the people I had doing pool-only discover scuba looked like better divers at the end of a 1 1/2 hour pool session then the open water students I had for eight hours of pool instruction. I realize that the difference was in the amount of time spent simply swimming. The focus of the pool sessions for discover students was having fun, and that meant swimming around. The focus of the pool sessions for the open water students was doing skills, and we were doing them on the knees.

The open water class pool sessions include an unspecified amount of time simply swimming while neutrally buoyant. The amount of time is unspecified because you can never really be sure how much time you will have, depending upon how much time you are scheduled in the pool and how much time it takes to do the skills. If you read the wording in the standards, though, they clearly want you to spend a lot of time doing that. I found it extremely helpful to the students, so I timed my classes so that the last student was climbing the ladder to leave the pool as the second hand finished the final minute of our time.

In contrast, some other instructors in our shop bragged about how fast they got the class done. That was a matter of pride for them, and I think some of them were having a friendly competition. The best way to get your time down to a minimum was to limit or even eliminate the free swimming time.

That made no sense to me. Our shop had paid for that time. We got no cost deduction four taking less time than scheduled. In my mind, we paid for the time, we should use it.

 

[The Chairman]

I had doing pool-only discover scuba looked like better divers at the end of a 1 1/2 hour pool session

I saw the same thing. I remember a discover diver pointing at a group of divers kneeling on the reef. On the boat he asked why they were praying. That was funny. I told him that it was a class where the instructor chose to do skills on the knees. Why? It was because they knew no other way.