Advanced Open Water Disappointment

[L13]

Darn, we lost a few good posts to moderation. I guess we have to learn to play nicer together, if we want to have nice things

 

[boulderjohn]

Darn, we lost a few good posts to moderation. I guess we have to learn to play nicer together, if we want to have nice things

When the guy doing the moderating is simultaneously taking contentious positions, even in the moderator posts, things are bound to get dicey. It used to be that a moderator could not both moderate and participate in the topic of the thread. The new rules apparently allow you to moderate and participate in the same post. (I write this knowing it will be gone soon.)

 

[The Chairman]

If I understand the idea correctly, reordering how things are taught (buoyancy before other skills instead of after) is an investment of some time up front for a large payoff in learning rate at the end, and in any case better learning by the end.

I spend time on the physics of vectors, or why trim is so important. It's usually done around a breakfast table, or bench as I outline the course. I use my fingers as fins and demonstrate how even a slight downward kick upsets your buoyancy. Of course, we cover the hand signals for trim and such. Then, as John mentioned, the student is always working on their trim and buoyancy while they are in the water. Instead of spending a few minutes at the end of a session to learn how to get off the bottom, they've been mastering this the entire class. Frickin' magic.

I usually only need two 3-hour sessions in a pool to get them ready for open water.

 

[L13]

When the guy doing the moderating is simultaneously taking contentious positions, even in the moderator posts, things are bound to get dicey. It used to be that a moderator could not both moderate and participate in the topic of the thread. The new rules apparently allow you to moderate and participate in the same post. (I write this knowing it will be gone soon.)

Actually, he(or someone) moderated out all his comments. It looks like the old rules still apply. Just a temporary slip.

 

[The Chairman]

Some people have issues breathing without the mask and need more time to learn.

I actually teach that standing in waist deep water before they get on scuba. I have them fill their mask with water and then we have a conversation. No scuba and no snorkel: just a mask full of water. Once they can speak full sentences without gagging, I tell them the mermaid joke. They usually snort through their nose, clearing their mask. Then we work on mask clearing while floating in the shallows. Once they get all that done, we don Scuba and go blow bubbles.

 

[BackAfter30]

There is a different way to look at this "frontloading". You can think of it as a seperate set of tasks or instruction, or you can look at it as what I know it to be: taking more time to slowly sneak up on the "real" learning. What the guys are advocating is not taking additional days to learn to dive trimmed and neutral, but to just start the training in a way that allows to neutral/trim to occur naturally automagically. You will all easily note that I am too junior to be an instructor so, what do I know? But, I AM an instructor; a ski instructor. Same thing. I do a lot of what's called "boot work" when I teach never-evers. It takes a bunch of time up front. While my peers already have their studenten sliding down the beginner area, I'm still doing boot work. THEN I take my flock to the sliding place and they slide successfully as well as their peers skiing with my peers, and my team tends to advance at a quicker pace. The reason they will advance quicker is that they are doing the right things without even knowing it, or having to try to do it. That is what @boulderjohn and @The Chairman have been talking about; it's not really additional teaching which requires more time, it's teaching in a different order that "tricks" the studenten into doing things better from the start. If they do all of the right stuff from the start, then they don't need to be taught anything to counter non-ideal moves later. "Front loading" doesn't take any more time than teaching them kneeling, because you're not teaching them anything extra.

 

[L13]

There is a different way to look at this "frontloading". You can think of it as a seperate set of tasks or instruction, or you can look at it as what I know it to be: taking more time to slowly sneak up on the "real" learning. What the guys ar advocating is not taking additional days to learn to dive trimmed and neutral, but to just start the training in a way that allows to neutral/trim to occur naturally automagically. You will al easily note that I am too junior to be an instructor so, what do I know? But, I AM an instructor; a ski instructor. Same thing. I do a lot of what's called "boot work" when I teach never-evers. It takes a bunch of time up front. While my peers already have their studenten sliding down the beginner area, I'm still doing boot work. THEN I take my flock to the sliding place and they slide successfully as well as their peers skiing with my peers, and my team tends to advance at a quicker pace. The reason they will advance quicker is that they are doing the right things without even knowing it, or having to try to do it. That is what @boulderjohn and @The Chairman have been talking about; it's not really additional teaching which requires more time, it's teaching in a different order that "tricks" the studenten into doing things better from the start. If they do all of the right stuff from the start, then they don't need to be taught anything to counter non-ideal moves later. "Front loading" doesn't take any more time than teaching them kneeling, because you're not teaching them anything extra.

I always regretted learning to snowplow with my skis first, before learning to ski on my skis.

 

[tjjohnson36]

, I tell them the mermaid joke. They usually snort through their nose, clearing their mask

Ok, I have to ask, what is your mermaid joke? I'll take the bait... lol

 

[VikingDives]

The law of primacy is so ridiculously important. I used to use a rather amusing video in my OW course that showed a group of OW divers who'd just been certified doing things like flipping to a kneeling position mid-water to clear their masks and doing other things that showed that they'd clearly been trained on their knees. The problem was just showing that video in class was teaching students to unconsciously emulate those divers. The video was funny, but I was unintentionally teaching the wrong things by using it.

 

[VikingDives]

I share pool time with another local shop. Some of their instructors kind of try to teach in NB/T, but it runs the spectrum to grossly overweighted and struck to the bottom of the pool. One of the nice things about this arrangement is that I get to compare the difference between how classes progress and where students end up at the end of the course.

The other shop is PADI, and they teach exactly to the standard. I teach basically the same progression that PADI courses follow but, I teach in NB/T right from the start, but I get to observe how both of our classes progress in the same amount of water time. I'd say the progression, skills-wise, looks something like this:

In the class I'm teaching this weekend, I spent over two hours in the shallow end working on neutral buoyancy, mask-clearing and reg. recovery. We progressed a little slower than usual, so it took about two and a half hours to get through those skills, but by the end of the day (four hours), they were hovering horizontally within about 20 degrees of trim and frog kicking. We'd also more skills than the other class. Once you establish comfort in the water, everything flows so much better.