Build Your Own Dive Professional

[Trace Malinowski]

For those of us who came of age in the 1980s, the decade was a pretty good one for Hollywood. One of the most popular directors was John Hughs who was responsible for films like The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Home Alone along with many other comedy classics.

Weird Science hit the theaters when I was a junior in high school and had a lot of teen boys crushing on actress and model Kelly LeBrock. In the movie, Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith play two teenage nerds (Gary and Wyatt) who channel their inner Frankensteins and use a computer, a lightning storm, and a doll to create Lisa, a living, breathing, fully-functional girlfriend with magical powers.

If you could build the perfect dive pro, what would you infuse into him or her? What traits, experience, dive count, prerequisite courses, skills, knowledge, abilities, etc., would you program into the computer to spit out the Mike Nelson of Mike Nelsons for the real world?

 

[lowviz]

If you could build the perfect dive pro, what would you infuse into him or her?

Reminds me of my favorite Trace quote: "Never ever ever ever take your eyes off the student!" (Feel free to correct the quote if I got it wrong...

As for the student, resist trying to impress your instructor. Just focus your energy on "getting" what is being taught.

 

[SpaceWarMachine]

I would make Lisa from Weird Science.

 

[VikingDives]

What traits, experience, dive count, prerequisite courses, skills, knowledge, abilities, etc., would you program into the computer to spit out the Mike Nelson of Mike Nelsons for the real world?

Traits - besides the usual (empathy, good communications skills etc.) I would want a person who's a lifelong learner. I.E. someone who wants to keep learning after they achieve their goal.

Experience/dive count - I've always though that time underwater was a bit of a better measure than dive counts. Dives are certainly important, but I don't think having some number of dives proves much. Ideally, I'd want an instructor that had been different places (oceans/lakes/warm water/cold water etc.) by the end of the course. I'm not sure that the way the dive industry allows bypassing assistant instructor is really a wise choice. Teaching under supervision takes a lot of pressure off, and allows a little time to "find your groove" before being tossed into the water with a class of students.

I spent my IDC trying to learn to teach well, and it seemed like half of my instruction was how to regurgitate a presentation, while hitting all the high points to get a good score on the exam. When we weren't doing that, we were learning sales techniques or the going over the instructor manual.

There were a couple of (3 maybe?) pool sessions, a single open water dive and 0 instruction on dive theory, physics, physiology. If we were taught anything about how to teach scuba, beyond following standards and procedures, I can't recall it anymore.

I'd like to see instruction for future instructors concentrate more on things that matter, like what to do with a student who has mask removal issues, for example. Having a little play book with 5 or 10 ideas on how to deal with those kinds of issues would've been a real help for me. That and a mentorship/apprentice program before being cut loose would help improve instructional quality.

The true problem as I see it is that quality is very hard to scale, when it comes to instruction. There's always going to be someone at some point who isn't going to emphasize quality. Agencies with reputations for quality (GUE, UTD) end up being niche players in the market, while agencies like PADI (which one could say has high standards, based on their written materials) suffer from mediocre reputations, even though there are high quality instructors in every agency.

 

[Akimbo]

If you could build the perfect dive pro, what would you infuse into him or her? What traits, experience, dive count, prerequisite courses, skills, knowledge, abilities, etc., would you program into the computer to spit out the Mike Nelson of Mike Nelsons for the real world?

I would start with one of these guys in the yellow shirts.

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