Sir: with all due respect (and I do mean that sincerely as you do have far more experience with teaching and diving than I do) I'm not sure that I have a personal "agenda" other than my position, based on my personal teaching experience, that situations can arise that are beyond one's ability to control and that being unable to control some situations (as in my previously described gorilla student's ascent to the surface in the pool) does not necessarily indicate a failure on the part of the instructor. My student had demonstrated a skill successfully a number of times with no indications of nervousness or hesitation. To suggest without having seen the student that there were signs I missed that he had not really mastered the skill is simply prima facie not reasonable. I thanked LeAnne because my understanding (which may be flawed) of your stated position is that the instructor (in this case me!) must have missed something and did not prepare the student adequately. I do not believe that to be the case. I am one who is willing to admit errors when I make them in hopes of learning not making the same error twice. I do not believe I made an error in this case.
I suspect that you are wrong, I suspect that there were more clues than you'd possibly believe; clues that, had you been attuned to them, would have indicated to you what was about to happen, before it happened. Now I could be wrong, but I don't think so. All my experience tells me that I should not think so. I really don't want to jam this down your throat, or put you down, because expanding your SA as an Instructor is oe of the most important things that you can do, and I feel badly that I may get in the way of your being able to do so because I made an issue of it.
The reason that I'm 90 percent certain that there were indicators before the bolt is because over the last three decades or so, looking at bolts of different types has been kind of a hobby of mine. At every ITC that I've ever run or staffed, as we were preparing for the problem solving dives I told a story about my ITC experience, as a warning for what I did not want to see happen.
There was a staff member at my ITC who came out from NAUI HQ. He was very full of himself but rather inexperienced. In fact the HQ Guy had far less diving and teaching experience than I did. I drew him for the problem solving dive.
We were at Salsbury Quarry (sp), Ohio. I was to set the scene, and then take eight simulated students, including the chap from HQ, out to the raft to simulate teaching a rear entry from a boat. Part of the rules of the game was that no staff member could do something that had not actually happened to them.
I'd set the scene as Dive 5, the final OW dive in a 42 hour course. We got out to the raft, I positioned all the students, having given them strict and clear instructions about how they were to enter the water with an inflated BC in turn. Just as the last student got into position the HO chap backrolls into the water and disappears under the surface. I secured my group and went and got him, following his bubbles down. When we got to the surface he announced that I had failed the exercise because I had lost control of my group. Well ... we got into a nasty exchange of words, his point being that he'd managed to get away and mine being that if by Dive 5 you hadn't sorted the squirrels out, well ... you weren't much of an instructor. Fortunately Lee Somers agreed with my analysis and I was able to repeat the dive with a different skill and Peter Carrol of Temple as my evaluator rather than the dweeb from HQ.
As a result of that I have always led a discussion of indicators that staff members should display as warning signs before doing something stupid. Many you undoubtedly know, watch out for divers at the front and back of the line, watch out for divers that forget their gear, that hesitate when asked to perform a skill, that half fill their mask by letting a little water trickle in rather than just pulling it away from their face, there are any number of clues that show discomfort, ill at ease, or downright fear. I'll be damned if just about every staff member there doesn't always know a few symptoms to watch out for. Frankly, taking this approach for as many years as I have has turned it from a laundry list of symptoms to a holistic (I hate that word), almost gestalt, approach to predicting trouble based on a myriad of attributes. So I am always watching, always heading off the next problem before it even happens. I feaverently and respectfully hope that I can convince you to start looking at each and every student as a potential squirrel underwater, allow no complacency, practice defensive instruction, just as you do defensive diving, "what am I going to do if he ...?" Try that somewhat paranoid approach for a few classes, and guess what ... you will begin to have fewer problem students, because you will, in no time at all, be fixing the problems that they're about to have before they do, and they will learn without ever having to go through those failures.
