Stuart, you clearly must have liked your instructor a lot, and I understand that, because I really liked mine, too. So it makes sense, in a way, that you would defend him . . . but you may eventually come to see, as I did over time, that just because you like the guy and YOU think what he did was reasonable does not make it so. In my experience, instructors who do what yours did also do other things during their classes to reduce the time and effort they have to invest in teaching. These shortcuts are not obvious to the OW student, who has never taken a diving class before, but they are obvious to other instructors who see both the process and the end result.
This is not about you. You chose a dive shop with a very reasonable expectation of being taught in a professional and responsible way. We are trying to tell you that you weren't, and that it's worrisome that the person who did teach you broke a major, and as RJP describes it, non-negotiable standard of training. That's just not the behavior of an instructor who is really going above and beyond to produce well-trained, confident, and adequately prepared students.
I have a friend who is a man I very much like, but I have seen him teach. The pool sessions are all done in one day, and students do each skill only until they do it successfully, but not again, because the schedule doesn't permit it. He arranges his open water dives to do the required 15 minute tour at the outset, and bring the students back to the float to run quickly through their skills so that the dives can all be done and everybody can leave by noon.
To contrast that, our shop's program involves 9 pool sessions of 90 minutes each. Each student demonstrates his skills to the instructor, and then is turned loose with his buddy to free swim in the deep end. The DMs have free rein to request additional performances of any skill the student has done for the instructor, so the average student will, for example, clear his mask -- while swimming -- a dozen or more times by the end of the class. The open water dives are arranged so that no more than two students are ever doing skills at once; they run through the skills, and are handed off to DMs for the tour, which is supposed to last as long as their gas or their thermal tolerance will allow. We do two dives each day, and never leave the dive site before 2 or 3 pm.
Which student do you think gets the better preparation? Even if someone is very talented, do you not think they benefit from more instructional time to cement their skills?
This is not about you. You chose a dive shop with a very reasonable expectation of being taught in a professional and responsible way. We are trying to tell you that you weren't, and that it's worrisome that the person who did teach you broke a major, and as RJP describes it, non-negotiable standard of training. That's just not the behavior of an instructor who is really going above and beyond to produce well-trained, confident, and adequately prepared students.
I have a friend who is a man I very much like, but I have seen him teach. The pool sessions are all done in one day, and students do each skill only until they do it successfully, but not again, because the schedule doesn't permit it. He arranges his open water dives to do the required 15 minute tour at the outset, and bring the students back to the float to run quickly through their skills so that the dives can all be done and everybody can leave by noon.
To contrast that, our shop's program involves 9 pool sessions of 90 minutes each. Each student demonstrates his skills to the instructor, and then is turned loose with his buddy to free swim in the deep end. The DMs have free rein to request additional performances of any skill the student has done for the instructor, so the average student will, for example, clear his mask -- while swimming -- a dozen or more times by the end of the class. The open water dives are arranged so that no more than two students are ever doing skills at once; they run through the skills, and are handed off to DMs for the tour, which is supposed to last as long as their gas or their thermal tolerance will allow. We do two dives each day, and never leave the dive site before 2 or 3 pm.
Which student do you think gets the better preparation? Even if someone is very talented, do you not think they benefit from more instructional time to cement their skills?
but please let us know when you do finish your OW. Don't tell us any of the particulars, just tell us you finished. Let us congratulate you, because we do have your best wishes and thoughts in our hearts. Remember, this is social media, and you can't see my face as I type this. 90% of communication is not verbal, and that's the 90% that gets missed from my keyboard to yours.
