I'm sure I know at least one instructor who, if he doubled or quadrupled the amount of time he spent on students. would produce exactly the same results. The only different would be that the student would have paid double or quadruple the amount of money to reach the same level (or lack thereof) of competence.
Surely there has to be a happy medium. I think we can agree that classes that are too fast are crap. That should make Wayne happy to hear but on the same token, classes that are too drawn out do not force the instructor to improve his/her efficiency either because, quite frankly, there is no reason to be efficient if you can spend all the time in the world on something.
To draw on a real world example of what I mean: A few years ago I worked for a short time with an instructor who had crossed over from the NOB (Dutch CMAS variant) to PADI. To be clear, this is NOT the instructor I was talking about at the top of this post. Anyway, the instructor in question was accustomed to taking anywhere between 6 and 12 months to certify an open water student. I'm not sure how many hours exactly he spent on the course but I believe it was upwards of 100 hours and probably more if the student showed below average aptitude. In our protocol we spent about 30 hours on the course, which was the PADI recommendation.
On a particular day we were scheduled to take a group of 4 students with the two of us. We agreed to split them up in pairs and each take a pair. I don't recall if it was module 2 or module 3. The pool doors opened 1/2 hour before we were allowed to get in the water (had to wait for swimmers to exit) and we had 75 minutes maximum of useful pool time. In the 1/2 hour before we were allowed to get in the water, I had my pair of divers get changed, set up their gear and do the pre-dive buddy check so that as soon as the last swimmer was out of the water we splashed down.
My colleague splashed down with his students 28 minutes later. I know for sure. I timed it.
After the fact I asked him what the problem was (I naturally assumed there was a problem). He said that there was no problem but it took him that long to go through the buddy check and the steps for the deep-water entry with his students. In other words, from the time we entered the pool it took him nearly an hour to set up the gear, do a buddy check and a deep water entry with two people of normal aptitude.
When I suggested to him that the were more efficient ways to get that done he got defensive and said, "there's no way your students know how to do a buddy check. You just glossed over it." My response was to call one of my students over and ask them to run through a mock buddy check with my colleague, naming all the steps and the reasons for the steps, which he did.
His students could do that too, but it took them 5 times longer to learn it.
Why? Because he was used to having 5 times longer to teach it and he never had to learn how to get it across to students in less time.
And that's the problem I have with the blanket statement that "more time = more learning". Because it's ... simply ... not ... true. At least not all of the time.
The problem I have with playing the "efficiency" card is that it's too easy to fall into the trap of cutting corners. You can get BIG returns from focusing on efficiency, as John's example illustrates, but in my experience "efficiency" is too often used as a euphemism for "hurrying", which brings this post full circle. The instructor I alluded to above is a person who thinks of himself as highly efficient while when I look at him, what I see is someone who equates "demonstration" to "mastery" and pushes his students to an uncomfortably high tempo that leaves them (in my opinion) nearly unable to fully grasp and/or absorb what they're being "taught".
So yeah what I see here are two people (Wayne and Pete) locking horns over the issue of "time" and they both have very good points but are both arguing positions that (when taken to an extreme) don't make sense. What's really needed is efficient instructors taking as much "time" as the student needs (lo and behold this is what standards dictate) but in practice the idea of "performance based learning" is often undermined by a weird obsession with "time"--either too much or too little, but in both cases not what the student's needs necessarily dictate.
R..
Surely there has to be a happy medium. I think we can agree that classes that are too fast are crap. That should make Wayne happy to hear but on the same token, classes that are too drawn out do not force the instructor to improve his/her efficiency either because, quite frankly, there is no reason to be efficient if you can spend all the time in the world on something.
To draw on a real world example of what I mean: A few years ago I worked for a short time with an instructor who had crossed over from the NOB (Dutch CMAS variant) to PADI. To be clear, this is NOT the instructor I was talking about at the top of this post. Anyway, the instructor in question was accustomed to taking anywhere between 6 and 12 months to certify an open water student. I'm not sure how many hours exactly he spent on the course but I believe it was upwards of 100 hours and probably more if the student showed below average aptitude. In our protocol we spent about 30 hours on the course, which was the PADI recommendation.
On a particular day we were scheduled to take a group of 4 students with the two of us. We agreed to split them up in pairs and each take a pair. I don't recall if it was module 2 or module 3. The pool doors opened 1/2 hour before we were allowed to get in the water (had to wait for swimmers to exit) and we had 75 minutes maximum of useful pool time. In the 1/2 hour before we were allowed to get in the water, I had my pair of divers get changed, set up their gear and do the pre-dive buddy check so that as soon as the last swimmer was out of the water we splashed down.
My colleague splashed down with his students 28 minutes later. I know for sure. I timed it.
After the fact I asked him what the problem was (I naturally assumed there was a problem). He said that there was no problem but it took him that long to go through the buddy check and the steps for the deep-water entry with his students. In other words, from the time we entered the pool it took him nearly an hour to set up the gear, do a buddy check and a deep water entry with two people of normal aptitude.
When I suggested to him that the were more efficient ways to get that done he got defensive and said, "there's no way your students know how to do a buddy check. You just glossed over it." My response was to call one of my students over and ask them to run through a mock buddy check with my colleague, naming all the steps and the reasons for the steps, which he did.
His students could do that too, but it took them 5 times longer to learn it.
Why? Because he was used to having 5 times longer to teach it and he never had to learn how to get it across to students in less time.
And that's the problem I have with the blanket statement that "more time = more learning". Because it's ... simply ... not ... true. At least not all of the time.
The problem I have with playing the "efficiency" card is that it's too easy to fall into the trap of cutting corners. You can get BIG returns from focusing on efficiency, as John's example illustrates, but in my experience "efficiency" is too often used as a euphemism for "hurrying", which brings this post full circle. The instructor I alluded to above is a person who thinks of himself as highly efficient while when I look at him, what I see is someone who equates "demonstration" to "mastery" and pushes his students to an uncomfortably high tempo that leaves them (in my opinion) nearly unable to fully grasp and/or absorb what they're being "taught".
So yeah what I see here are two people (Wayne and Pete) locking horns over the issue of "time" and they both have very good points but are both arguing positions that (when taken to an extreme) don't make sense. What's really needed is efficient instructors taking as much "time" as the student needs (lo and behold this is what standards dictate) but in practice the idea of "performance based learning" is often undermined by a weird obsession with "time"--either too much or too little, but in both cases not what the student's needs necessarily dictate.
R..
. Time to :nuke:this one....:ss:.
