Excellent point Jim.
My wife a new diver and i go to a lake, that we play in, to practice skills. Every dive we do something like share air shoot buoys, navagate, ect. She keeps asking why they did not teach her these things in class. Well they did for the most part, and here are how things went with her. air share and mask clear was done at 2-5 feet ,,,,,,,,, nav (vis 5-8 ft) was done by swimming out 15 ft and returning. cesa at 10-15 ft. The water instructor pressed for time said here is your temp card. Now the next day and following week we started hitting our play lake and we started over. off with the bcd and on with the bpw and long hose. one day of buoyancy and gettng the kit to work for her and keep her belly down. next several days were getting comfortable in 25 ft water. took one day to get her to remove her mask and put in on on the 20' platform without panic surfacing. I darn near drowned getting her to donate her primary reg with exhaust ports down and not up. It took perhaps 5 trips till she could with minimal assistance put her rig together alone. a compass took a couple of days to make it work for her. i had to mount the compass on a plexy sheet so she would not get the problems with her arm not remaining square with her travel. That does not even touch the problem with the compass having too many rings of numbers on it. Now she is excellent with the compass as she can make a 300 ft trip and miss the target by no nore than 10 ft. We are now working on awareness of surroundings. I say that because when she misses the target by a couple of feet. she does just that,,, she swims right by it from the intensity of focusing on the compass. The times she does not swim buy she hits the target if she is at the right depth. after a few head thumps she is now starting to do weigh point navigation so she can look around. She finds it is much better way than having to explain how she got the head scrape in the resteraunt. One place actually asked if she was doing compass work. She has the basics down pretty well. We hit the road and went from one hole to another. each place with its own challenges, each time I let her fail and each time she learns. she doesn't fail much any more, not because she knows it all but because she knows she doesn't know it and stops to ask before she proceeds. We progressed to fla for a honeymoon dive trip to ginnie and vortex. vortex she learned first hand not only that she uses air lots faster at 55 than at 20. But there is no difference in the feeling of 55 vs.20 which means she watches her gages now. As safety drills go she is right at home with the bpw and necklace. she has inhaled water from an upside down reg and she now donates it right. There is no place for any new diver to stop perfecting their basic survival skills. On a trip to ginnie I took her to the various cave entrances and she saw first hand what real depth control was and she wants that for her self. Especially when the guy she saw hovering with no movement for 10 minutes turned out to be a girl. Come May we are gong to the carribean for her first ocean dive's. in a week or so she is taking nitrox. She is ready to dive at the drop of a hat and is now telling me what she wants to work on. Later i will get her adv OW done. Some may say a waste of time but if she has the skills she should be papered as such. I am pretty darn proud of her.
. In Bonaire after we have been in the water for 45 minutes.. I'll look at her with my arms in the air and say which way... She's getting us back to the same beach.. Not the same rock.. But , She is improving... 
