francousteau:So, after reading the various threads regarding the merits of taking a drysuit class, I signed up for mine (PADI) at the LDS. During the signup ....snip....
That sounds like a very poor pool session. I'd say you got swindled.
At the shop where I assist it goes like this:
Students watch the video on their own time. They can buy it if they want or watch it at the shop.
On the evening of the pool session the student(s) come at 7pm for a 2 hour theory session. This involves, materials and insulation, buoyancy and weight, trim and body position, d.s. features, mobility, effect on other bits of gear (fins, BCD, weights etc), finning technique, care and maintenance, risks (uncontrolled ascents, tight seals etc) and risk mitigation etc and a tour through the shop to get familiar with what the shop has to offer and the prices.
Then we go to the rental area to pick out a suit. This takes about 30 min and we explain donning and doffing at that point. Some instructors allow students to go with a minimal jumpsuit on and some make them wear the same gear they'll have on the OW dives.
Then we head to the pool. At the pool the usual set of skills involves donning, buddy check (important, many people forget the d.s. hose). deep water entry, buoyancy check, descents/ascents, fin pivot or hovering, swimming, including the introduction to frog kicking for students who don't already know it, several inflator excercises involving uncoupling freeflows and reattaching under water. Then we do hovering, somersaults, barrel rolls, hand stands on the bottom and all kinds of weird stuff you hope never happens. The thinking is that it's better to have this experience in the pool and it's good for confidence when the student realizes tht he/she can get out of anything you throw at them. For students who look good towards the end of the session we'll also throw a surprise at them by swimming along side and pressing the inflator button and holding it in and pushing their feet up. They're expected to unclip the hose, somersault out of it and regain neutral buoyancy without touching the bottom or the surface in 3 meters of water. At the end of the dive we do kit removal and donning on the surface.
Needless to say this is quite a lot to throw at students in the 75min we have in the water so we limit class size to two students.
If the student is doing the specialty then they will also go on the weekend and make two dives in which they'll more or less go diving with a few excercises thrown in and practice with frog kicking. If the student is just doing the orientation then they don't get a specialty card but the theory and pool session is the same. Many experienced divers just do the orientation and not the whole specialty (40 euros instead of 125).
We also have a variation on this that we do to prepare OW students for doing their checkout dives in a drysuit. In that case the focus is heavy on buoyancy control.
So....to my way of thinking, any drysuit specialty that doesn't look somewhat like what I just described is shooting short of the mark.
R..