Now this is the kind of thing I think of when I hear "Distinctive Specialty"!
Expelled PADI instructor?
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Guille G
Contributor
I taught my students while they were neutrally buoyant from the start. You could say I "required" them to do it that way, but in reality I just demonstrated it that way, and when it was their turn, they did it that way. It would be theoretically possible for a student who could not do it that way to insist on doing it on the knees, but that never happened, because they did the skills easily while neutrally buoyant.
You seem to have the idea that teaching them while neutrally buoyant is adding an additional required skill, but it isn't for two reasons. First, they are simply doing the required skills in a different position. Second, they usually find the skills easier in that other position. There was no more students struggling to maintain balance while kneeling. I saw kneeling as adding an additional skill, since we don't kneel while we dive.
I got to that stage of my instruction a little at a time, experimenting here and there as I went before going to full neutral for the entire class. Near the end of the confined water sessions, when I briefed them on the two equipment removal and replacement skills, I told them I would demonstrate the skills in mid water, but if they wanted, they could be on the bottom. About 90% did it mid water.
You seem to have the idea that teaching them while neutrally buoyant is adding an additional required skill, but it isn't for two reasons. First, they are simply doing the required skills in a different position. Second, they usually find the skills easier in that other position. There was no more students struggling to maintain balance while kneeling. I saw kneeling as adding an additional skill, since we don't kneel while we dive.
I got to that stage of my instruction a little at a time, experimenting here and there as I went before going to full neutral for the entire class. Near the end of the confined water sessions, when I briefed them on the two equipment removal and replacement skills, I told them I would demonstrate the skills in mid water, but if they wanted, they could be on the bottom. About 90% did it mid water.
Here is an additional thought that just occurred to me.
After I submitted the original (much longer) draft to PADI on teaching while neutrally buoyant, I had to go through a long editing process with a representative from PADI headquarters (Karl Shreeves, who has a writing credit on the article). It was clear that they had never seen it done this way. He was evidently struck by something I emphasized in our discussions: when students do the skills on the knees, what they do during the skill is often very different from how the skill is done while diving.
In attempting to deal with that issue and still allow instructors to do the skills on the knees, he insisted we add a sentence that said that if students are taught to do skills on the knees, then they should also be taught to do them neutrally and in horizontal trim, hopefully in the same session.
In other words, teaching students on the knees adds required skills to the dive; teaching neutrally does not.
After I submitted the original (much longer) draft to PADI on teaching while neutrally buoyant, I had to go through a long editing process with a representative from PADI headquarters (Karl Shreeves, who has a writing credit on the article). It was clear that they had never seen it done this way. He was evidently struck by something I emphasized in our discussions: when students do the skills on the knees, what they do during the skill is often very different from how the skill is done while diving.
In attempting to deal with that issue and still allow instructors to do the skills on the knees, he insisted we add a sentence that said that if students are taught to do skills on the knees, then they should also be taught to do them neutrally and in horizontal trim, hopefully in the same session.
In other words, teaching students on the knees adds required skills to the dive; teaching neutrally does not.
No, I'm pointing out a disconnect that is common to this debate.
For 25 years, I've seen PADI defenders on this and other fora play semantic games with the difference between teaching, showing, exploring, and requiring performance as a gating event to certification. A training agency ostensibly has two functions - education, and assessment for credentials. With any agency, instructors are free to teach (i.e. share knowledge) beyond the standards - if a student comes up to an instructor after class, and asks a question about the countering high pressure nervous syndrome using trimix because of something they saw on the Discovery Channel, no agency in the world is going to require the instructor to say "I can't talk to you about that; it is forbidden knowledge for your level." However, it the instructor refuses to certify a student based on failure to answer a test question about the same topic, that instructor will be in deep trouble with PADI. In any intellectually honest discussion of training standards, the salient issue is what performance can be required of a student as a condition of the credential sought, because that is the determining factor in the dominant level of skills and knowledge of participants in a given agency's program.
You can go into any high school or college in the world, even the most elite, and if you say "you will never be tested on this," the vast majority of students will tune out everything that follows. A former manager of mine is fond of saying what gets measured, gets done.
As I said previously, having students do their skills while neutrally buoyant is not an additional skills issue that could lead to that problem for the reasons I listed in that previous response. Here is an additional factor.
PADI requires the use of mastery learning during instruction. That means that you are not only not allowed to fail a student for not performing well enough on non-required skills, you cannot normally fail them for not performing well enough on the required skills--you are supposed to keep teaching the skills until they reach a level of mastery expected at that level of training.
I have never failed a student for anything--I just keep teaching until they get it. Now, I have had some challenged students decide after a while that they just weren't meant to be scuba divers, but those were very few and far between.
So even if it were true that teaching while neutrally buoyant were an additional skill (and it isn't), you would not fail a student for not doing it. You would continue teaching until they mastered it. Since most skills are easier to do while neutrally buoyant, it is hard to imagine this ever being an issue.
After we published the article on neutrally buoyant instruction, I wrote a follow-up article showing how students learn skills incorrectly when taught on the knees. It was fully edited and approved for publication, but for some reason that never happened. Oh, well.
A quick look at the Confined Water Dive #1 skills will show not only why teaching on the knees misteaches the skills, it will also show why neutrally buoyant students learn the skills more easily. When I was doing this, for CW 1 I had the students horizontal, with the legs lightly touching the floor. Being horizontal is important--not 45°. This is not a fin pivot.
Regulator recovery
Both methods of recovering a regulator are completely different in the two positions.
Students are told to tip the head back when they clear the mask. Why? It is because getting the water out requires the bottom skirt of the mask to be the lowest point, so the water will fall out. For kneeling students, the mask skirt is already the lowest point, so tipping the head back is counterproductive. They learn to clear the mask without tipping the head back, which is the wrong thing to do on an actual dive. You will often see divers clear their masks by going vertical in the water because they never learned to tip the head back, as must be done by students learning in horizontal trim.
Alternate Air Source
Kneeling students must kneel next to each other, nearly chest to chest, to do this skill. That is completely different from what happens in the real world. With neutrally buoyant divers, you do it as it is in real life, with the OOA diver swimming to the buddy while signalling the need for the alternate air source.
In later sessions, the OOA skill is done in the deep end, and the two divers are to go to the surface. I saw a nearly comical SSI demonstration of this a few years ago. The two divers were chest to chest, and they completed the exchange. They were, of course, overweighted and planted on the bottom, as you must be for on-the-knees instruction. In order to ascend, they had to inflate their BCDs, which is, of course, the opposite of what you are supposed to do on a real dive. That means the OOA diver had to repeatedly take the donated regulator out of his mouth so he could orally inflate his BCD enough to get his overweighted body to the surface. When neutrally buoyant students do that skill, they simply ascend while dumping air after the exchange.
A quick look at the Confined Water Dive #1 skills will show not only why teaching on the knees misteaches the skills, it will also show why neutrally buoyant students learn the skills more easily. When I was doing this, for CW 1 I had the students horizontal, with the legs lightly touching the floor. Being horizontal is important--not 45°. This is not a fin pivot.
Regulator recovery
Both methods of recovering a regulator are completely different in the two positions.
- Leaning to the right for the sweep method while horizontal brings the regulator right to the front of the student, Recovery is a snap. Leaning to the right while kneeling brings the regulator out to the side of the student, not the front, where it is harder to locate.
- In the reach method, the kneeling student's tank is pulled down and away from the student's back by the force of gravity, making it hard to reach. The student is usually taught to reach back with the left hand to lift the tank to a position where the regulator can be reached. In contrast, when horizontal, gravity puts the regulator right behind the head. It is so easy to reach the hose that many students reach past it the first time they try. The reach method while kneeling is so hard that given the choice, students will go for the sweep. In horizontal trim, it is so easy that it becomes the preferred choice.
Students are told to tip the head back when they clear the mask. Why? It is because getting the water out requires the bottom skirt of the mask to be the lowest point, so the water will fall out. For kneeling students, the mask skirt is already the lowest point, so tipping the head back is counterproductive. They learn to clear the mask without tipping the head back, which is the wrong thing to do on an actual dive. You will often see divers clear their masks by going vertical in the water because they never learned to tip the head back, as must be done by students learning in horizontal trim.
Alternate Air Source
Kneeling students must kneel next to each other, nearly chest to chest, to do this skill. That is completely different from what happens in the real world. With neutrally buoyant divers, you do it as it is in real life, with the OOA diver swimming to the buddy while signalling the need for the alternate air source.
In later sessions, the OOA skill is done in the deep end, and the two divers are to go to the surface. I saw a nearly comical SSI demonstration of this a few years ago. The two divers were chest to chest, and they completed the exchange. They were, of course, overweighted and planted on the bottom, as you must be for on-the-knees instruction. In order to ascend, they had to inflate their BCDs, which is, of course, the opposite of what you are supposed to do on a real dive. That means the OOA diver had to repeatedly take the donated regulator out of his mouth so he could orally inflate his BCD enough to get his overweighted body to the surface. When neutrally buoyant students do that skill, they simply ascend while dumping air after the exchange.
Some pseudo teach this at the surface, even in a long hose (where they undo the clip and it wrapped around the back of their neck) to retrieve their reg and get ready to descend.
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