"Family of drowned Tennessee diver sues dive shop"

[cerich]

It does not make me feel warm and fuzzy at all. I think they have to make a stand.

But at least they have done something.

Perhaps they need to see a good example to get them going. I did the best I could as a mere PADI instructor,as i described above. Perhaps you should describe what you did when you were on the board of directors for NAUI to get them to require this kind of instruction in that organization.

well when I brought it up I got two others of the 9 to agree it was a good idea...but I got a earful of what the instructor mill "needs" and some that simply didn't agree.
I got nowhere with it I am sad to say.

 

[Wookie]

well when I brought it up I got two others of the 9 to agree it was a good idea...but I got a earful of what the instructor mill "needs" and some that simply didn't agree.
I got nowhere with it I am sad to say.

Follow the money.

 

[boulderjohn]

well when I brought it up I got two others of the 9 to agree it was a good idea...but I got a earful of what the instructor mill "needs" and some that simply didn't agree.
I got nowhere with it I am sad to say.

So you see the problem.

PADI has at least recommended neutrally buoyant OW instruction and put out materials showing its benefits. It has published one article, and I have another one supposedly in the queue to be published in the near future. In a recent article about preparing instructor candidates for the IE, the only picture they showed of a student doing a skill had the student neutral and horizontal. That is certainly not enough, but it is more than any other major agency I know. It is interesting that PADI gets criticized for not doing enough by people from agencies that aren't doing anything.

So what can we do as individuals?

I have published one article so far and have another in the works. I take every opportunity in threads like this to describe a better way so that it reaches more and more readers. I have written about it extensively in the instructor to instructor forum. If you went back 10 years ago, any thread on this topic in the Instructor to Instructor forum would have been dominated by people explaining why skills have to be taught overweighted and on the knees. In the last few years, none of the discussions there have had any significant participation by people with those ideas.

I feel a bit like a lone wolf, though. Pete (NetDoc) has done a lot to promote the idea, but I don't see a loot of activity from anyone else. Yes, PADI can do more to make this happen, but so can others.

 

[EricTheDood]

I would make a SWAG that the % of OW certified divers who return to the water within one year of certification, outside of a few vacation dives, is probably less than 20%, and possibly even a single digit number. Anyone know of stats out there that can back this up?

This leads to over-weighting, which IMHO is due to oversized classes, which are oversized because of cost issues. First, the students need to sit in a tidy circle so that everyone can be easily accounted for, and that's difficult without overweighting. Furthermore, neutral buoyancy with first time divers leads to positive buoyancy (they breath too deeply while concentrating on skills), and a resulting s***show ensues, with students floating to the surface in random directions. That's fine in the pool, not so fine in the ocean.

Smaller classes could help significantly - ideally one-on-one, but a sweet spot might be four students to an instructor + DM. The question is, are people willing to shell out a few extra bucks to get much better instruction?

While we're at it, why is good finning technique completely absent in rec diving classes? I'm glad we live in the age of Youtube.

 

[Wookie]

I rest my case.....
Getting Scuba Certified On Vacation: It’s Easier Than You Think
This just came across my facebook feed.

 

[boulderjohn]

This leads to over-weighting, which IMHO is due to oversized classes, which are oversized because of cost issues. First, the students need to sit in a tidy circle so that everyone can be easily accounted for, and that's difficult without overweighting. Furthermore, neutral buoyancy with first time divers leads to positive buoyancy (they breath too deeply while concentrating on skills), and a resulting s***show ensues, with students floating to the surface in random directions. That's fine in the pool, not so fine in the ocean.

Class size makes no difference.

If I have a class of 8 students, they are all around me as in a kneeling class, except that they horizontal and buoyant, legs lightly touching the floor, rather than kneeling firmly on the bottom.

As for your supposed s*** show of neutral buoyancy, you obviously have never seen it done this way. Students don't have any trouble in the pool, and they learn to breathe properly very quickly if you make it part of what they are learning. The first skills taught go faster because they are much easier to do (and very different) when horizontal than when kneeling. (Think about what the skills look like and you will see.) They get the hang of buoyancy surprisingly well, so by the end of the pool sessions they look like divers during the OW dives, with no buoyancy issues. If you believe that students can't learn buoyancy while properly weighted and so you must overweight them and plant them on your knees, then you have created a self-fulfilling prophecy--they will not learn buoyancy and weighting in your class.

I have been through these debates many times over the years in the instructor to Instructor forum, and the ones that bother me the most are the ones tat say, in essence, "I have always taught on the knees, and I have never taught your way. I have an incredibly powerful imagination, though, so I am able to imagine how bad it must be to do it your way. I know you have done it both ways and have thus experienced it both ways, but my incredible imagination tells me that you must be hallucinating when you describe what actually happens in the class."

 

[boulderjohn]

I rest my case.....
Getting Scuba Certified On Vacation: It’s Easier Than You Think
This just came across my facebook feed.

Yep, there are places that are violating standards, as that one clearly is. It happened to me in my OW training as well. It was not until years later that I actually looked closely at my log book and saw how many standards had been skipped in my certification class. I am not condoning this.

 

[Wookie]

Yep, there are places that are violating standards, as that one clearly is. It happened to me in my OW training as well. It was not until years later that I actually looked closely at my log book and saw how many standards had been skipped in my certification class. I am not condoning this.

I know you aren't, John. I think you are one of the good guys. I wish there were thousands more like you. Sadly, there are thousands more like the picture shows.

 

[boulderjohn]

Sadly, there are thousands more like the picture shows.

Here's the problem with the picture and pictures in general.

When we published the article on teaching OW while neutrally buoyant, I was asked to submit high quality photos. I posed for most of the skills both neutrally and on the knees, and I provided suggested captions pointing out the differences. (Many of the skills are actually done completely differently on the knees than in swimming posture.) When they printed the story, the last person to deal with it was the layout editor. That person is a layout editor, not a scuba instructor. The pictures were completely screwed up, without the intended comparisons. Worse, when it came to the final product, there was a visual hole that had to be filled. So the editor did what layout editors always do in that situation--go to the file of stock photos and pick one out to stick in place. The selected picture showed a beginning class with all the students on the knees.

While I was negotiating with PADI about the draft of that article I pointed out that the OW class then had lots of pictures and videos, and not one of them showed a diver in a natural diving position. All showed people doing skills while kneeling. The reply from the training director was an immediate "OMG!" It had never occurred to him. He promised they would change that, and now there is not a single picture of people kneeling in the OW course.

Of course, all those kneeling pictures taken over 5 decades still exist, and there are still dive operators creating new pictures and new videos of the way they have always done things.

 

[boulderjohn]

BTW, our original very long draft of the article included a history of instruction using the kneeling technique, with that section created by dive historian Dr. Sam Miller. He had a lot of trouble finding out when it started, and we eventually realized it had always been done that way because instruction began with no means of achieving buoyancy whatsoever--wet suits had not even been invented yet. The old kneeling technique for skill introduction was a relic of old fashioned instruction that did not change when the BCD was invented.