The thing I love about SDI standards is being able to set those high expectations for students and seeing them want to achieve. I had an open water student a few weeks ago who did fine in the pool, but when he showed up to open water, he'd kind of regressed. After dive three he told me that he needed to go back to the pool because he knew he wasn't doing things correctly and calmly.
In the other hand, the thing I dislike the most with SDI is the limited standards. Like TDI, there's a wide variety in instructional quality.
If I had to guess, is day ssi has higher minimum standards for graduation (I know PADI does). I'm not sure that the average student if one liked across those three agencies could be identified as a better driver, but I'd bet cash that my students or Jim's would be.
If you'd ask me (and this is scuba board, so I'll just tell you
there isn't an agency that's doing everything right. GUE and UTD do a lot of things I really like, but then there's a few things that I think are completely nuts (no computers/ratio, one size fits all, deco). RAID almost gets it right, but they require certain skills be completed on certain dives, like PADI.
It's the agencies' fault that most divers suck, but the standards aren't the root of the problem. It is that the person walking in the door is treated like a sheep that needs to be shorn of its wool. The customer is pushed, and the instructors are trained to herd, the sheep through a pipeline of courses that make the training agency money.
The problem is the sheep don't like queueing up and eventually run away.
Until the dinosaurs running the agencies understand that customers will keep coming back if they are taught correctly (and spend more money too!), nothing is going to change.
In the other hand, the thing I dislike the most with SDI is the limited standards. Like TDI, there's a wide variety in instructional quality.
If I had to guess, is day ssi has higher minimum standards for graduation (I know PADI does). I'm not sure that the average student if one liked across those three agencies could be identified as a better driver, but I'd bet cash that my students or Jim's would be.
If you'd ask me (and this is scuba board, so I'll just tell you
there isn't an agency that's doing everything right. GUE and UTD do a lot of things I really like, but then there's a few things that I think are completely nuts (no computers/ratio, one size fits all, deco). RAID almost gets it right, but they require certain skills be completed on certain dives, like PADI. It's the agencies' fault that most divers suck, but the standards aren't the root of the problem. It is that the person walking in the door is treated like a sheep that needs to be shorn of its wool. The customer is pushed, and the instructors are trained to herd, the sheep through a pipeline of courses that make the training agency money.
The problem is the sheep don't like queueing up and eventually run away.
Until the dinosaurs running the agencies understand that customers will keep coming back if they are taught correctly (and spend more money too!), nothing is going to change.
