I have to tell you that there is no phrase I hate more than "if it's not broke, why fix it?" It implies that the speaker has achieved perfection in what he does. Nothing can ever be better. It's the great phrase to use when you want to avoid learning anything new. It is the phrase I heard over and over again when I was trying to bring new teaching methods to education--teachers would smugly say that what they were doing is the best that can possibly be done, all the evidence of the incompetence of our graduates notwithstanding. Imagine if the Wright brothers had had that attitude after that first flight at Kitty Hawk--airplanes would still be novelties making "successful" 100 yard flights.halemanō;5623638:If it's not broke why fix it?
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Why, with the limited time frame of the vast majority of intro or certification courses worldwide, would you not take full advantage of a successful "training wheels" approach that accomplishes the training goals in the typical short duration?
First of all, when I say that my students are never firmly planted on their knees, I don't mean they are hovering in trim in the first pool dive. I go through several steps to get them comfortable in the water, and then I have them lying forward, their legs on the pool floor, in something resembling a fin pivot position. When you first really start to do it that way, it is a revelation. You realize that all the skills are performed differently that way. You realize that the process of doing skills on the knees is different from the process of doing them while horizontal. You next realize that it is actually easier for them to do most of the skills that way--talk about "training wheels" is misguided, for they have better training wheels when they are lying down than when they are kneeling.
By the fourth pool dive, my students are only touching the pool bottom accidentally. I tell them that they have the option of doing the last skills on the pool bottom if they wish, but it has been a while since any of my students (or the students of other instructors I know who follow the same approach) have done that. For the past few months, all my students have done the last skills (no mask swim/replacement, weight belt removal/replacement, and scuba unit removal/replacement in mid water.
As for the limited time issue, our experience is that we are reaching that point in less time than it used to take, primarily because many of the later skills go so fast. Fin pivoting and hovering take almost no time, and they used to be major time bottlenecks.
I have been in extensive discussion with the key people from the PADI training department in the past few months. Unless I am completely fooled by what I have been told so far, you will see changes in the next year or so. In the last talks we had, the discussion centered around two approaches to instruction that will achieve the result of having students capable, buoyant swimmers who can do the critical skills in mid-water. One is the one I described above. The other is to start them on their knees and then quickly transition them to performance in a horizontal, neutral performance of the skill. (The person who wrote that said "in the same session."
