I'd be a lot more likely to take a class if I felt I would learn much from it...some of these classes, seeing how students who have the card dive, I'm just not so sure I'd learn anything, atleast nothing I can't learn from a book.
It's the same way I felt as when I was full cave but lacked an AOW card, and had AOW divers trying to lecture me on the proper ways to dive. I'm not an expert, but I'm also not stupid. I know my personal limits, and I don't push them, but I work constantly work to grow them, so that after every dive, I'm a better diver.
I still have rough dives at routine places...recently I went to Madison, and for the first 20 minutes, just felt out of the zone, uncomfortable in my gear...usually, nothing is more peaceful for me than putting on a drysuit and tanks and slipping underwater, but on this dive, it all felt awkward. After a little bit though, things started clicking into place again, and I spent a good portion of the dive concentrating on improving my frog kick, where I know I have a tendency to point my toes down where I think I can get them pointed a little further up, to minimize silting. I didn't need an instructor to teach me to frog kick, and I've never had an instructor criticize my frog kick, but over the course of several dives, with several constructive criticisms offered by dive buddies, and with the help of a photographer friend who managed to catch a few shots showing when in the kick I tended to start angling my toes, I'm improving my kick.
However, some divers just can't teach themselves or learn like that. Some divers can't handle the basic math involved in diving. Some divers can't know their personal limits. Some divers don't belong in caves.
And there are a whole ton of divers in between. I'm sure I'm not on the far end of the spectrum when it comes to self instruction, I'm probably just slightly above average. I think the divers that make you sit back and go "holy crap, that is one polished looking diver! I've never seen anyone dive that well!" probably are very good at self instruction, and/or dive with people who are very good at offering constructive criticism, and that their skill level did not necessarily come solely from instructors giving them cards.
However, the problem is, because not everyone can do that, is we do need certification cards to distinguish the good divers from the bad divers. And the problem with that is, not only is the certification seen as overly expensive and unnecessary by many divers who are good at becoming better divers on their own, but many instructors will give a card to someone who does not have a very polished skill level.
Does anyone know if you can roll AN/DP, Trimix, and DPV into one class, and do all of your dives at fun caves like Eagles Nest? Because I don't see the point in paying thousands of dollars for a class that's going to take a student down a slope until they hit the minimum dive time required, and at the full cave level I believe a diver most likely has most of the skills involved in those classes under basic control. Stages, gas switches, MOD math, gas math, towing a diver while sharing air, all pieces of cake. The only difficult thing is the dive before the class to calculate your SAC rate under normal, deco, and extremely stressful situations, so that you can perform accurate gas math planning. Seems like the perfect opportunity to do some awesome guided dives and have a lot of gear fail on exit, at an incredibly expensive rate.
