How Rigorous Should Training Be?

[boulderjohn]

Personal experience is important, but it's less important than what you teach, how you teach it, and how well you teach it ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

Personal experience isn't important?? If that's the case then anyone on the net could teach this stuff. Without the experience one would only know how to save themself by a book, not learn what went wrong and how they fixed the issue. That might work where you dive where you have direct path to the surface but I don't know any cave diver who thinks personal experience isn't necessary.

Did you misread him, or did you purposely twist his words and take them to an extreme to make a completely absurd straw man argument?

If someone said that you don't need a Ph.D level education to teach high school math, would you equate that statement to meaning that no education is important and that the person was arguing that any kindergartner can teach calculus?

 

[Kevin Carlisle]

Did you misread him, or did you purposely twist his words and take them to an extreme to make a completely absurd straw man argument?

If someone said that you don't need a Ph.D level education to teach high school math, would you equate that statement to meaning that no education is important and that the person was arguing that any kindergartner can teach calculus?

Saying that actual experience is less important than what you teach is the only absurd thing I have heard. You can't teach and hope to teach everything a student needs to know if the instructor is only doing the minimals. A good instructor goes out and actually does the dives he is training people for and has real experience dealing with issues in that settting. I don't OW tek dive but I cave dive almost every weekend, over 100 each year. The one thing I know for certain is things are going to go wrong and if handled poorly you just might be the next statistic. That's the reality of divers who are on average 30 minutes to an hour or more from fresh air. An instructor having personal experience doing those dives, and learning from his knowledge can't be beat. Myself and many of the people I dive with will never reccomend an instructor that doesn't have the experience in his personal diving.

 

[boulderjohn]

Saying that actual experience is less important than what you teach is the only absurd thing I have heard. You can't teach and hope to teach everything a student needs to know if the instructor is only doing the minimals. A good instructor goes out and actually does the dives he is training people for and has real experience dealing with issues in that settting. I don't OW tek dive but I cave dive almost every weekend, over 100 each year. The one thing I know for certain is things are going to go wrong and if handled poorly you just might be the next statistic. That's the reality of divers who are on average 30 minutes to an hour or more from fresh air. An instructor having personal experience doing those dives, and learning from his knowledge can't be beat. Myself and many of the people I dive with will never reccomend an instructor that doesn't have the experience in his personal diving.

Interesting. It is not often you run into people who only think in extremes like this. If you aren't doing the toughest possible dives, you are totally incompetent. If you yoru experience isn't superb, it's poor. Teaching skill is of no importance whatsoever--the only thing that counts is dive experience.

You never mentioned whether you intentionally twisted Bob's statement that experience is important to its opposite when you attacked his position. From what you have written it's obviously intentional. If someone says it is important but something else is more important, the black/white thinker automatically takes "less important" and turns it into "not important."

You may be interested in reading what Piaget had to say about black/white thinking and the inability to see shades of gray.

 

[Kevin Carlisle]

Interesting. It is not often you run into people who only think in extremes like this. If you aren't doing the toughest possible dives, you are totally incompetent. If you yoru experience isn't superb, it's poor. Teaching skill is of no importance whatsoever--the only thing that counts is dive experience.

You never mentioned whether you intentionally twisted Bob's statement that experience is important to its opposite when you attacked his position. From what you have written it's obviously intentional. If someone says it is important but something else is more important, the black/white thinker automatically takes "less important" and turns it into "not important."

You may be interested in reading what Piaget had to say about black/white thinking and the inability to see shades of gray.

I didn't twist anything, and this is the Tek forum, if you want to talk OW stuff go there. What he said in that one sentence was just nonsense. I agree with you that what they teach is important, but if they just do enough of the dives to have that instructor rating then they really don't have the knowledge from personal experience to back up what's in the text books. Would you want to learn ccr from an OC diver who just uses CCR for classes or someone who goes out and dives CCR?

 

[Dive-aholic]

Kevin, I think you may have misunderstood Bob. Or maybe I just understood it differently. I understand what you're saying and I don't think you two disagree all that much. The way I understand Bob's post is that all the personal experience in the world won't matter if you don't know how to convey that information to students. I've had the opportunity to intern with a lot of instructors, including some that have a ton of personal experience, far more than I'll probably ever have, yet their teaching style just wasn't all that great. It's not that they didn't care or weren't trying to do well. They just aren't great teachers. I'd much rather have someone who knows how to teach and has minimal personal experience than someone who has a ton of personal experience but doesn't know how to present that information to students. Actually, I'd rather have someone who both knows how to teach and has a lot of personal experience, but that's not all that common. I can only think of a handful of instructors that fit that description. I've been fortunate to intern under a few.

 

[SuPrBuGmAn]

I thought the basketball coach analogy was a bit retarted... Cave diving isn't a spectator sport where you can armchair coach people after seeing it live, seeing it from several different angles, zoomed in, slo-mo, etc.

If your not doing it, you don't get to see where the mistakes are being made, the intricacies and tricks that will help fine tune a diver and improve on thier capability. You won't be able to give good reasons for gear suggestions or protocal. Regurgitating some book simply doesn't cut it.


Anyone instructing cave diving NEEDS experience if they're worth a crap.


This isn't basketball(or any other spectator sport), and thank God, basketball sucks.

 

[LiteHedded]

basketball is awesome

 

[Rainer]

No, basketball pretty much sucks...except in March.

 

[SuPrBuGmAn]

basketball is awesome

Your no longer welcome here

 

[LiteHedded]

nba ball is where it's at. GO MAGIC