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sailnaked has it right.The AI course is not to make you a better diver,it is there to teach you how to teach and all involved in it.The IDC is the same.Both are designed to help you become successful in the business of diving ,not to make you a better diver.That should have been done in your ow-dm courses and on your own time thru experience.While teaching an AI course or staffing an IDC I have told a few to get their skills to demo quality on their own time.If they want me to help them with it then there is a cost to it.It is not something expected to be done at the AI or IDC course level. People get into being an instructor at times for the wrong reasons. A good reason is to make some money at it,not just enough to pay for your insurance/dues,and to produce people who enjoy diving safely.There is not alot of money to be made,but it certainly should be enough that you will not have trouble paying insurance/dues and have some left over so you can pay for some toys for yourself and still have some left over in your pocket.
It is a clear conflict of interest: the instructors' responsibility to be completely honest and fully truthful to his or her students vs. the inswtructors' duty to sell as gear as possible but limited to that which the sponsoring LDS deals in. Bad, bad, juju. Stack on top of that the spiff of the week and other salesman incentives and the students' real needs oft take a backseat.
Our lecture periods are typically 50 minutes, but if one can't keep an audience completely spellbound for two hours with nothing more than a chalkboard, an interesting topic and a few cogent and relevant sea stories then I would not consider them a teacher.
That's what you consider to be success, where I to find myself ibn your situation I'd feel like a complete and utter failure ... its those differences that make the world go round and my entire reasons for these posts is you assumption that, just because yours is the majority path, it is the only path.
It is when the selection you present is limited to the few brands that a given retailer carries or when it is influenced by kickbacks or on-hand inventory that gotta be moved rather than the students' actual needs.
Rather clear that you know nothing about how science works.
When was the last time you were diving in ice caves under a berg, or swimming with schools of Giant Bluefin Tuna or watching pengiuns flash by? Beats the hell out of playing nursemaid to a some once a year tropical divers ... at least in my book it does. You want to see wonder in the eyes of a student, take a newly endorsed scientist, who knows what's going on but has never been able to see it in person, out on a blue water dive in the middle of the Sargasso ... then you'll see some eyes pop.
What you see as "successful," frankly, I'd see as being boring as hell. That does not mean that every one should do what I do, there is not enough demand, but there is room for folks with the interest, dedication and skill. It was what I decided I wanted to do when I was an undergraduate and I made it happen ... that's what I call "success."
So we agree that you need to work at whatever it is that you want to be successful at.
Once again you don't know what I do. It sounds like you ran a recreational diving course as an outside contractor at an institution of higher learning ... like working for a dive shop with good facilities and no need to sell, but not at all like running a scientific diving safety program.
Funny, I never had that problem. Could it have been something you said?
All my student show up the first day of class with a full set of gear except for tanks and regulators, and the majority have bought them by the end of the semester and they are almost all diving five years downstream. What is it that has made our experience in teaching diving at an institution of higher learning so very different?
If you think that singing the praises of ScubaPro or U.S.Divers, or whomever whilst skillfully denigrating the brands carried at the LDS down the street has anything at all to do with assisting, "people in doing something fun safely," then I think you're a little weird and somewhat missguided.
Once upon a time it was, unfortunately now it isoften little more than learning to be an organ grinder, different tune, different species monkey, different agency, same crank handle.
Agreed, by the OP agrees too ... his point is that the IDC is marketed in a deceptive fashion, or at least was in his case.
NAUI is also non-profit, as is LA County.
If the sine qua non for diving skill is the PADI (or most other agency) Assistant Instructor course it's no wonder that the industry has problems.
