A few observations: 1. People who don't meet their own expectations in a class tend to be unhappy at the end of it, and it's extremely easy to convert that into criticism of the class. I've had to work my butt off not to do that to my C2 class, where the vast majority of my problems were my fault.
2. There was something wrong with this class. There was not enough in-water time. Ocean conditions proved inhospitable for a number of students on the first scheduled boat diving day, and people don't learn well when they are sick. Exposure protection didn't match the water available in which to dive, and that's also a recipe for having a bad time.
3. This was going to be a difficult class to teach in the best of circumstances, because as far as I could tell, nobody in the class had had much of an opportunity even to try diving as a team before they got there. Several people had changed equipment. Some had low total dive counts. It was going to take a very concentrated and careful effort to make the class the best possible experience for all involved.
4. It's my perception that the fact that the senior instructor was teaching an instructor intern reduced the value of having two instructors involved in the class, thus making it more of a 1:6 ratio, which if people need individual help, is quite difficult.
5. Where there WAS in-water experience available, seasickness or cold kept some folks from being able to take advantage of it.
6. Although Bob enjoys a stellar reputation as the king of gear-balancing and trim (and I can speak from personal experience that he is very good at this) for whatever reason, he was unable or unwilling to bring those skills to play in this class. Some of it may be related to some very strongly held opinions about what he considers suboptimal gear. (And I think there are people who feel differently, even within the organization, but one listens to the instructor one has.)
7. One student was actually ill during the class, which I can't imagine. These classes really require that you be able to step up and give your best.
8. Of the students who were most unhappy with the class, only two, I believe, actually did any of the fun diving over the weekend, where a different vision of the usefulness of skills and the attitudes of GUE-trained divers might have been perceived. Of the two, I know one said that he had the best dive of his life during that weekend, precisely because of the things he had been shown.
So -- it was a suboptimal class from the instructor standpoint, from the conditions standpoint, and to some extent from the standpoint of where the students were coming into it. Since the next set of classes is not being held in the same place (and I have heard rumors that it will be held to 3 students) I think the instructors learned something very useful from the experience -- unfortunately, that doesn't fix things for the students who were involved.
We had a similar thing with Peter's Essentials class. The instructor scheduled a day of diving at a local site where the currents, given the tides of that day, made it simply impossible to do the planned diving. The instructor, not being local, had not realized that. The class lost out on some of the diving they were supposed to do. This happens. I've been in a class that lost the day of experience dives due to water and weather conditions, and I've seen classes conducted in visibility so poor that I don't think the instructor could see the students half the time. You do what you can, especially if people aren't local and therefore can't easily reschedule for next weekend.
The discussion around this class really reminds me very strongly of the discussion around my Cave 2 class. It also had issues, some of which were my fault and some of which were beyond my control. The discussion had staunch defenders of the class and instructor, and people who were happy to take a swipe at both. The truth is that GUE and GUE instructors aren't perfect. They're good, sometimes very good, but both the organization and the people who make it real are fallible. The best teacher can have an off day, or be presented with a student or students who are difficult for them to teach. Students can, either through lack of preparation or just lack of understanding of what's required, show up at a level where it's just not reasonable to expect an instructor to bring them to standards in the time available.
This class was not the best example of what GUE Fundamentals can be and has been. I hope the students came away with something, and I hope they are not soured on GUE training or GUE diving. I know that, after I had time to get some distance on my C2 class, that it is an enormous source of sadness to me that I really cannot justify the use of our joint resources to challenge the class again.
And Jax, why wouldn't you descend together? Descent is one of the times when things go wrong and people need help. I find descent and ascent are the times when I'm most motivated to maintain the close formation that GUE teaches.
)
