I once asked someone who teaches both PADI Tec and TDI which people asked for PADI Tec. I was told it was people who had been PADI divers their entire diving life and couldn’t imagine going with another agency.
PADI Tec 40 Instructor Course in Ohio?
- Thread starter SentinelAce
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SentinelAce
Contributor
I like how my post went from “ it’s the instructor that matters.” to PADI sucks....LOL.
Yeah. I was a fully skilled TDItech instructor with all the required skills, and then I decided to cross over to PADI tech. I was told I was going to have to tone down my skills from superb to totally incompetent in order to do that.
I am, of course, being totally sarcastic there. It gets very wearisome, though. When you see truly mindless crap like post #40, you just quietly explode inside and then shut down. ScubaBoard claims it does not allow agency bashing, but the truth is it does not allow bashing of agencies other than PADI. PADI is always fair game.
I think a large part is how PADI IDC farms have created classes like this. where its supposed to be an instructor-level class, yet... looks like a bunch of untrained open water divers who got access to tek gear.
He doesn't own whitestar. He has the diving concession their. Whitestar is owned by the county. And I hope you are going somewhere else for the deep dives. You can't get much more than 75 feet at whitestar. While that may qualify for a recreational deep dive, it's not instructor level training. My AN/DP/Adv Wreck instructor class was a week at gilboa with Steve Lewis and we did two dives less than 100 ft. All the others were below 100.
12 dives that week as I recall.
All in sidemount with stages.
Days were 10-12 hours long with the classroom portions between dives, during meals, and even just chilling he'd throw a question at me.
One of the best weeks of my life.
Did you report the post? As you know, the mods are not scouring the board for agency bashing or anything else, but rather depend on members' reports.
Nope. I have been around a long time, and I learned long ago what a waste of time that would be.
Here's a little history.
Maybe a dozen years ago, ScubaBoard's leadership decided that it had a bad reputation for PADI bashing. They discovered that PADI instructors were generally either not mentioning ScubaBoard in class or telling their students to stay away from it. The New Divers and Basic Diving forums were especially filled with bashing. If anyone made a post mentioning that they had PADI instruction, the thread would be filled with posts telling them that their instruction must have sucked. If a new diver asked a question about just about anything, the thread would be filled with comments about how they wouldn't have to ask such a stupid question of they had had proper instruction from an instructor from another agency.
So ScubaBoard, concerned that the agency possibly responsible for 80% of the world's divers was shunning the forum, made two significant changes. 1) It named those areas "green zones," where such comments would not be allowed. 2) They added four new staff members called Board Guides. These people had their names in orange. They had few staff privileges. Their main job was to patrol those sites and report problems to the real staff members. I had never heard of two of those people, and as far as I know, they never did anything. The third was Thalassamania, which was unusual because he was often one of the perpetrators. I was the fourth. When I was introduced to the rest of the staff, they were told that I was a PADI instructor and could add that perspective to the staff. I don't know if I was the first PADI staff member, but I was the only one when I joined.
As I did my job, it became clear that about 90% of the bashing was being done by seven people. (If I think about it, I bet I can remember them now.) Only one of them is still active today. Once one pounced on a thread, the other six were soon to follow, and then some hangers on would jump in, the way school children join a bully, hoping to curry favor. One of the seven was a staff member, and I got to see his protests about the changes in the staff discussion areas. He eventually quit because his anti-PADI voice had been muzzled.
Eventually I became a full staff member, and after a couple years, there were more PADI members on staff. In fact, for a while, we probably dominated staff action. Those days are long gone, though. If there are any PADI members on staff now, I don't know who they are. Things are not anywhere near as bad as they were when I first came on staff, but I have learned over the last years that there is no point in reporting bashing, because absolutely nothing gets done. My reports don't even get a reply.
ReefDiver118
Registered
If you are willing to consider TDI I would suggest Davey Bones Scuba. While they can and occasionally do teach PADI for entry level classes if the students insist, SDI and TDI are preferred. The shop owner is very easy to work with and will ensure you are trained to the highest standards. They train out of Gilboa Quarry in Ottawa, OH one of the few lakes in the area that you can actually get down to 140 feet.
It not bashing when someboby reports their experiences. Many of the PADI and SSI 'tec' instructors DO suck. I've seen many of them in the water and continue to do so. It's because their standards are a joke and many of the IT were just given their instructor trainer rating for tec because they had been with PADI/SSI for many years. Same with IANTD. It's not bashing, it the reality. Not every instructor in those agencies suck, but it's a crap shoot when you go in without doing research. I reckon you know this if you done any traveling.
People need to stop whining about bashing.
Unfortunately, the only professionally run agengy is basically a cult. It is what it is. The whole 'tec' training landscape is an utter sh!t show and always has been.
I wish their was a agency that had actual standards when it comes to diving and teaching sans the new-age religion stuff.
It is not bashing the agency to report on a course you took and whether in your opinion your instructor sucked (and hopefully explaining why you believed that). It is not bashing the agency if you give your opinion on the quality of the written course materials for a particular course or courses that you took. The problem is when someone unreasonably extrapolates their experience with one instructor--or worse yet, information they read or heard--to an agency's entire tech training program. Also, just because someone here may have read several course reports in which others voiced an opinion that their instructors sucked, doesn't mean that person is correct to distill those reports down for the rest of us to a conclusion that "many of X agency's instructors suck."
Only if you have personally taken courses from "many" PADI or SSI tech instructors could you have a basis for asserting an opinion that "many" suck.
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