When I teach Intro to Tech/Advanced Buoyancy classes, I joke that the key to successful tech diving is the ability to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. This is true for such skills as helicopter turns where one foot frog kicks as the other backward frog kicks and when doing valve drills by signaling simultaneously as one closes a post.
Drills form the foundation for dealing with emergencies, but often only serve to create muscle memory. Of equal or greater importance is the ability to think through the problem at hand. When a diver has a post failure the diver is often facing two problems at once.
1) Correcting the problem that is occurring by diagnosing the failure and resolving it properly.
2) Getting the attention of one's buddy or team.
In caves or at night light signals work exceptionally well. In the daylight they are often less effective due to team positioning not always being perfect, the surrounding bottom features or lack of features, and the time of day casting different lighting through the water column. It always amuses me when graduates of high-quality preparatory courses such as GUE-F enter a tech class and find themselves faced with their first failures training. They will nearly do a demonstration quality valve shutdown with light signaling, but the buddy or team will be absolutely unaware. As a student a decade ago, I was no exception in one of Andrew Georgitsis' technical classes in which I tried signaling a buddy who didn't see the light when I had a post failure. I simply maintained position while performing a demo quality drill without chasing him down. I shouldn't have had to do that because the team position should have been better, but the fact is that if it had been real my buddy and back-up gas supply would have been swimming away.
I believe that 100% of my students have done the same thing.
What is needed after drills is "live fire" exercises in which students are hit with many surprise failures to teach awareness as well as problem recognition. My favorite times to create failures are:
1) Just as the team enters the water or begins to descend.
2) Any time there is poor team positioning or separation.
3) Any time the team is performing a task such as tying in a guideline, doing a gas switch, removing items from pockets, writing in wet notes, deploying a DSMB, etc.
4) Just as the team is about to exit the water or while preparing to climb a ladder.
It's important in training to create a Utopian world in which team, buoyancy, trim, and everything else are prioritized in that order and to keep reinforcing good positioning while also making sure divers are maintaining team awareness. By learning to work out in front of them when doing a task with heads back against manifolds, tanks and manifolds sitting low on the shoulders to allow full range of motion of the head as to not compromise upward visibility and to break the bad habit of looking down and taking eyes off the team, students can then determine how safe the position of the team is and the team's awareness during real dives and compare them to the perfect world of class.
By performing many failures at all phases of the dive the instructor can assess the student's ability to maintain awareness at unexpected moments such as the immediate moment when the team strides into the water, assess the student's ability to maintain buoyancy and trim in blue water, maintain awareness and fundamental skills when task-loaded, and to practice getting the attention of their buddies.
When it comes to daylight signals it is often necessary to flash the light across the facemask of the buddy if the team member isn't directly facing you (obviously you don't want to zap his eyes directly with the light) or in a strategic location such as on his gauges in blue water or if flashing the light on a bottom feature did not attract his attention.
It's important not to develop silly rote learning during training. For example, it's necessary to develop the ability to signal the buddy while shutting down a post, but it's also important to acknowledge that once you have a buddy's attention you do not need to be signaling with your light while problem-solving.
Learning is a process and standards and procedures are tools to facilitate that process. Too many instructors and divers fall into the habit of placing too much emphasis on how something is done rather than on what is supposed to be accomplished and why.
