I agree that having an instructor be honest with you is a good thing, particularly moving into technical diving. What seems to be a mismatch to me is the philosophy of coaching and feedback and the GUE course restrictions that others have posted about; specifically the 6th month redo time limit if you get a provisional, or if you fail entirely you have to completely redo the course.
Individuals develop at different paces. Some get it quickly, others have to work on some skills, others have to go back to the drawing board entirely. What you learn does not evaporate though. If you continue to dive, and apply the methodology that you learned in classes, knowledge does not *disappear*, it gets reinforced and internalized over time.
I was listening to a podcast interview with Jarod Jablonski (league of extraordinary divers podcast) where he outlined how he developed GUE and the coaching methodology, essentially that you could coach folks over time and then give them a certification when they met the goals or standards necessary to advance. What he talked about made a lot of sense, but unfortunately is not reflected in the current GUE fundamentals structure, which is much more all or nothing than his original concept. When you take fundies you have 4 possible outcomes. 1. you get a tech pass, 2. you get a provisional tech pass, 3 you get a rec pass, 3. you fail completely. In 3 of the 4 outcomes you either have to do a follow up session within 6 months or redo the class entirely if you want to pursue technical training through GUE. My question is what drives the 6 months or the need to redo a class entirely and how does that match with the coaching folks over time philosophy that Jablonski advocates? If you are continuing to dive and train using the GUE method than 6 months is irrelevant, you will not lose the skill set you gained during fundies, in fact you will internalize it and make it habit; while you are building and refining the skills you have to work on. Retaking a class in whole is a waste of $$ and time. If you failed fundies becuase you had a hard time maintaining trim and buoyancy while performing skills than retaking fundies and spending time and $$ going over equipment configuration again is not going to do anything but discourage and dissuade folks, the opposite of what we should be trying to do.
I was going to take fundies this summer, in fact I had already started the academics and some of the remote teaching sessions for the class. Through a turn of events the class was cancelled and I could not make timing work to do it at another time. Because of this I found stumbled upon UTD and took their version of fundies, essentials. The UTD system is very close to GUE and their training methodology looks to me like it matches more closely Jablinski's original concept of coaching until someone is ready to progress then GUEs does now. In fact there is a shop in Rockville Maryland that does their pricing in exactly that way, you pay $95 for each coaching session until they get you to a point where you are ready to move on to the next level of training (they estimate 7 sessions for the average person). Please note that I am not trying to sell UTD kool-aide here, every agency will have things that seem off to folks and UTD is no different (for example I have a lot of reservations about Ratio Deco); but their training program methodology appears to be much truer to the original Jablonski idea than GUE does now.
I have also heard folks say that GUE fundies is more than skills development, it is also a critical element to team development and ensuring everyone has standardized procedures. I get that argument, makes a lot of sense, but again if someone has the fundamental skills that making them do a class that wastes time and money going over things they have mastered to get to the team procedures is going to be a put-off to many. Why not have a different transition course? Do a check dive session with someone to evaluate if they truly have the fundamental skills and then have a shorter procedure oriented course to onboard them to GUE team SOPs? I have a theory on that but don't want to distract from my main point, that GUE appears to have drifted from elements of their founding training ideals
In my personal opinion GUE has configured the JJ in a way I definitely do not like and do not want to dive.I get the reasoning behind the GUE breather, but it does not suit my style of diving. No doubts it works fine for the GUE guys, but not for me (heavy, cumbersome and clumsy imo).
