Suit filed in case of "Girl dead, boy injured at Glacier National Park

[wetb4igetinthewater]

I'll go read it, as I'd like to line up with what the laywer blogged about it. It doesn't make any difference of course, just satisfies my curiosity.

OFF TOPIC ALERT!!!

While I know Brian's open letter has factual errors, the link (from An Open Letter of Personal Perspective to the Diving Industry by NetDoc) to PADI's response to his letter is no longer valid (http://www.padi.com/newsletter/02491878/default.html).

Unfortunately the internet isn't truly forever.

I'm still curious about a counter view to those expressed here: When a training agency decides it is more important than its instructor members or, worse, the training agency helps the plaintiff sue its own members

 

[Rollin Bonz]

OFF TOPIC ALERT!!!

While I know Brian's open letter has factual errors, the link (from An Open Letter of Personal Perspective to the Diving Industry by NetDoc) to PADI's response to his letter is no longer valid (http://www.padi.com/newsletter/02491878/default.html).

Unfortunately the internet isn't truly forever.

I'm still curious about a counter view to those expressed here: When a training agency decides it is more important than its instructor members or, worse, the training agency helps the plaintiff sue its own members

@wetb4igetinthewater

Looking for this?

PADI Responds to an Open Letter to the Dive Industry, dated 12 November 2014

 

[boulderjohn]

Debbie Snow was a newly certified PADI instructor

This is another inaccuracy in the charges, one that I have been patiently waiting to be corrected.

Immediately after this incident became public, I was contacted privately by someone who had worked with Debbie Snow in the past, in another dive operation in another state. He said she seemed to be an OK instructor and was surprised to see her acting as she did in this case. I was hoping that this person would eventually provide this background. I don't know much more about this than I just wrote.

My point in bringing this up relates to what I believe to be the purpose of the misinformation, as seen by some of the responses in this thread. The implication is that her actions were reflective of her performance in the supposedly recent instructor certification examination, as if it is not possible for someone to perform well while being watched by examiners and then do something different when not being watched. For example, I am pretty sure that people who pass the tests to get a driver's license do not arrive drunk and drive 100 MPH during the test. For some reason, when a drunk drives 100 MPH and causes an accident, we do not blame the person who gave the test and issued the license.

 

[Wookie]

This is another inaccuracy in the charges, one that I have been patiently waiting to be corrected.

Immediately after this incident became public, I was contacted privately by someone who had worked with Debbie Snow in the past, in another dive operation in another state. He said she seemed to be an OK instructor and was surprised to see her acting as she did in this case. I was hoping that this person would eventually provide this background. I don't know much more about this than I just wrote.

My point in bringing this up relates to what I believe to be the purpose of the misinformation, as seen by some of the responses in this thread. The implication is that her actions were reflective of her performance in the supposedly recent instructor certification examination, as if it is not possible for someone to perform well while being watched by examiners and then do something different when not being watched. For example, I am pretty sure that people who pass the tests to get a driver's license do not arrive drunk and drive 100 MPH during the test. For some reason, when a drunk drives 100 MPH and causes an accident, we do not blame the person who gave the test and issued the license.

As a studier of human behavior as I know you are, there is no doubt in my mind that you are aware of the concept, and probably more than aware of Normalization of Deviance.

Who could possibly understand what goes through the mind of someone else, but I think you reinforce my point.

I was a Navy Nuke. There has never been a reactor accident in the Navy, incredible when you figure that they take 17 year old high school graduates, train them for a year and a half, and send them out on a submarine or aircraft carrier and give them the keys to the reactor and tell them to have a good time.

Why don’t they toast reactors? A high level of training, an installation of personal reliability, and continuous oversight of both the personal reliability program and reactor training.

Guess what is missing from any instructor membership process? They get adequate training, even excellent depending on their CD/ITE. That’s where the path diverges though. As an instructor and member for 21 years with 3 years broken membership, but with continuous membership with other agencies, no one ever observed me teach. No one ever evaluated me actually interact with a student. No one attempted to instill any kind of personal reliability. Either you had it or you didn’t. No one ever required me to demonstrate that I was a good instructor.

I gave up instructing for a number of reasons, but lost faith in the instructional system (I hesitate to name names here because as you rightfully pointed out, they are all the same) is the main reason. If I am an OWSI, I am judged by all of the OWSI’s, including you, Debbie Snow, and the man on the moon with an instructor card. If my training agency cares so little for my reputation that they aren’t going to provide any oversight and evaluation of any instructor until a QA is filed, well, that isn’t an organization I want to be a part of. Not only that, I will heartily encourage everyone else I know not to be a part of that process as well, because the process isn’t worth my time, or the time of the folks I care about.

And so I’m not.

 

[boulderjohn]

For most cases, oversight and evaluation is the responsibility of the operation that hires you. That does not work for independent instructors, but the overwhelming majority of OW instructors work for an operation that manages the instructional process. It is the same with teaching in general. A teacher is observed and evaluated by the administrators of the school where he or she is employed, not the school for which the student teaching was done. Additionally, in at least my state, schools are required to provide mentoring programs for new teachers to get them off on the right foot.

I worked for two different dive operations. The first is the one where I was working when I experimented with neutral buoyancy instruction, leading to the article that PADI published 11 years ago. The Director of Instruction there was so impressed by the difference in results that he required that all instructors for that shop (about a dozen) teach students while neutrally buoyant and in horizontal trim. He felt the the improvement in student performance was important. In the second shop, they let me teach that way, but no way would they impose that on others. As was explained to me in so many words, all instructional methods can lead to students who are certified and thus able to buy equipment and go on trips. Thus, all approaches are equal. He went on to explain that "instructors are a dime a dozen." Any instructor can be replaced easily because so many are looking for jobs and willing to do what the shop says to do. I was in the pool with a student at the same time that shop was in with OW students, and their instructors were still teaching on the knees.

In summary, if you work for a dive operation that cares about the quality of instruction, the instructors will be supervised and mentored. If the operation only cares about certifying people who can spend money with them, they won't care about that. That is true for all agencies.

 

[formernuke]

Any actually case related updates on this case?

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

This is another inaccuracy in the charges, one that I have been patiently waiting to be corrected.

Immediately after this incident became public, I was contacted privately by someone who had worked with Debbie Snow in the past, in another dive operation in another state. He said she seemed to be an OK instructor and was surprised to see her acting as she did in this case. I was hoping that this person would eventually provide this background. I don't know much more about this than I just wrote.

My point in bringing this up relates to what I believe to be the purpose of the misinformation, as seen by some of the responses in this thread. The implication is that her actions were reflective of her performance in the supposedly recent instructor certification examination, as if it is not possible for someone to perform well while being watched by examiners and then do something different when not being watched. For example, I am pretty sure that people who pass the tests to get a driver's license do not arrive drunk and drive 100 MPH during the test. For some reason, when a drunk drives 100 MPH and causes an accident, we do not blame the person who gave the test and issued the license.

I know Debbie. She was an AI for a while. She acted as shore support in one of my open water classes.

I know Debbie as an extremely caring person. I cannot speak to the events of that fateful day, though the evidence indicates she was completely overwhelmed and exercised poor/fatal judgment. She passed her IE in December 2019 and the incident was November 2020, 11 months later.

While I would not characterize her as a newly certified, I think the term "inexperienced" would be a more accurate term. I cannot speak for anyone else, but I certainly would not want to be teaching in her environment in my first year of teaching, despite having spent time diving in Lake Tahoe. I can relate to dive shops putting pressure on instructors to "get it done." I do not know how many divers Debbie Snow had certified prior, nor for what courses.

I hope that we can all agree that Mr. Seth Liston, as an (junior) open water diver, should not have been acting in any capacity in assisting the course, except as shore support.

Now before anyone accuses me of bashing PADI, I feel strongly that most agencies, including ones where I am active, the bar is simply too low. My proposed solutions of things like apprenticeships/co-teaching with more experienced instructors for new courses, etc.. just isn't going to fly for dive centers of most agencies. That is the heart at the issue for me.

As far as the person who contacted you John, does he live in Panama?

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

For most cases, oversight and evaluation is the responsibility of the operation that hires you.

If agencies mandated dive centers to do so, what impact do you think it would have?

You brought up independent instructors, but it is my impression that most don't start out that way. There are likely some exceptions.

 

[boulderjohn]

If agencies mandated dive centers to do so, what impact do you think it would have?

You brought up independent instructors, but it is my impression that most don't start out that way. There are likely some exceptions.

One would think that any business would want to get the best performance from its employees. I was flabbergasted when I heard a dive shop manager say what I described above, that the quality of instruction was not important as long as the student got certified. (He did not say it that way, but that is what he meant.)

As a lifelong educator in roles from teacher to high level administrator, that is the area I know best. Prospective teachers take multiple courses in college, go through different kinds of internships and student teaching experiences, take state certification exams, participate in new teacher mentor programs, have administrators assigned to them to observe their performance and evaluate it regularly, and still we have uncountable thousands of incompetent teachers across the country. Think of how many millions and millions of dollars taxpayers have poured into managing these teachers, and still I have seen examples that should horrify anyone.

One of the reasons for this is similar to what we see in scuba. If the management of a school or a dive operation does not see any benefit to improving the quality of the staff, then we can expect little effort in maintaining or developing quality. We can, in fact, see the opposite. I once heard a highly regarded principal say that he saw nothing wrong with hiring an incompetent teacher if that teacher was also a competent athletic coach. When I heard that, I thought of the time I was part of a 21-person English department with 5 teachers who had been hired in the past to coach basketball, with all 5 eventually fired as coaches but retained as English teachers. In scuba, the quality of instruction can suffer when dive management does not want to spend the money to send enough staff to manage instruction in low visibility settings or limits the time spent on pool training because of the cost of pool rental time.

So what about this case? I put a lot of the blame on the scuba shop's management. I cannot imagine this would have happened with quality management. Neither of the shops I worked for would have allowed this to happen.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

I started this thread and have been following it for nearly the past year. I haven't posted much because I have seen a number of things that give me pause and also piss me off. I have also been involved with contacting the US Attorney and Attorney General over the way they handled/ are handling the case.
I have also spoken to Linnea's mother and seen the way she has been treated. It is disgraceful what happened and how it happened.
Whatever the outcome, a girl died for no good reason and there were factors that contributed to that beyond her control.
She trusted so-called dive professionals and did what they said to do. The fact that they were even at the site, without a permit, in the conditions that day calls into question the judgement and level of "caring" of the instructor.
Those conditions were such that the average tech diver, unless they had a very good reason, would have said screw it. In fact they would have given the cluster of just trying to rush into the water before dark. Then to suggest anyone dive without a hose to connect the drysuit? Caring?
Give me a break. Absolutely no excuse for that in any way, shape, or form.
I can empathize with the family. My daughter passed away 2 weeks ago.
It wasn't an accident. It was natural causes and I know the feeling from that.
This wasn't natural, and calling it an accident is a stretch. Some accidents happen with no obvious cause.
There were several obvious causes/factors here. All of which were in the control of the instructor. They chose not to exercise control or caution.
Why? It doesn't matter. Short of a mental break there is no excuse for the entire episode. This trip, with a prudent instructor, would never have happened.