Teaching contradictions: differing dive training philosophies

[Edward3c]

NetDoc wrote
Pete, I tip my hat to you for you must be one hell of a lot better instructor than I am.

In my OW pool sessions I'll often be found kneeling on the bottom of the pool -- in 3 feet of water and talking to my students. Heck, in 4 feet of water I'm often found standing on the bottom of the pool and talking with them while they also stand. I'll also confess that when they first start, they are often found touching, perhaps even resting, on the bottom in 3 feet of water.

I applaud you for being able to not have them touch the bottom at any time!

I have no issues with kneeling etc on the bottom whilst doing elementary training more advanced yes it can be done mid-water, but its no big deal if not.

What I do discourage from other instructors is spending more than 5 minutes talking in a lesson - that's what the classroom is for - open water lessons are for learning and practicing skills.

Kind regards

 

[DCBC]

...Consequently, I teach that a dive consists of one descent, followed by an ascent with a suitable surface interval between dives. It's my belief that students learn the wrong thing by example from their instructor bouncing up and down like a rabid yo-yo during these CESAs and I also feel it puts the instructor at an elevated risk. ...I am not going to teach my students to do one thing while I do another. I'm not into hypocrisy.

Personal opinion is meaningless without substantiation. My students have had the intelligence to understand the facts. I want my students to develop their decompression profile based upon the science and not someone's misguided opinion. Hypocrisy?

 

[The Chairman]

If you dive like a yo-yo during class, then you are teaching your students to dive like yo-yos. You can dance around it all you want and justify it any way that you can, but you're teaching your students that being a yo-yo is quite OK because YOU do it. If your personal opinion is that this makes a good diver, then so be it. I disagree with you, but what else is new? Calling my opinion unsubstantiated is a vapid appeal to some specious authority you don't possess. I would suggest that you have no substantiation for your opinions either... other than yourself.

Teaching by example has a long and noble history. This includes demonstrations, mentoring and simply setting a good and consistent example. It amazes me that you would suggest that it is unsubstantiated. Perhaps you should open up your world view a bit and see just how viable and powerful example can be in the classroom. It really comes down to how you want your students to dive. I avoid behaviors during instruction that I don't want my students emulating. It's just that simple and this methodology prevents bad habits from forming by instilling the good habits from the very start. It's like always having bubbles come out of your mouth when the reg is out. It sets a constant reminder to our students that they should never hold their breath. In fact, we require the same of them. How is this that different? I've just extended this concept to exclude a few bad behaviors instructors indulge in because they are convenient or appeal to their ego. If the convenience and ego are that important to you, keep doing what you're doing. Me? I'll keep working out ways to set the bar a bit more neutral.

 

[Thalassamania]

Er ... Pete, your example is to do a horizontal CESA. How does that jibe with your stated opinion: "If you dive like a yo-yo during class, then you are teaching your students to dive like yo-yos. You can dance around it all you want and justify it any way that you can, but you're teaching your students that being a yo-yo is quite OK because YOU do it. If your personal opinion is that this makes a good diver, then so be it. I disagree with you, but what else is new? Calling my opinion unsubstantiated is a vapid appeal to some specious authority you don't possess."

 

[The Chairman]

What don't you understand? It's the pool, and we're not changing depths. They get the mechanics down just fine. The rest of the class is devoted to being sure that they never have to use that skill IRL.

 

[Thalassamania]

It's the pool, and we're not changing depths. They get the mechanics down just fine. The rest of the class is devoted to being sure that they never have to use that skill IRL.

Actually they are missing most all of the mechanics. What you are teaching them is how to do a horizontal swim, with no buoyancy change due to suit and BC, whilst exhaling all in the a pool. Rather different than teaching someone to do a vertical swim, whilst controlling their increasing buoyancy and venting expanding air from their lungs. In fact, I would not consider it even remotely analogous.

 

[nimoh]

I am not an instructor, so don't have experience teaching students, other than participating in classes as a divemaster, but it seems to me that it would be preferable to teach vertical CESAs AND explain to the students why bounce diving is bad, than to just avoid bounce diving altogether.

I see it as sort of analagous to putting a car in a skid to get a feel for how to control a car in a skid.

 

[boulderjohn]

I have already said my piece in this thread, but since it seems to have no end, I will repeat some key points I made before.

1. The horizontal CESA is a very poor simulation that in many ways does more instructional harm than good. I wrote a very detailed analysis of this earlier.

2. In performance instruction, like coaching sports, the instructor frequently must do things that are not normally done in a game. Since when I first wrote that, Pete made a baffling response about the evils of teaching unsportsmanlike conduct, let me give more obvious examples. In basketball the coach frequently participates in drills by standing in a spot and making repeated passes to players taking shots. In baseball a coach tosses balls into the air and hits ground balls to players who field them. In soccer a coach kicks crossing passes to players who learn to judge their approach to make a shot off the pass. In several decades of coaching a number of sports, I have never met a single player who was so blithering stupid as to think that they are supposed to do what a coach is doing under instructional circumstances.

3. Pete says that the problem is that the coach is showing that it is permissible during a dive to ascend 20 feet and then go back down again a couple of times, when everyone knows that such an act can cause injury. But everyone does not, in fact, know that. For example, I have never heard that before. He has not responded when asked to provide evidence that this danger has been identified in medical science.

4. Asked about the non-normal things he does while conducting an OW checkout dive, Pete says he does not ask the students to do anything other than an air-sharing ascent during a dive. He says that all the other skills normally checked out during a certification dive series happen anyway during a dive, so he just lets it happen. In fact, he says it is impossible to have such dives without those things happening. I admit that I did not challenge him on that, but I find that I experience more than a few dives in which I do not lose my regulator and have to recover it, have a complete mask flood and have to clear it, take my mask off and have to replace it, head out on a compass heading for a while and then return to the same point, etc. Apparently he does not do those skills in the OW dives unless the students happen to run into those situations on their own. I find it hard to believe they do with any frequency

 

[Thalassamania]

I am not an instructor, so don't have experience teaching students, other than participating in classes as a divemaster, but it seems to me that it would be preferable to teach vertical CESAs AND explain to the students why bounce diving is bad, than to just avoid bounce diving altogether.

I see it as sort of analagous to putting a car in a skid to get a feel for how to control a car in a skid.

Where the analogy breaks down, majorly, is in the fact that the horizontal swim provides neither the feel of increasing buoyancy (and the need to control it), nor the expansion of air in the lungs and the need to vent it.

 

[nimoh]

Where the analogy breaks down, majorly, is in the fact that the horizontal swim provides neither the feel of increasing buoyancy (and the need to control it), nor the expansion of air in the lungs and the need to vent it.

actually my analogy was meant to apply to the vertical swim, meaning that you can't get a feel for it unless you actually do it.