And why do you think that is? Because the young little leaguer progressed to any skill level. The batting tee is an example of a learning aid that allows the hitter to focus on one aspect of a complex skill. He/she learns to keep their head in and eye on the ball. Then they progress to a slow moving target, then a faster one and then one that moves. Its a basic learning principle.
Now, I am not saying that the fin pivot is the greatest learning exercise ever invented, but I am saying that I see value in it and I do teach it. If done properly it is a nice progression to swimming horizontally.
And when is it ok for fins to touch the bottom, well we do it all the time off of 'joisey! especially when I am trying to bust a porthole off a wreck!
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Nope, they won't. It is used because it serves a specific function--to isolate a specific skill so that the student can focus on that. It is similar to an important point that was made in our instruction when I was certified as a coach by the United States Volleyball Association. We were told that when we were introducing the correct spiking motion to players, we should not do it with live sets because they will skew the motion and pick up bad habits because their focus will be on trying to time their jump and arm swing rather than work on technique.
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I really do salute all those instructors out there who never allow their students to touch the bottom at all during the first pool session. I am simply not that good, and I am awed by you.
Jeff's post made me think about what I do and why I do it from a different angle, John's reenforced it. The whole thing was brought into focus by a discussion I had with my son who's playing center on what may be, arguably, the best high school basketball team in New Mexico. His coach has an interesting approach ... while he teaches basic skills like dribbling, shooting, boxing out, passing, etc., most of the time is spent playing. They play all sorts of artificial combinations, especially three and four on five. My son's game has improved substantially in this regime, a double/double is now rather routine for him in a game, and he only "writes home" about a triple/double. Despite this, I have not seen the kind of improvement in specific named skills that I had expected, and that's what we were talking about. He said that individual skills, as long as they are "journeyman" are less important to success than is being able to use them together. dribble, shoot, box-out, rebound, shoot again or pass it off, and perform all those individual skills in a seamless way and you'll not only win, you'll dominate. Again, the key here is that each individual skill has to be adequate to the task and it is more effective to practice fitting the skills together so that they flow together than it is "perfecting" each individual item.
Diving is much the same way. Why is getting people up of the bottom so important? The flow of conversation here on Scubaboard would suggest that it is important because buoyancy control is a skill that is essential to learn and if you start off right at the beginning the student will be better at the end of the course. Permit me to suggest that that is not really what is going on. When you work with student to do as much as they can without touching the bottom, or the sides, or surfacing, what they are learning is those "connection" skills. What they are really learning in not just the concept and practice of neutral buoyancy but rather the ability to maintain their position in the water column while doing something else, perhaps more than one something else, e.g., maintaining buoyancy while sharing air, clearing their mask and ascending, holding a stop and then surfacing.
The more I think about it the more I realize that my opposition to most agency standards (including those that I wrote for NAUI) is that they focus on skills rather than on exercises that teach how to connect skills seamlessly. Too many dive classes have become sessions in which individual skills are repeated, one after another, in isolation from other skills, much like using a batting tee. While there is nothing wrong with a batting tee when used as part of an integrated and holistic program, using it as a sole end in itself is not going to produce, say, an effective first baseman. What we lost when diving courses were cut back were the exercises, the excuse for doing so was that there were not realistic simulations of something you'd actually have to do. While this complaint had a grain of truth to it, the net effect was to deprive students of the ability to connect the individual skills, but ... the current movement back to doing all of the individual skills while up off the bottom brings back a critical element that has been all but lost from most recreational training programs.
So ... it seems to me that the dividing line that had been established and that John, et.al., have been working to smear, if not break, has to do with bringing back exercises that teach the connections as well as the individual skills, as opposed to what has been the leitmotif of "modern" diver training, the reduction of exercises in favor of the demonstration of the "mastery" of individual skills done in isolation. So, let's carry the change forward, back to the future, as is were ... let's bring back bailouts, doff and dons, etc., recognizing why it is that we do them and what exactly we are trying to accomplish with them.
