Was my expierience unique, or the norm?

[Flatliner]

Hi all,

I have a question for all of the other newly certified divers here. Did you find the class room portion of your open water training useful or not? I am wondering if my expeirience was "normal". To be honest, I considered it a waste of a weekend. A significant portion of the time was spent telling me why some particular brand or type of diving equipment (that the shop dealt in) was far superior to all others rather than teaching me about diving. Also, I heard several times how shopping on the internet or ebay was evil. I kinda felt like I went to one of those dinners with friends where you get there and realize that they want to recruit you for amway.

My local dive shop is awesome and I could give you several instances of truly amazing customer service off the top of my head. Also, my open waters dives were excellent and I really enjoyed them as they solidified what I learned from the book. However, I walked away from the classroom very disappointed.

Robert

 

[runamonk]

We didn't get into any gear specifics during my class room sessions. I would speak with the instructor about your feelings on this matter.

I find that most of the "Gear" talk is totally subjective. Something your instructor might find totally awesome and the best thing for him will be the exact opposite for you and most divers will tell you the same thing.

If you don't feel you got enough out of the classroom I would suggest talking with another instructor. Maybe see about a taking a refresher through them to make sure you learned in the class what you needed to learn.

There are a lot of instructors on this board, I'm sure some of them will pipe in with some better advice.

 

[jpcpat]

Mentioning a few preferences is one thing, what happened to you is another. A hard sell for the shop's gear is over the top. Are you sure you want to keep dealing with them?

 

[redrover]

No mention of gear brands in class. I bought during class and asked about my choices after, before or on other days and got quite a bit of recommendations for less expensive options.

 

[WarrenZ]

During my OW class we looked at a lot of the gear we would be using but it was all in a “this is the stuff you will be using and this is how it works” type of discussion. I think you should take a long hard look at the instructor and the experience you had before you take more training from them.

 

[waterpirate]

AH the amway aproach to dive instruction. Sorry to hear about your experience. The best way for you to gauge your personel experience is to ask yourself, do I understand, and can I apply the concepts presented to open water?
If you can answer yes to those questions, you are a success in spite of the amway pitch. As you progress spend more time shopping your next instructor, as we are all very different, find one you like, and have a great time!
Eric

 

[spectrum]

Flatliner,

Our classes were very free of the hard sell and that was a pleasure after hearing of stories like yours. I agree with the others that there is little room for this short of using props to explain the gear.

Otherwise you considered the weekend a waste of time and that leaves me wondering if you felt prepared for the dives you made in open water and I assume in the pool before that.

I can say from personal experieince that if you hang around ScubaBoard and read your class text and then some before the lectures that it is possible to hear no new technical informaton in the presentations. Hopefully the instructor included embelished things with examples and stories. The bottom line is that with a little priming the basic Open Water body of knowledge is pretty thin.

Pete

 

[Richesb]

You obviously had a PADI class. Yes Padi is always trying to sell something. But the information that you gather is helpful at a later date. The more you get into diving the more technical things become and the insignificant things you le4arned now make alot of sense.
Dive, learn, be safe

 

[D_B]

:lol:
... I'm pretty sure you won't find it in any PADI teaching materials
I know my class and instructor was not like you described.. the only gear advise offered was to avoid entry level gear .. not because any of it is dangerous, It's not .. but good quality gear will last a lifetime of diving and you don't want to find that you spent money on stuff that you want to upgrade a short time later

sorry yours was so hard sell, it may be a shop policy of instructing for that shop

 

[DHMO Diver]

In my PADI OW class there was no equipment pitch of any kind. There was discussion of equipment in general and purchase strategies (ie: reg set BC and then the rest) but no discussion of what is better. Further, the LDS has a policy of exchanging any of the initial gear for other versions if it does not suit you. The LDS owner spent about an hour with my wife and I when we got our initial gear and did not try to sell us the high dollar gear (mask, fins etc).

I originally trained under DTBWSH in the early sixties and re-took OW with PADI. Gear pushing was not part of either curriculum. My guess, as DB said, is that this is business driven, not organizational driven. As so many have said in other post it is the instructor not the acronym.