What is taught?

[spectrum]

I wrote this as a follow-up to the Adjusting Weights thread post # 34.
http://www.scubaboard.com/showpost.php?p=2214403&postcount=34

I felt we were drifting off topic but wanted to see where this line of thinking went, so here it is.

It's true that scuba diving is a gear intesive sport. it is also true that most people come to the sport totally unfmilliar with the gear and and the fundamental physics of how and why it works. We can teach techniques for determinng correct weighting, ascents, descents and so forth. However without a functional understanding of concepts like buoyancy and the pertinent gas laws people are diving by rote and can't begin to reslove the myriad of personal configuration issues. I'm not saying anyone needs to be a math whiz but there are realtionships and behaviors that must be understood. Coming to the sport with many years of fluid power experience has helped me a lot. Partcipating here has helped me apply that knowledge and experience to my diving.

It is also very true that many instructors do not set high standards and a long as you can execute the required drills and survive a few free swim dives you will become certified. I recognize there there are instructors that actually teach students to dive and when they become certified thay are at least aware of what they are working towards in terms of technique and style.

It must be scary diving and not really knowing what is going on.

Pete

 

[nolatom]

I don't know Boyle's law, nor Dalton's law, but I was taught in OW that gas gets compressed as you go deeper, and vice-versa. In the Nitrox course, I was taught how to multiply the percentage of oxygen by the number of atmospheres so as to keep it below either 1.4 or 1.6.

Unless I get into mixed gas or tech diving, are you suggesting I need to know the mathematical formulas? Why?

 

[spectrum]

Unless I get into mixed gas or tech diving, are you suggesting I need to know the mathematical formulas? Why?

Formulas, no, just relationships as I said in my post. It sounds like you have more than many. It may be said to most students but I know it is never understood by many.

 

[Dave in PA]

It must be scary diving and not really knowing what is going on.

Pete

It is true that ignorance is bliss and one generally needs to try to explain why we need to learn something, before you can really teach it.

Some students still want to know what I mean by "you will receive your C-card after you pass ALL of the tests" You know, they have their brow furrowed as they think about what I just said.

 

[Meng_Tze]

Yes, but isnt this with everything we do?

If you dont know the principles or dangers but yet manage to do the activity - either well or struggle through-, many people will not get deeper into in to understand why, how etc. The focus was to do the activity.... and that is being done.

You drive a car every day, do you ever stop to think how complex that is? Watching for dangers, adjusting speed, putting on makeup, phoning your friends and drinking coffee. ;-| What laws of nature play in it? in corners, when breaking accelerating?...... how your engine combusts fuel, etc,.....probably not. You learn to drive and are bad at it at first, then experience takes hold and you learn some more.....


I am not saying that it is the right way of things, it just is the way things are.... this tendency to avoid understanding complexity in detail comes through in the way diving is taught. It is made easy to grasp, set certain standards that a newly certified diver needs to have and then you are basically free to do what you want. If you want to progress from there, a bit more complexity gets added and so forth.

 

[EvilSlumLord]

Many instructors are definitely making a tradeoff here as (at least based on my OW class experience) a lot of the folks that were in the class wouldn't have absorbed those concepts even if they had been pushed by the instructor. If being able to understand and apply them in practice were criteria for passing the class, most of them would have washed out. Some might argue that is the right thing to do in the scheme of things.

My complaint about my OW class (and those I've heard about from others) is that they talk about proper weighting (in the books and verbally) but never walk you through the exercise in practice. They just overweighted you so that you could get through the class. Unfortunately that meant I (not realizing I was overweighted) dove several of my follow on dives overweighted, trying to figure out why I would alternate between crashing into the bottom and feeling like I was on the verge of a rapid ascent.

Now that I've taken the time to adjust my weight (dropping 6 lbs so far and maybe more in the future), my buoyancy control has significantly improved. One could say "well you should have done that right away" but as a new diver I like many presumed that the shop/instructor had assigned my initial weight reasonably close to what I probably needed and never said "by the way, we are overweighting you quite a bit". Subsequent visits to the shop have revealed "oh yeah, we always do that with OW class students because they take big breaths initially and hold them in and therefore would never sink otherwise."

I'm no expert but it seems like this could be done better.

 

[nolatom]

I'm aware there's a chorus of, "anyone can get a C-card", and "they don't train divers like they used to/like they should", "standards have been lowered".

It may be true. I can't tell, since I don't teach, or work in the sport. I get in about 20dives a year, mostly with pick-up buddies. Most of them have been good, some very good, including the "newbies". Maybe I've just been fortunate. But I feel I got pretty good training, from OW through AOW and Rescue, from my local shop.

I don't go way back to the "old days" to make a comparison, just back 7 years to when I got certified. And maybe I've been diving with the people who have decided to stay involved with diving and have taken more seriously than some. But, that said, I haven't really noticed too many divers who lack the basic skills, or don't have a fair idea how to weight themselves.

As I say, maybe I've just been fortunate, haven't been around enough, or am wearing rose-colored glasses (mask?) but I haven't seen much evidence of deficient training or lack of understanding of the basic principles of diving, buoyancy, gas management, or dive planning. It must be out there, since so many posts on boards like these comment on it, but I just haven't noticed it on the dive boats I've been on (mostly Flower Gardens, Pensacola, West Palm/Jupiter, New England).

These are just the observations of an "average" diver, neither newbie nor way experienced at this point.

 

[CJ Waid]

OK, I want in this one. I had an excellent instructor, this guy is straight up the **** in the water, he impressed me (and I have spent years surfing in blizzards in the dead of winter in lake michigan) This guy is definately the ****. He wrote a course that PADI offers, he has a scrap book about 6 inches thick with all of his certifications, originally he hung them on the wall, there are only about 20 or so in frames, then he got sick of putting them up, and just throws them in this book now. This guy is good, he can go through the everyone of the diamonds upsidedown and backwards and not touch a single side. When he certified me and my buddy, he took a lot of time with us to make sure that he drilled everything in our head, (He might have suspected that we were stoned at every class though, this may have been the reason he was so careful with us) anyway, right after I got certified, he realized that we were not totally convinced that the dive charts were real, etc. He said that our certification was a license for us to go out and break all the rules, he said just dont hold your breath on the way up. So, I have had ear aches from not believing that I needed to equalize quite yet, I have found myself 50 feet underwater without hoses hooked up (skipping predive checks) and just the other day I was down at a 100 feet in lake michigan and I shot up to the top like a bottle rocket when I realized that i was down to my last 200 pounds of air, I should have made sure that my deflator hose was accessable, instead the strap was broke and it was caught under my tank, and I didn't have a dump valve on that rig, so I shot to the top so fast I think I might have gotten a little air when I came out of the water. The moral of the story isn't that I am a dumb ***, it is that it is not my instructors fault that I am a dumb ***.

I think that if you see an undereducated diver, it is because you are seeing an "undereducated diver", that doesn't mean that is the instructors fault.

Consequently, I am working toward becoming an instructor now, I think I will be a good one, because I "really" know why you should do the stuff you are taught now.

 

[wreckchick]

Uh... let me get this straight....

You're a complete cluster in the water and you think that makes you uniquely qualified to teach others how NOT to be a complete cluster?

I'm not sure the logic works for me, please do enlighten.

Rachel

 

[CJ Waid]

I never said I was a cluster in the water. I am pretty non-clustery in the water. I just have to break rules to understand them, its not that uncommon, especially among young males, What does clustery mean? I did over 50 dives the first month I was certified, and I will admitt, I was pretty stoned the time, and I only had a hand full of incidents, I don't think that is that bad at all.