The other night I was watching Dr. Dan Gottlieb on PBS. He advocated the concept of "Do less. Be more," as a way of finding time to discover yourself, your happiness, and what it means to be human in a world in which we've lost free time in the congestion of competition and technology.
What I've discovered in my experience, especially after the last cave class I taught and a solo class which wrapped up on the Thursday before Good Friday, is that students have different thresholds for learning. Those who are hoping to cram as much information as possible into the time allotted for class are more motivated to stay focused during long days. But, even these students can reach an information plateau. Some students are highly motivated to learn, but can only absorb so much in a given day. They often need down time to take a break in their minds then return to diving again and have time on their own to contemplate the information.
What I noticed in these last two classes was that my cave student had incorrect answers to questions that were discussed during long days. The solo class was a one day course, but a long day packed with information. Some of my student's incorrect answers surprised me since he was a NAUI tech diver and highly intelligent. Since we had two-way discussions in which he totally understood various topics in class, and since I had repeated and emphasized exam questions multiple times, I blame any lack of retention on the amount of information covered during a long intense day.
In-water, I have found that starting a course with a thorough review is important. In the cave class, we started with propulsion, buoyancy, basic 5, S-drills, valve drills, light deployments, running line, touch contact, and good team diving in open water. In the solo class, we performed these drills on a training platform and worked on good team diving as a review to help contrast that with operating independently.
After review, I begin to initiate failures based exercises "by the numbers" from the beginning to the end of an exercise in shallow water. This provides an immediate debrief and fixes slop rather than have the student make the same mistakes during a left post failure that he did for a right post failure underwater only to be corrected later.
Once we have correct procedures understood and cleaned up, then it is time to balance learning with trial by fire to stimulate the brain and get our game faces on. After I've evaluated what we need to work on regarding trial by fire exercises, the pressure is reduced to foster practice and retention of the weaker areas until we strengthen them.
Once that looks good, then the student needs experience dives without the stress of failures to start putting everything together.
After the experience dives, I have a final in-water exam returning to the shallows or the cavern and taking all the gloves off and increasing pressure and the intensity of the failures to let us both discover the student's threshold for handling multiple failures with control. Finally, we do the written exam and course debrief.
After all these years, I'm still trying to balance "less is more" with giving 110% to the class. I try to gauge my student's interest, retention, threshold for learning, physical and emotional comfort to balance class time with down time exposure and duration of dives, but it isn't always easy and I'm still trying to create the perfect class in terms of time, information, critical skills, experience and testing.
