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As in the first post, the bad-ass diver mentality is the source of 'hard' courses, not because the content is 'hard' but because some instructors, and some divers, want to be bad-ass. Of course they are not interested in teaching efficiently or effectively, because what is bad-ass about that? I can teach badly to make easy things hard and I am sure I did so before I did much teaching, but later I found that thinking about students made me re-evaluate things.
Once again we see the ego drenched, I'm the best on the block, 'cause I'm not the "baddest" construct. Tell you what beeno, I've seen excellent instructors who are meek and mild and excellent instructors what can blister the skin right off your back. I've seen both types run rather easy courses as well as rather hard courses. I'd say that your generalizations don't even make it past descriptions of special cases.
Of course, if you want a course filled with stories of killing sharks with my knife held between my teeth, then you are right, I am probably not where you want to be. I am not sure that anyone interested in learning to dive belongs in that sort of course though, for the reasons listed in the long post above. Good for bodice ripping stories, though not much to do with learning diving, in any conditions.
I'm likely the only person that you know that actually killed a shark, with a hand-to-hand weapon that was attacking. You can read the story here on scuba board from many years back. I have never told that story during a class, because there is no learning objective to it and doing so would be a waste of valuable training time. Most all instructors I know get the ego trip from the quality and capability of the students that they teach, not from relating sea-stories ... those are for pizza nights.
It is usually better to assume that someone knows more than they say, than less. By this, I mean that I am not basing what I say about rescue courses from talking to one or two people who took them. It is from teaching and helping teach many rescue courses (with and without other instructors) and seeing many of those intructorss fail to take care of many little things, and fail to organize the course for student success. And also seeing many other rescue courses taken and taught, and having evaluated a bunch of people in their rescue skills for leadership positions(who have taken rescue courses previously from both other instructors and myself) . Students who refer to their rescue course as 'hard' inevitably have terrible rescue skills that need to be completely retaught, because as explained above high stress learning is in fact not learning much at all.
I've seen a lot of incompetent instructors over the years, and complained about it regularly, as anyone who have read my posts on the board will tell you. But I have to say, given the way in which you express your opinions and couch you arguments, and your failure to provide any sort of diving resume on your profile makes me suspect that overstepping your credentials a bit when you go on about the "many" rescues courses your assisted with and taught, and the "many other rescue courses taken and taught," not to mention, "having evaluated a bunch of people in their rescue skills for leadership positions(who have taken rescue courses previously from both other instructors and myself)." Time to create some creditability for those claims.
Rescue can be taught to be an exhausting course. I know it can, because I see it taught that way all the time. There is absolutely no trick to teaching a 'hard' course. Don't think about students, fail to organize, don't break the skills down into components, teach them in a way that makes it hard or impossible to learn, and it is simple for an instructor to teach a 'hard' course, even to Navy divers. I have seen it done. It can also taught 'easy' with all the same exercises and scenarios fully performed by students who gain confidence as they move along. Guess which students retain the received information longer?
There you go again, you're addicted to logical fallacies. There is no causal connection between "hard" courses and instructors who, "Don't think about students, fail to organize, don't break the skills down into components, teach them in a way that makes it hard or impossible to learn." Except, perhaps, in your mind. Even when viewed in the most favorable light it is naught but:
cum hoc ergo propter hoc. I counter your claim to, "having seen it done" with mine, I too have seen it done, both ways, with some instructors being highly effective using a "hard course" approach and other being equally effective with a softer, gentler approach. In my experience there is no correlation.
Since my students are often 90 lb Japanese women, imagine how much more tiring it would be for them to carry a 200lb American to shore. Part of teaching rescue is teaching any diver how to leverage what is at hand to effect a rescue (other divers, option to drag rather than carry etc.)
I suspect that what you have learned teaching 90 lbs. Japanese women maybe unique to the problems of teaching 90 lbs. Japanese women. Perhaps you should broaden your experience before offering up advice that most other are applying to teaching 200 lbs. occidental men, with about 20% occidental women mixed in. But, in any case, there are few 90 lbs. people who are going to be able to carry or drag a 200 lbs. person up and out of the water.
Introducing rescue breathing as one big pile of stuff can weaken anybody, regardless of fitness, whether they are old fat people or a Navy diver. Or it can be taught by having the students walk through the steps while standing in waist deep water in the pool or in the ocean. Guess which one ends up with better performance in the actual scenario exercises. Guess which one ends up with stressed out student divers who never gain confidence in the exercise, and makes mistakes in the full scenarios.
That's easy to answer: the one who has learned to use mouth to snorkel rescue breathing during transport.
I have taught a lot of rescue courses and evaluated a lot of rescue drills for DM courses and later, and inevitably the ones taught with the "do it all at once" method have to be retaught the skill, while the ones taken through the exercise step by step have that firmly locked into muscle memory where it can be brought out with just a light review.
I don't know any instructors, not one, out of the "many" I have seen, who teach an "all at once." BTW: This logical fallacy is referred to as a, "straw man."
I could walk through every exercise and point out where badly organized instructors fail to prepare themselves, learn from teaching and thus fail to properly teach their students, but that just gets long and involved and can really only be evaluated by other instructors who have the teaching material at hand.
Look, you are so emphatic and insistent that I am willing to consider that perhaps instructors in Japan are not very good. But there are lots of fine people, here on Scubaboard and out in the field whom you are misrepresenting that I have to call you on it.
The three mentioned problems, though, are easy to recognize, even by students. Because either they as students had unresolved problems or difficulties with them, or someone else in their class had unresolved problems or difficulties with them, in the typically taught rescue course. So many instructors like to compare genital size by bragging about how 'hard' their rescue courses are. They are not 'hard', they are just badly taught and organized, and I have to clean up their messes later by reteaching rescue breathing when their students come to me for Divemaster.
I can't say that I've ever "bragged" about how "hard" my rescue training is, but I think it fair to point out that most of my students would describe my course as one of the most difficult things that they have done in their life and would also point to the rescue training that they received as the most taxing portion of the course. But, on the other hand, I heard, first hand, from former students concerning literally hundreds of actual rescues of divers that they have had to conduct over the years, ranging from a few dealing with full blow AGEs to many that were little more than tired diver assists through difficult exits, and they universally comment on how everything just snapped into place and worked just the way it had been demonstrated during class, so I guess I'm doing something correctly, despite the "hard" nature of my program.
You made my point for me. Badly organized instructors who fail to learn from their mistakes, and thus fail to organize and teach adequately, end up teaching 'hard' courses.
That flies quite in the face of my experience, which is that poorly skilled and often badly organized instructors slough off the more rigorous portions of their standards and teach "easy" classes because they either can't actually do the skills themselves, or they're too lazy, or their too hung over. Rarely do they teach courses that would be described as "hard," that's way too much work.
Unfortunately these 'hard' courses make for little or no retention of the learned material.
Reference please.
Why is someone in a position where they are making mistakes in the full scenarios? Because the instructor has failed to learn how to teach effectively. It is tiring to do the scenarios, certainly, but only a bad instructor's students will have to repeat them, because only a bad instructor's students will still be making mistakes in the full scenarios. A good instructor makes sure the skill is learned and repeated in a low stress, non-tiring situation, before it is put to practice in the tiring (for anyone) scenarios. Someone sent forward into the full scenarios before the skill is locked in is just not being taught properly, and the instructor is setting the student up for failure. That failure is not the student's fault; it is the instructor's fault. As you say, some get things right from the beginning, some need reps, but failing to ensure all students get it right before doing the scenarios is just failing to teach at all. It is counting on students to teach themselves, which makes the instructor rather pointless. And only a fully idiot instructor will be screaming anything at a student at any time during the full scenarios. Since part of the exercise is to measure the rescuer ability to maintain communication with people on the shore (remember that's the first thing you do after surfacing them, and you continue to pass along info on the way), yelling anything at them prevents evaluation of that communication.
Ah, something we agree on.
Again bad-ass instructors usually teach ass-bad courses, because they externalize their own problems and failings onto students.
Another, and this time conjunctive, logical fallacy.
A student failing to perform in a class only reflects on the instructor, and no one else.
Ah, something we agree on. We have a saying, "If they have not learned, have you actually taught?"
A student feeling that a class is difficult similarly reflects on the instructor, and no one else.
B.S. it may reflect on any number of things, including an inadequate suite of prerequisites.
It does say anything about the value of the course other than it needs better care in instruction, and more self-awareness by the instructor, and much more focus on the water by the instructor.)
Perhaps there's a word missing in this sentence?
I am sorry you (or whoever's experiences you are referrring to) took a badly organized, and badly taught rescue course. It's an important course, and being taught in such a way as to not be able to internalize the full exercises permanently is a bad thing for everyone involved.
As we say, "If they have not learned, have you actually taught?"
