For some odd and personal reasons, I ended up diving as a third teammate on a GUE Cave 1 class this last week. I did Cave 1 in 2008, and it was the only GUE class I have ever done that I passed outright the first time through. I have since done Cave 2 (provisionaled) and NACD Full Cave, and have almost got my Abe Davis dives in (maybe I actually do, after this last week). I have been trying to set up a "tune-up" day with an instructor for a couple of years, to review some failure scenarios and emergency drills, but I hadn't been able to make schedules work, so when this opportunity came up, I took it.
It was a fascinating experience in quite a few ways. To begin with, I had the very strange experience of looking at the class from two viewpoints simultaneously -- I was a student, and expected to perform as a student, but I was also looking at how the class was taught and how things were handled from an educational strategy perspective. I was also constantly looking at the instructor's approach, compared with the five other cave instructors with whom I have worked.
First off, I would say that we should all do this kind of thing. Even if one doesn't want to spend five days of cave diving time in a class, I think it is absolutely worth it to spend one or two days under someone's keen eye, to have sloppy habits identified and corrected, and to review the procedures which, if you dive conservatively and carefully, you have probably never had to use. If somebody on a team in front of me gets entangled, slits out and snaps the line, I will be glad that I recently did a lost line drill . . . just from the perspective of having the, "Oh, yeah, did that recently" reaction instead of, "Oh, #*&". In addition, I don't think there are any of us who can't learn something from a good teacher. JP Bresser, the instructor in this case, handed me several really nice tips that made life easier. Little things, but everything that adds to comfort and simplicity in a cave is good, right?
It was fascinating, watching my teammates. One fellow was someone with whom I have dived a number of times, and I would describe him as a solid and pretty imperturbable open water diver. The other guy was unknown to me before class, and was the least experienced diver, but had some open water technical training and a recent tech pass from Fundies. It was very interesting to see how the unfamiliar environment and the class stress degraded their diving skills at the beginning, and how adding the task loading of new procedures made it worse. What was fantastic was to watch the two of them get on top of it and grow and improve on a DAILY basis. By the end of class, they were totally different divers. I would not have believed people could learn so quickly. And here I have to give JP huge kudos as an instructor -- he does two important things. He doesn't waste time, and he doesn't overload students. We began each day at 8, and were back in the hotel by 6. Everyone got a good evening meal and adequate rest, and as a result, performance improved every single day. In my class, years ago, we started at 0730 and got back to the condo no earlier than 10; all of us were completely exhausted by the end of the week. Performance improved through Wednesday, and then we fell off the fatigue cliff, and Thursday and Friday saw errors being made that we had not been making earlier on. My C2 was worse -- one day began at 0430, and we fell into bed, completely drained, at 11 something at night. I did a surgical residency, with similar types of hours (or worse) and felt even then that your brain shuts off when you are whipped. I also believe that running schedules like that teaches the wrong thing -- you want cave divers to make an honest assessment of their capacity on any given day, and skip a dive if they are too tired or don't feel well.
Yes, we didn't go through as much detail as my first class. Danny is fanatic about navigation, and we spent long debriefs going over what each of us could remember of the cave landmarks, as well as a student-produced rundown of the dive, the failures, the times and depths where things happened, etc. It's a good exercise, but it also takes a lot of time. Danny also spent a lot of time running us through valve and S-drills in open water each day, until they were as perfect as we could get them. It was useful, in that I know how a demonstration quality S-drill should be done, but in this class, once we had shown JP that we could do them with reasonable facility, we did them in scenarios, which is probably more useful practice, and frees up about 45 minutes a day.
I'm really not sure how to reconcile this one issue. It was very clear that running the class the way JP did it meant everybody could continue to learn and improve, and I think rest was an enormous part of that. There is only so much you can do to shorten the days with efficiency; beyond that, you have to leave stuff out. Is it better to omit things (and mind you, I'm talking details, not the meat of the class at all) and improve student success and morale, or to try to do a data dump of the instructor's incredible information base, and end up with tired and discouraged students? I loved Danny's class, although it wiped me out, and I love Danny; there are many, many small things he taught me that I think are important and have never forgotten. But I think JP does an elegant job of walking the line between creating enough diver stress to accelerate improvement, and so much that it's counterproductive. I don't know that I would say one man or the other is better; they are different, and it may to some degree depend on what works for the individual student.
Running through the exercises, it was hugely clear to me that the bottom line on cave diving is bandwidth. When I took the class the first time, I had no bandwidth to spare; I was running on max just to remember everything we were supposed to be doing. I can tell you I NEVER saw Danny during the class, whereas I often saw JP. I don't think their instructor procedures are any different. I just think I had the capacity to see and notice a lot more this time, and that has come from lots of time in the environment. (It didn't hurt that I had nothing on the line but JP's opinion of me; I have an NACD Cave card he can't do anything about, no matter how much of a doofus I proved to be.) Having better skills (for example, for working in the dark) made things like the lost line much easier, although a three-person lights-out air-sharing exit is a cluster, no matter what!
There have been some curriculum changes in the class over the last 6 years. Lights-out stuff is not done with lights out any more, but with blackout masks. JP says that was a safety change, as it permits the instructor to keep his lights on and observe the students better, but I think it's due to the prevalence of glowing gauges that defeat the purpose. . Unconscious diver is only practiced in OW, unlike my drill, where I had to haul Kirk's sorry butt out of the cave for about 15 minutes. The academic part of C1 used to include a lot of stuff on decompression, which they have decided, since C1 doesn't permit any decompression, is not a good use of class time (and I agree!). The Knowledge Review and final exam have been revised and improved; there are way fewer questions that are misprinted or are ambiguous. Good to see that the class is continuing to improve!
Anyway, two final things: One, I loved the way JP ended the class. We did a dive into Grand Cenote (where we swam out in terror of the failure that never came) and then practiced the UD drill. He then surfaced, waved bye-bye, and told us to go diving. Watching my buddy pump his fist at the mainline tie-off gave me a huge smile. I will never forget the first time I led a team into the dark; there is no feeling quite like it.
Second, one of the benefits of doing the class with JP is that he takes his successful teams for a photo shoot. Saturday, we went to NoHoch and spent an hour and a half modeling (which is quite challenging). The results were fabulous, and we all have great mementos of a good week of diving and learning:
It was a fascinating experience in quite a few ways. To begin with, I had the very strange experience of looking at the class from two viewpoints simultaneously -- I was a student, and expected to perform as a student, but I was also looking at how the class was taught and how things were handled from an educational strategy perspective. I was also constantly looking at the instructor's approach, compared with the five other cave instructors with whom I have worked.
First off, I would say that we should all do this kind of thing. Even if one doesn't want to spend five days of cave diving time in a class, I think it is absolutely worth it to spend one or two days under someone's keen eye, to have sloppy habits identified and corrected, and to review the procedures which, if you dive conservatively and carefully, you have probably never had to use. If somebody on a team in front of me gets entangled, slits out and snaps the line, I will be glad that I recently did a lost line drill . . . just from the perspective of having the, "Oh, yeah, did that recently" reaction instead of, "Oh, #*&". In addition, I don't think there are any of us who can't learn something from a good teacher. JP Bresser, the instructor in this case, handed me several really nice tips that made life easier. Little things, but everything that adds to comfort and simplicity in a cave is good, right?
It was fascinating, watching my teammates. One fellow was someone with whom I have dived a number of times, and I would describe him as a solid and pretty imperturbable open water diver. The other guy was unknown to me before class, and was the least experienced diver, but had some open water technical training and a recent tech pass from Fundies. It was very interesting to see how the unfamiliar environment and the class stress degraded their diving skills at the beginning, and how adding the task loading of new procedures made it worse. What was fantastic was to watch the two of them get on top of it and grow and improve on a DAILY basis. By the end of class, they were totally different divers. I would not have believed people could learn so quickly. And here I have to give JP huge kudos as an instructor -- he does two important things. He doesn't waste time, and he doesn't overload students. We began each day at 8, and were back in the hotel by 6. Everyone got a good evening meal and adequate rest, and as a result, performance improved every single day. In my class, years ago, we started at 0730 and got back to the condo no earlier than 10; all of us were completely exhausted by the end of the week. Performance improved through Wednesday, and then we fell off the fatigue cliff, and Thursday and Friday saw errors being made that we had not been making earlier on. My C2 was worse -- one day began at 0430, and we fell into bed, completely drained, at 11 something at night. I did a surgical residency, with similar types of hours (or worse) and felt even then that your brain shuts off when you are whipped. I also believe that running schedules like that teaches the wrong thing -- you want cave divers to make an honest assessment of their capacity on any given day, and skip a dive if they are too tired or don't feel well.
Yes, we didn't go through as much detail as my first class. Danny is fanatic about navigation, and we spent long debriefs going over what each of us could remember of the cave landmarks, as well as a student-produced rundown of the dive, the failures, the times and depths where things happened, etc. It's a good exercise, but it also takes a lot of time. Danny also spent a lot of time running us through valve and S-drills in open water each day, until they were as perfect as we could get them. It was useful, in that I know how a demonstration quality S-drill should be done, but in this class, once we had shown JP that we could do them with reasonable facility, we did them in scenarios, which is probably more useful practice, and frees up about 45 minutes a day.
I'm really not sure how to reconcile this one issue. It was very clear that running the class the way JP did it meant everybody could continue to learn and improve, and I think rest was an enormous part of that. There is only so much you can do to shorten the days with efficiency; beyond that, you have to leave stuff out. Is it better to omit things (and mind you, I'm talking details, not the meat of the class at all) and improve student success and morale, or to try to do a data dump of the instructor's incredible information base, and end up with tired and discouraged students? I loved Danny's class, although it wiped me out, and I love Danny; there are many, many small things he taught me that I think are important and have never forgotten. But I think JP does an elegant job of walking the line between creating enough diver stress to accelerate improvement, and so much that it's counterproductive. I don't know that I would say one man or the other is better; they are different, and it may to some degree depend on what works for the individual student.
Running through the exercises, it was hugely clear to me that the bottom line on cave diving is bandwidth. When I took the class the first time, I had no bandwidth to spare; I was running on max just to remember everything we were supposed to be doing. I can tell you I NEVER saw Danny during the class, whereas I often saw JP. I don't think their instructor procedures are any different. I just think I had the capacity to see and notice a lot more this time, and that has come from lots of time in the environment. (It didn't hurt that I had nothing on the line but JP's opinion of me; I have an NACD Cave card he can't do anything about, no matter how much of a doofus I proved to be.) Having better skills (for example, for working in the dark) made things like the lost line much easier, although a three-person lights-out air-sharing exit is a cluster, no matter what!
There have been some curriculum changes in the class over the last 6 years. Lights-out stuff is not done with lights out any more, but with blackout masks. JP says that was a safety change, as it permits the instructor to keep his lights on and observe the students better, but I think it's due to the prevalence of glowing gauges that defeat the purpose. . Unconscious diver is only practiced in OW, unlike my drill, where I had to haul Kirk's sorry butt out of the cave for about 15 minutes. The academic part of C1 used to include a lot of stuff on decompression, which they have decided, since C1 doesn't permit any decompression, is not a good use of class time (and I agree!). The Knowledge Review and final exam have been revised and improved; there are way fewer questions that are misprinted or are ambiguous. Good to see that the class is continuing to improve!
Anyway, two final things: One, I loved the way JP ended the class. We did a dive into Grand Cenote (where we swam out in terror of the failure that never came) and then practiced the UD drill. He then surfaced, waved bye-bye, and told us to go diving. Watching my buddy pump his fist at the mainline tie-off gave me a huge smile. I will never forget the first time I led a team into the dark; there is no feeling quite like it.
Second, one of the benefits of doing the class with JP is that he takes his successful teams for a photo shoot. Saturday, we went to NoHoch and spent an hour and a half modeling (which is quite challenging). The results were fabulous, and we all have great mementos of a good week of diving and learning:
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