It's not only Scubaboard. When I first started teaching with this method it was because of things that I had heard on the internet. I became curious and it inspired me to start experimenting with "out of the box" approaches. At the time I was working for a shop whose CD was very .... er .... "precise" about the "rules". (more about him later).
He would see me trying things like asking a diver to take off their mask while swimming and just keep swimming and would tell me that PADI never intended for the skill to be executed like that.
Likewise with the hover. I do the hover starting from the surface and just descending into hovering as opposed to working from bottom up. I have Pete (@The Chairman) to thank for that idea . He literally called this a "standards violation" at one point. The high point was when I started doing the equipment R&R while hovering and he lost it and told me to "cease and desist".
There are many examples of criticisms that I had to endure from him and we had many exchanges where I said, "just try it with me and tell me what you think". Thankfully the other instructors at the shop didn't get involved because they saw a "conflict relationship" evolving with a lot of discussions, even after hours, and a lot of back-and-forth between me and the CD in the pool where we tried stuff and he told me that it was really cool but it was against standards.
I think the coin fell for him when one of my OW students in MOD-4 did the following. She was hovering in the deep part of the pool and the mask strap kept slipping down because she had done the pony-tail in her hair wrong. She took off the mask while hovering, fixed her hair and replaced the mask again without losing buoyancy control. It wasn't a one-off. She really had this level of control and he saw that happen.
That was the day he said to me, "we" (suddenly it was also HIS result) need to see how PADI really feels about this.
PADI didn't get it at first. Their official stance was that the standards described WHAT the instructor needed to do but now HOW. However, they were concerned about the instructor potentially task loading the students.
Then John asked me to offer input into his project and I was honored (and humbled) to do so given that I'm really a nobody when it comes down to it. Of anything I've ever done in diving, being a part of that is the one thing I'm most proud of.
When the article came out and more importantly when PADI tightened up the standards, I couldn't believe it.
At that point I hadn't seen that CD for some time because he had moved to Australia to train for a while and then put his energy into becoming an IANTD and TDI instructor trainer. When he moved back to the Netherlands we got in touch again and we've become good friends. At one point he mentioned that the standards were changed along the lines I was using and that it was a "market initiative". I explained my (small) personal role in that and we had a good laugh about all the conflict we had had in the past. He told me that he was so happy that I was as "headstrong as an ox" (in Dutch, "een bord voor je kop") and kept pushing ahead despite all the doubts and objections.
So what John is saying is true. A paradigm shift of this sort can't happen if the peanut gallery won't allow it. It has to happen in such a way that the peanut gallery experiences a moment in which they suddenly realize that what they THOUGHT were "facts" are not facts.
R..
