How much experience does your instructor have?

[eponym]

Thank you all for taking the time to respond to my post. I almost have the answer I was looking for. The Salt factor. Good form in the water, comfortable handling new divers' issues.

If you do go for divemaster, encourage your instructor to throw things at you. Controlling a freaked-out diver (and yourself, simultaneously) on ascent from eighty feet or more can be challenging.

This is hard stuff to create in a course, I know, and potentially dangerous. But setting your buddy up to steal your mask has a different flavor than does finding only the mouthpiece in your mouth while you're trying to free a fouled anchor in current. A few dives gone wrong (stressors, surprises, snafus) is not a bad thing if they teach you something.

Your Marine Corps training may have given you a leg up in this regard. I would be interested to hear your thoughts. My godson is a Marine serving his second tour in Iraq.

-Bryan

 

[beester]

Alot of good and reasonable things have already been said. Imo a good instructor needs to have 3 things:

- Diving technique and experience. He needs to be a good and relaxed diver. Fortunately it's not very hard to become one. You just need to dive ALOT and in different circumstances (good vis, bad vis, current, cold, tropic, boat dives, shore dives, quaries, inland lakes, ice dives, deco dives, wreck dives, etc, etc). Next to that you need to be able have the luck to watch very good divers dive. From all walks of life and different organisations, so that you learn there is not one truth, and learn to recognise the pitfalls in every education. So basically if you surround yourself with the right people and just love to dive whenever you can no matter where you'll just need time to get this.

- Didactic skills. You need to be a teacher. Some have this naturally some get this through professional experience (being teachers, trainers, in leadership positions), some have to work very hard to get this and some will never do. If you can't convey your diving experience and love for the sport why are you teaching? If you don't have the patience or the vocabulary skills to convey a message or a technique how will you become an instructor? Finally you need to love working with new divers. Love watching them clear their first mask after numerous attempts, love them taking their first underwater breath and love it when they finally get the 'buyancy trick'.

- Personality. This means both how you function under stress, how you make decisions, how calm you can be, etc.

The above comes from a voluntary organisation point of view so it might differ with the commercial organisations.

I'm no instructor and won't be in a long time , but I have dived a bit with new divers. And it's always a pleasure... just small tricks... letting someone use your fins with springstraps to show how easy shore entries can be with a small equipment adjustment. Or doing a propper weighing and let the person experience the effect this has on his trim problems or explaining and showing how underwater navigation can be done also in bad vis with a combo of compass for direction, underwater points, depth meter and time. It's not instructing but it's just passing on some basic things that you've learned from others.

That being said: I've been led by the hand the first 50 or so dives by a variety of good instructors (I still dive with them on weekly basis):
-W a 1500+ dive instructor who's interests lay in north sea wreck diving and the bigger animal live in the tropics (hammerheads)
-G a 800 + advanced instructor who's taken me along for some really nice dives... his insights into dive medicin have also been quite good.
-G a 10000+ dive instructor who has been diving since early 60's did a tour on the calypso with Cousteau, was a professional diver (safety diver)... I drink mostly beers with this guy but we share the shame passion for wrecks.
-E a 1000+ instructor who used to be a safety instructor in coal mines and has seen it all... if we're talking high stress quick decision matters he's the man.

And many more instructors and non instructors...

Anyway my cup of salt

 

[Rhone Man]

I think experience in diving is not measured in years, dives or exposure to different types of conditions - it is measure in the "oh, sh**" moments. You learn more in those moments (and getting yourself and your dive group out of them) than you do in 100 carefully planned and executed dives.

 

[Thalassamania]

I think experience in diving is not measured in years, dives or exposure to different types of conditions - it is measure in the "oh, sh**" moments. You learn more in those moments (and getting yourself and your dive group out of them) than you do in 100 carefully planned and executed dives.

I have to respectfully disagree. The old saw about proper planning prevents piss poor performance comes into play. I've made more than 10,000 dives, in lots of different conditions and, thankfully, the "oh wow" moments have greatly outnumbered the "oh sh**" moments. Frankly I don't know how much I actually learned from the latter variety ... beyond feeling lucky to have survived. I do believe that I learned a lot more from 100 carefully planned and executed dives than from all of the more frightening moments. There is that other old saw about, "there are no old and bold divers." If I had to "measure" an instructor's experience (skill and capability) I think I would look to whom he or she had been mentored by, that's far more telling, to me, than anything else.

 

[beester]

I think experience in diving is not measured in years, dives or exposure to different types of conditions - it is measure in the "oh, sh**" moments. You learn more in those moments (and getting yourself and your dive group out of them) than you do in 100 carefully planned and executed dives.

But if you only get experience from those 'Oh ****' moments and they happen again (ie you didn't learn from them) are you a good instructor, an unlucky one or an uncarefull one?

 

[Dannybot]

The experience of the instructor is somewhat based on the subject they are teaching.

As the class complexity and depth of the materials increases, so does my expectation of an instructors experience and expertise.

Sometimes we tend to over think this issue of instructor (regardless of agency) experience as it relates to OW teaching. I would no more expect a typical OW instructor to be teaching technical diving skills than I would a tenured college physics professor teaching arithmetic to 1st graders.

The problem arises when (any) instructor starts teaching things they themselves have little understanding of.

I like this analogy when talking about instructors. How many professors are seasoned professionals in their fields? Not that many, but these are people who are GOOD teachers, they can communicate to a variety of individuals, can get their points across, and are patient to wait for the light to come on. So maybe the question should be worded "are you capable of beinng a good teacher?"

 

[Mike Ange]

Experience is im
portant but do not be fooled into thinking that a number of dives equates to actual experience. For my family I would prefer an instructor with 100 good quality dives involving different environments and activities over an instructor who has done the same dive 500 times and logged it as 500 dives. Unfortunately, as an instructor trainer I get many instructor candidates who have completed the minimum requirements for instructor certification by going to the local quarry (or other site) and logging 5 or 6 20 min dives over a number of diving days. These are not dives they are accumulated statistics and unfortunately you can see this readily in the skills they bring to class.

 

[dvrliz1]

Well I guess I am extremely fortunate. My instructor has over 18 years experience as an instructor, and over 33 years experience as a diver. Yes sometimes he got on my nerves, but he had more confidence in me diving then I did myself. I have seen him with other students and he has great patience and knowledge. He was able to put people who where nervous, at ease. As a matter of fact, he brought me to Bonaire to do my check out dives...how divine....

Oh I forget to he WAS my boyfriend before he taught me how to dive and now is my husband!