TDI Intro to Tech or AN/DP?

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@wetb4igetinthewater

No means no. It's as simple as that. You GUE/Fundies fan boys keep pushing aggressively hard and you are doing your side no favors. What gives you GUE/Fundies fan boys special powers that you can determine through the inter webs that GUE/Fundies is a fit for everyone? It is not. No matter how hard you push it, Fundies is not one size fits all. You push hard and you can be damned sure I'm going to push hard back. I despise other people telling me what they think I should do. And that's what you're doing with everyone you're trying to push GUE/Fundies on.

NO!
 
@wetb4igetinthewater

No means no. It's as simple as that. You GUE/Fundies fan boys keep pushing aggressively hard and you are doing your side no favors. What gives you GUE/Fundies fan boys special powers that you can determine through the inter webs that GUE/Fundies is a fit for everyone? It is not. No matter how hard you push it, Fundies is not one size fits all. You push hard and you can be damned sure I'm going to push hard back. I despise other people telling me what they think I should do. And that's what you're doing with everyone you're trying to push GUE/Fundies on.

NO!
I don’t understand why you are so triggered by this. I do know there are a number of PADI instructors who have distinctive specialties of equivalent courses. I haven’t taken them, but from what I read, I’m going to guess that they took said courses and incorporated it into their offerings via a distinctive specialty. I think that’s awesome as I’m guessing that they use these courses as gatekeeper for PADI tec 40.

As I said, TDI allows instructors to add to their classes. I would suggest for anyone taking ItT to do so from an instructor who has augmented their course to have a syllabus similar to UTD/GUE.

These courses simply cover foundational skills that ensure that a diver is prepared to get into technical diving. I don’t understand how this can be controversial.

If someone thinks that those skills are not needed for technical diving, I hope that they speak up when I’m on the same boat that is headed to a challenging technical dive site so I can get off.

There is no scuba police. Anyone can do whatever they wish underwater.
 
@wetb4igetinthewater

No means no. It's as simple as that. You GUE/Fundies fan boys keep pushing aggressively hard and you are doing your side no favors. What gives you GUE/Fundies fan boys special powers that you can determine through the inter webs that GUE/Fundies is a fit for everyone? It is not. No matter how hard you push it, Fundies is not one size fits all. You push hard and you can be damned sure I'm going to push hard back. I despise other people telling me what they think I should do. And that's what you're doing with everyone you're trying to push GUE/Fundies on.

NO!

It will objectively make you a better diver. Full Cave/Trimix/CCR instructors from other agencies have taken fundies and gotten incredibly valuable lessons out of it. Don't take it, whatever. Your choice, your loss, none of my business. But to suggest that people shouldn't routinely recommend it is ridiculous and demonstrates a serious lack of perspective.
 
I start classes in a few weeks, with no itt - asked about it and was told it was part of the class.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m more worried about where I’m clipping things off and getting things where they become second nature - that’ll take repetition. The idea of doubles doesn’t really phase me, we go from al80s to hp80,100,120, overweight in case customers need weight - you get used to diving all out of wack, you almost forget how good it feels to be minimalized.

Right or wrong, it’s happening and I’ll let you know how it goes
 
I start classes in a few weeks, with no itt - asked about it and was told it was part of the class.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m more worried about where I’m clipping things off and getting things where they become second nature - that’ll take repetition. The idea of doubles doesn’t really phase me, we go from al80s to hp80,100,120, overweight in case customers need weight - you get used to diving all out of wack, you almost forget how good it feels to be minimalized.

Right or wrong, it’s happening and I’ll let you know how it goes


Good luck! It will be interesting to hear your story.
 
First itt and even sidemount is not required to start tech in sidemount.
So this are courses like drysuit that can be selfteached. Same as specialties like multiple stage cave or dpv cave. Yes, i know a lot of divers and instructors will not like this, but it it true. It are called 'specialties'.
The argument you dont know what you dont know is sometimes a completely dead cow and ********. If you know how stages work, just learn ( can be reading or a good buddy) about the gas rules etc. Practise and extend limits slowly.

In diving you have 3 types of courses: the usefull ones, the can be usefull ones and the ones that don't train you better diving.

The first group is ow, aow, nitrox, adv nitrox, normoxic trimix, full trimix, the cave path till full cave, rebreatherclasses, etc.

Then you have the can be usefull group:
Drysuit, dpv, itt, cave specialties, sidemount. Some need it, others dont.
To learn yourself sidemount or dpv cave you need to read about it, be more or less an autodidact, have a buddy or camera to help you with skills, but this doesnt need to be necessarly an instructor. But you must be able to criticise yourself. If you don't see things, it does not work. Evaluate your own dive, then you can learn.
But for example you are a liitle bit afraid of real restricties in sidemount caves, taking a course can bring you further that you enjoy it and then the course is usefull. So yes, it is really good that there are such courses, but please dont say they are absolutely needed, they are optional. And yes, i also teach optional courses. I am not against them, only aigainst them as required.

And the last group:
Photography, biology, seaslugh identification, zomby diver, etc
If you are interested, take it. But dont expect to get a good course from an instructor who only uses a simple camera if you want to improve your photographyskills. Better is to sign in on workshop weeks with real photographers. The only thing: you dont get a cert.
I aslo teach biology and photography. I almost never do it because i tell people go for biology to the course the university teaches for divers once a year in evenings and for photography, i did the instructor rating with a gopro clone. Now I have a good camera, but am still exploring and improving, but I am now at a level that sometimes i can help others. But for more experienced people: book a liveaboard with some of the professional photographers. I don't know all details that profis know.
I will never book such things myself as i really hate theory when i could go diving, but i am with photography more a diver than an photographer and i am selfteached with this. So all are personal choices. But yes, I have seen really nice results of people who did such workshop-liveaboards.
So nice that these courses are possible, but sometimes it is better to book a workshop without cert. And you won't learn better diving skills. Do it if your interest is there.

In diving, diplomas, cards, certs seem to be the norm, the more the better.

When I did my courses, ow was nice, aow crap as i already did nightdives and deed dives. 3*/dm was only because it sounds nice that you are a 'guide'. rescue was boring. Deep was not done according to standards, so i paid for the card.
Advanced rec trimix was a good course, but with bad instructor, normoxic was just 10 m deeper, so i did not learn anything and full tx with 3 stages was good. Cavern, intro and full cave in one week was one of my most usefull courses. So some of my required courses were also not that usefull as they had could been. But I can now use these experiences to improve myself as instructor.

With this as personal experiences,i teach normoxic trimix now with 2 stages. It is allowed with one, but then it is same course as adv nitrox or art, just on trimix and a little bit deeper. So I teach it now with 2. A little bit more challenging and the step to full is smaller. I went from one stage to 3 and yes I could do it, but it can bea big step.
Full tx is with 2 or 3. I teach it with 3. A 100m dive done with no travelgas is not the way in my eyes.
Cave I prefer students who do at least zero till intro, or the last part ( intro to full, or zero to full). We dont have caverns here and i dont see any usefull thing in teaching just cavern because in 8 minutes dive is over because of cavernlimit. In other places cavern can be a nice first step, but not here. The argument you learn the skills in cavern is true, but if I only sign of cavern, divers will go over their limits on the first dive after the course. I do it this way: The first dive in zero to intro is most times 100-120 minutes near the entrance to do only skills. So in this dive we do the cavernskills. The divetime is more than the minimum of a caverncourse, but it is only done in 1 dive instead of 4. But you start in twinsets, I don't allow single tanks in intro to cave. And the next dive means slightly further in the cave and of course skills again, the caves here are mostly better just outside the cavern and inside the cave to practise things and not irritate others.
I also allways do a dive with skills at home in open water before going to caves.
Intro to cave is also a course to invite people to go over limits after certification. That is why I stimulate good divers to do also the full cave part. So look at the diver and listen to the divers wishes. Then advice if only intro is better or the way directly to full cave.

I offer potential students a dive to know each other, i can check them and can say it is better to do practise longer, or do another course first, or you can do it in backmount, but for sidemount you need a sidemount course also to have the right level. If people dive good enough, we can start.

I really hate instructors who only sell and not look at the divers.

For myself I would never switch to another agency for a higher level course when i also had to do a lower level course. I have done courses with several agencies, and I cannot say padi is always worse, cmas always great. At the end it is not only the instructor, but also the diver. As soon as you think i know it all, then your level is getting worse. Every diver need to practise from time to time. And after a teaching dive i also do an evaluation of myself what i could do better.
There are no statistics that agency A has less accidents, or that DIR is always safer. I dive DIR, but I also dive sidemount and rebreather, sometimes solo and if needed a normal bcd ( but with longhose). Use the tools for the job.

On internet we cannot advice to do itt first and then an/dp. This depends on the diver. If the course is done in weekends, the diver can practise during the week. If the course is done in a few days, there is no time to practise in between. All points to think about. The instructor has to look at the diver. And not only require things that are not required before knowing the diver.
 
I know the OP has already decided the direction they will go. I wanted to clear a few things up regarding TDI ITT. I wrote the course so I know what is in it and the intention of it. Before me Steve Lewis (Doppler) had a Power Point presentation covering the basics. Back then there was a lot of resistance, from TDI head quarters, to add another layer to technical training. Steve freely gave me his work to provide a base for me to write the ITT course, I in turn gave the course to TDI with the understanding that they would consider making it a full blown class instead of only a specialty class. When they did consider making it a full class it needed photo's and drawings to complete it and I didn't have the time to work on it due to my work schedule at the time. JJ even contributed thoughts on how to present things in the manual so that they would make more sense. JJ was willing to help and only asked that if anything was directly quoted from the GUE Fundies manual to give acknowledgment. We all simply wanted to improve diver training and make things safer. To understand the need and what the course is designed to provide though, we need to go a decade or so back.

In the late 80's and early 90's technical education was becoming formalized. Mentoring people up was standard and without referrals it was difficult to get into a technical class. As we progressed through the mid to late 90's technical training became refined and had a frame work of learning more skills while gaining experience to do more difficult technical dives. In the late 90's and early 2k's technical training and diving became more mainstream and a lot of instructors moved into becoming technical instructors. During this time frame, mentoring also slowly died off and was much less common.

As technical instructors we were getting more and more students that had never been in doubles and were essentially going from OW single tank no decompression diving straight into AN & DP. In the 90's divers would come into those classes having been mentored into diving doubles, learning fin technique, buoyancy skills through doing light dives or practice dives with those that had experience. Coming into the 2k's a hole developed that put a lot of pressure on instructors teaching AN & DP to students that had very little or no mentoring. They lacked any experience with frog, helicopter, or back kicks. They were also highly dependent on the OW "buddy" system and had not learned to think through the "what If's" of a technical dive. Lastly they had no experience with dive stress that leads to cascade events.

The TDI ITT course is designed to provide these basic skills while allowing the instructor to evaluate if the student is mentally ready to move into technical diving. Yes it is a good tool for the student to gauge if they are interested in technical diving however it is a more useful tool for the instructor to gauge the student. When I was teaching technical diving I became frustrated with students coming into AN & DP classes completely unprepared both mentally and physically. They would hold other students back, have difficulty understanding concepts, and often quit out of frustration.

The time to teach these skills has also been shortened to minimum standards which puts even more pressure on the instructor to do more in less time. When I was teaching AN & DP it was standard to be taught in 8 days with two extra days of possible over run. During this time it was hard to squeeze in fin control, free water buoyancy control, and the mental approach of staying on your own schedule even if your team was at a different depth on decompression. Today there are very few instructors that take 8 days to teach AN & DP alone, much less needing to cover the ITT skills that should be learned before then.

TDI gives their instructors a lot of flexibility to teach to their own drum and level. There are pro's and con's to this as well as other organizations approach to teaching. The ITT course had to be written to allow for this flexibility and is one of the things that I struggled with when writing it. I had a very clear vision of what I wanted the course to do however that vision wouldn't and couldn't fit all instructors. In the end the ITT course is now a full TDI course that fills a gap that had developed in training and exists even more today. If I were still teaching today, I would consider waiving ITT after an interview and evaluation of a potential student. Even when it was only a specialty class it was required, of my students, unless I interviewed them and had an in water evaluation. Other instructors do it differently and that is their choice, that is the upside of how TDI structures their classes. When I was teaching I never taught Extended Range. I lived in places that He was readily available and didn't believe that the course held value for my students. I certainly enjoyed the flexibility to take students straight from AN & DP to Trimix (back then TDI didn't have Helitrox). I was also able to obtain a waiver for how I introduced my students to Trimix during my AN & DP courses, which was slightly different than standards however more effective in my experience.

ITT was never about making more money for the instructor. I, for that matter, never depended on teaching as my primary source of income. My classes though were at the top end of the cost scale. The reason was that the student needed to have value and free, IMHO, eliminates value. ITT is about providing an entry point into technical diving where both the student and instructor can determine if technical diving is the right direction for the student. It also provides a platform to introduce the basic skills needed to start moving into technical diving. I haven't taught in over a decade so I am not current with class structure. Back when it was a specialty there were two options of passing. One was a tech pass (with doubles) and the other was a rec pass (single). The student had the option of returning for a check out dive in doubles to upgrade to the tech pass. This was designed to let another instructor know how the student took the class if they were coming to them with an ITT pass. I have no idea if the standard course offers this.
 
ITT was never about making more money for the instructor. I, for that matter, never depended on teaching as my primary source of income. My classes though were at the top end of the cost scale. The reason was that the student needed to have value and free, IMHO, eliminates value. ITT is about providing an entry point into technical diving where both the student and instructor can determine if technical diving is the right direction for the student. It also provides a platform to introduce the basic skills needed to start moving into technical diving. I haven't taught in over a decade so I am not current with class structure. Back when it was a specialty there were two options of passing. One was a tech pass (with doubles) and the other was a rec pass (single). The student had the option of returning for a check out dive in doubles to upgrade to the tech pass. This was designed to let another instructor know how the student took the class if they were coming to them with an ITT pass. I have no idea if the standard course offers this.

I believe Steve was the author of a Skills Challenge document that I have in my instructor manual although I can't find it available through TDI anymore. It gave a baseline of skills and potential challenges at each level. Perhaps TDI would entertain a baseline exam for potential AN/DP students in order to have a standard as to whether a student is prepared enough to forgo the ITT class. Right now this is based on very subjective criteria which can vary from instructor to instructor. I would be in favor of a more standardized baseline for accepting students at the higher levels.
 
I don’t understand why you are so triggered by this. .
Because there is a certain population of divers out there who will always be triggered. I have no idea how to identify them, or if its even worth pursuing. The "DIR" moniker is part of this emotional reaction I suspect. But *shrugs* the reason (if any) doesn't really matter, its been going on since I started on SB in 2005
 
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