Anyway, I am of the opinion that I kinda screwed up with the DM thing. It was a while back, I was fresh out of DIRF, and had just witnessed how much fun the GUE guys have working with classes (at least it looked like fun). Not to mention all the new stuff I had just learned and was dying to pass on to someone...like a curtain had been lifted and I had to share with the world. So my instructor from rescue asked me about doing DM and I decided to do it.
Well...come to find out, and Mike is the authority on this so I will yield to his expertise, the dive industry is a f$@*ed up place and I don't really see a place for me in it other than as a consumer. Spending the weekend at the quarry with students is fun...compared to sitting on my couch and doing nothing. When compared to doing an ocean dive with my best friends (who are my dive buddies coincidentally) it doesn't even come close.
Being a good diver and being a good instructor of diving are two very different things. Working with students requires infinite amounts of patience and a lot of, IMHO, swallowing what you think is right and "buying in" to the whole recreational certification marketplace. One of my buddies, also a member of this board, is doing DM with me. He is a natural at it (I am not)... He spent about 4 hours one afternoon working with 2 extremely fussy women to get their weighting right. 4 HOURS. I just can't do that kind of stuff...they would have driven me to madness after 30 mins. I can work with "good students" who are cool people and are excited about diving. It takes real skill (and NOT diving skill...the people kind) to work with students like that and, sad to say, from my experience there are a lot like that in scuba classes. I love to dive with new people and I love to dive with new divers...what I don't like doing is dealing with the ones that are not excited, don't really want to be there, have no interest in anything other than getting certified (why, I have no clue), and will probably dive a couple times a year for a couple years and then quit. Anyone that works with students has a million stories about stupid, dangerous, and exasperating things that have happened in classes...it is just way different from diving for pleasure at a place you want to dive with people you want to dive with...it makes it more like work...and I dive to get away from work.
