How do you know when you're too "green" to dive without an instructor or DM?

[boulderjohn]

I have been in extensive discussion with the key people from the PADI training department in the past few months. Unless I am completely fooled by what I have been told so far, you will see changes in the next year or so. In the last talks we had, the discussion centered around two approaches to instruction that will achieve the result of having students capable, buoyant swimmers who can do the critical skills in mid-water. One is the one I described above. The other is to start them on their knees and then quickly transition them to performance in a horizontal, neutral performance of the skill. (The person who wrote that said "in the same session."

I was not completely fooled. I was not, in fact, fooled in the slightest.

This is actually a pretty big announcement buried at the end of this thread.

This past summer a group of instructors around the world, including a number of SB members, engaged in a collaborative project to submit an article on this kind of discussion to PADI for potential publication in its professional publication, The Undersea Journal. The discussions I described above were in relation to that submission, with a member of the PADI staff essentially becoming a co-author with extensive suggestions and revisions. I was just informed that the article will be published this spring.

[Thalassamania]

Well I have to say that you are in a serious worldwide training minority there Jim...

The best, by definition, are always in a serious minority. If you prefer to be part of the "inferior" to the best, go for it ... I wish you all the success.

I want the highest rate of success on the initial skill attempt. Start easy, easy success, slowly increase difficulty, continued easy success, after seeing and feeling that I am right (that it's easy), student begins believing it is easy, continued easy success at harder and harder skills, student knows it is easy.

Why, with the limited time frame of the vast majority of intro or certification courses worldwide, would you not take full advantage of a successful "training wheels" approach that accomplishes the training goals in the typical short duration?

"The highest rate of success on the initial skill attempt," is a concept that I agree with wholeheartedly, where we part company is in our definition of "success."

My training in golf stresses that only playing 3 rounds per week might maintain my current level of play, but to get better I need to play more than 3 rounds per week. I think you could say that about many "skill" activities.

An Expert instructor with high expectations for your progress and success goes a long way. See Bob's quote in my sig.

I can't say that I've observed turtles eating coral, but I have seen them eating sponges.

Or algae growing on the rocks nearby. That leads me to guess that halemanō's Underwater Naturalist training came from an instructor with low expectations who preferred over-weighted kneeing students.

I was not completely fooled. I was not, in fact, fooled in the slightest.

This is actually a pretty big announcement buried at the end of this thread.

This past summer a group of instructors around the world, including a number of SB members, engaged in a collaborative project to submit an article on this kind of discussion to PADI for potential publication in its professional publication, The Undersea Journal. The discussions I described above were in relation to that submission, with a member of the PADI staff essentially becoming a co-author with extensive suggestions and revisions. I was just informed that the article will be published this spring.

This will be a MAJOR advance for all of diving, I applaud your the teams work and I hope that you will get permission to reprint it here on the board so that those of us who do not get the Undersea Journal will be able to read it.

[boulderjohn]

The best, by definition, are always in a serious minority.

In reference to John Brown's ill-fated attempt to free the slaves, Henry David Thoreau said, "I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?"

[Hank49]

I am living proof that that is NOT TRUE. I was the worst student in my class (read my journal, if you don't believe me). I was the student you look at and sigh. I have eventually mastered the skills well enough to have technical and cave certs from fairly demanding instructors.

if they want to. "Did you see how I did that? You can learn to do it like that, too!" When I finished my OW (and AOW, and several specialties) I had never seen somebody who could just sit in the water, unmoving . . . or someone who could swim back the same way he swam out, because he hadn't disturbed the bottom. You can't aspire to what you don't know exists.

You may have been the least skilled but that was probably due to little overall water time in your life.
I took Halemano's statement to mean more that some just flat don't like, or want to be in water. You obviously did because even your self proclaimed lame performance didn't discourage you from going back again and again.....and into caves......brrrrr.

[NWGratefulDiver]

You may have been the least skilled but that was probably due to little overall water time in your life.
I took Halemano's statement to mean more that some just flat don't like, or want to be in water. You obviously did because even your self proclaimed lame performance didn't discourage you from going back again and again.....and into caves......brrrrr.

... which defines the difference between those who would beat their head against a brick wall vs those who would conquer the wall by using their head ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)