Would you send someone to an instructor with such little experience? Are the prerequisites for instructor not enough?
Thoughts?
Good question... since this hasn't been discussed, ad nauseum, in almost a week!
:shocked2:
Let me ask a different question: How many dives ARE enough... such that dive count is the
only thing you need to know about an instructor?
By itself, the number of dives someone has is almost irrelevant. Would you send someone to an instructor with 500 dives... if that was the
only thing you knew about that instructor? 1,000 dives?
While I'm not a fan of zero-to-hero programs, I would need to know what kind of instructors they ACTUALLY ARE before I could determine whether or not to send someone to them. Dive count is only one piece of information. Sure, if it was all I had to go on... I would probably send someone to a different instructor. But it would be an instructor I actually knew a lot more about than how many dives they'd done.
Would I "send" someone to them? No. Because there are other instructors that I know well. But if a friend of mine called and said "I'm here in the Caribbean and going to take a scuba class with ______, what do you think?" and I felt that your two friends really knew their stuff, had a good teaching style, were really great folks, had good dive skills and actually were good, effective instructors I would probably have no problem with someone I knew who was looking to get certified as a warm-water vacation-only, pretty-fishies diver taking a course with them.
Of course if I felt/knew your two friends were idiots, unsafe, had no skills, or were simply crappy instructors, or the person wanted to dive NJ wrecks right after they got their c-card… that would be a different story. Just as it would if your friends had 500 or 1,000 dives.
I think I lost my arrogance - or drank the Kool-Aid - when I went through the instructor training program myself. I learned two key things there:
1. Being a good instructor is not about how well you can dive... it's about how well you can teach.
2. There was very little correlation between dive count and instructor quality among the 20+ candidates in my IE.
In fact, the most experienced, skilled diver in the group did not pass. Why? Because he was not a good instructor. There were others who had far fewer dives than I do who you could tell would be phenomenal instructors.
To be clear, I’m not saying that dive skill/experience is NOT important. But it’s not the only thing, and dive count is only one piece of that. I had nearly 1,000 dives before becoming an instructor, but I can assure you that I was nearly as skilled/experienced a diver at 200 dives.
Am I a better instructor because of the additional 800 dives? Probably.
Would I have been a good, effective instructor at 200? Maybe.
Are there people with 5,000 dives who would never be a good instructor? Certainly.
Experience in an important thing… but it’s not the only thing.