Diver Training, Has It Really Been Watered Down???

[boulderjohn]

How can one reply to anything other than the post? If the history were relevant, then if it is not in the post it won't be replied to. (How's that for a subjunctive followed by a double negative?)

What I meant to say is that the people responding to that post were responding as much to a long history as to a specific post. You can easily quibble with that.

 

[Themerrydiver]

A few decades ago, I was a relatively young English teacher who had a class of sophomores in a remedial writing program. All students had poor punctuation skills. I taught them a concentrated, targeted, traditional series of lessons designed to solve that problem once and for all. At the end of weeks of concentrated effort, not a single student showed any improvement. Not one. I concluded they were incapable of learning punctuation.

About a decade later I found myself in exactly the same situation. Having learned my lesson, I completely abandoned that traditional approach and did something entirely different. Within about a week, every single student was proficient at punctuation. Every one. I concluded that the previous class had not learned punctuation despite all that time on task because my instructional methods sucked.

Decades ago, scuba instruction featured long, long lectures. This not only took a very long time, it was ineffective--student retention of information was poor. That gave way to home study followed by instructor review. This cut time considerably, but, more importantly, it greatly improved student retention of information. Now that approach is giving way to online instruction, which takes less class time and features even greater retention of information.

The idea that if it takes longer to do something, it must be better is one of the greatest fallacies in instruction.

In the case of this specific issue, what most readers don't know is that the poster above who talked about his practices has been inactive recently, but has a long, long history in this area, a history to which people are replying rather than that specific post.

You made some very good points. I had a good dive instructor. Just spending more time on the instruction isn't as important as thorough instruction. Also, your skills improve with practice. My personal issue to work on was buoyancy control. I didn't "get" the science behind it and how it would directly affect my diving at first but when I did it and then practiced more I improved vastly. Online instruction can work very well for some folks, and class instruction and practice work better for others. As long as either course is thorough, you can learn and then apply the concepts. My check out dives were on the coldest, rough water days I've had so far but I made It!

 

[Bob DBF]

Why choose the contractor that takes the longest to achieve the same result?

If all one is trying to get is an OW card, I guess the shortest time is optimal. @DCBC was discussing training that was well above minimum standards.

featured long, long lectures. This not only took a very long time, it was ineffective--student retention of information was poor. That gave way to home study followed by instructor review.

In 1980 my instructor was ahead of the curve, as he required home study and did a review in class which gave way to student driven discussions of SCUBA, rather than long lectures. The four pool sessions were all day Saturday, and two of them overlapped the three Sundays of ocean sessions.

I believe the quality of the diver was improved by the amount of time spent in the water as well as book learning, and having time to discuss their questions regarding diving. All things being equal, more time with a good instructor is better than less.



Bob

 

[boulderjohn]

@DCBC was discussing training that was well above minimum standards.

Was it? How do you know? It is certainly longer, and if you believe that anything longer must necessarily be better....

 

[The Chairman]

If all one is trying to get is an OW card,

Then I'm not the instructor for them. I go well above and beyond the minimum. If you start people on their knees, then you have a long way to get them neutral after they've learned that bad habit. T-rex was an awesome creature in his time, but he forgot to adapt and now he's extinct. Instructors who don't want to adapt are facing extinction. They might serve a small niche for a few seasons, but the more they refuse to change the less viable they are.

 

[RayfromTX]

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[mainedvr]

I am a new instructor, and am working hard to find my rhythm of teaching. I want the students not to be rushed through the class and I don't, but I am teaching through a shop that has time expectations too. I will not sacrifice mastery of skills for getting a student a card. I have seen what is being asked in other classes. So my answer would be yes it does seem that there is some training issues but it is up to the instructor to give it the best they have.

I do struggle with having many students and not having them in the sand on their knees for dives OW dives 1 and 2 but try to keep my classes small enough to handle with my experience level. Again its up to me to teach them and I do work on the buoyancy but also can not have students constantly floating away cause they haven't got it yet, but I know they will get it.

 

[aquacat8]

Ha ha @mainedvr I see you are from California! You had me flashing back to my open water class with a line of students clinging in various positions, some upside down, to an eerily glowing white rope sand anchored down about 20-25 feet in the cold water of San Carlos beach Monterey. Visibility: 1-3 feet after all the students kicked up the sand with their new fins. You bet that instructor overweighted us, and you bet he wanted us kneeling not swimming around. For a while after that class I thought tiny me was supposed to carry 35 pounds! Once in a while at that location a student got lost, even died or got injured, and lawsuits against poor instructors and thin margin dive shops would ensue. Everyone was just trying to get through it. Niceties of trim and buoyancy control were for later. Not everyone passed. One of my classmates, a rather flamboyant gay fellow, crawled out of the ocean with his mask full of blood from a nose bleed to collapse in the middle of my dry flannel lined sleeping bag I’d staged for my buddy and I to enjoy our lunch on. He began complaining loudly and I believe never went diving again. One of my instructors was so poor doing this she would sleep in her car at the site’s parking lot in her dry suit to keep warm. Good Times ;-)

 

[RainPilot]

I don't believe that training has been watered down, at the agency level.

I have always been taught to treat the Standards (capital S) as a minimum, not a target. I believe that time and money pressures have caused several shops to begin to treat them as a target, along with occasionally creative interpretations of "mastery", and this has led to the lowering of standards (small S) across large swathes of the very competitive dive training industry as others are forced to match price and time scales.

Once an instructor begins to teach independently, they often move away from some of the limits imposed by the shops, so they tend to take a bit longer ensuring "mastery". Also, since they often cannot compete financially, they then market their courses on "quality". Somewhere, all of this becomes conflated to the point where people are making their courses significantly longer than necessary and treating it as a feature not a bug.

All of this happens on a continuum, however, and there is a huge overlap of "long but good", "short but good" and such.

Generally however, I feel that the old "Cheap, Fast or Good, pick two" is a pretty good guideline. If a place has the cheapest courses and they knock them out in the shortest time, you are unlikely to be getting great training. Unlikely but NOT impossible.

 

[boulderjohn]

I don't believe that training has been watered down, at the agency level.
...
Generally however, I feel that the old "Cheap, Fast or Good, pick two" is a pretty good guideline. If a place has the cheapest courses and they knock them out in the shortest time, you are unlikely to be getting great training. Unlikely but NOT impossible.

Please note the two parts of this post that I retained above.

My initial training (in Mexico) was relatively cheap and pretty darn fast. I am sure many thousands of of OW students have been trained in that location and in similar locations through the same process. It was not good.

But it was also not the fault of the agency. They achieved that speed by skipping standards--a lot of them. I did not swim and I did not float. I set my gear up one time (not 5) in the confined water session--which was all of 2 hours long. I could go on and on listing the requirements I did not do. It was not until years later when I took my DM course and was required to do the standard skills for the OW class that I learned what I had missed. I have only myself to blame--I went back and looked in my initial log book and saw the skills I had not done were listed and signed off by my instructor. I had never noticed that before. I imagine most people did not notice it then.

That was a couple of decades ago, though, so it is not a new development. This History of NAUI shows that it was a problem from the beginning. NAUI's policy from its beginning in 1960 was to send certification cards to the instructors when the students registered so that the instructor could hand them the cards as soon as the class was completed. They were aware of the fact that many students got the cards before completing the class and did not indeed finish it. They knew that some students got the cards and then never even took the class. Instructors giving certifications to students who have not completed training requirements has been part of instruction since the creation of agencies.

At the agency level, though, there has been no loss of standards. In another recent thread, the PADI standards from 25 years ago were compared to the standards today. The only thing missing was one regulator buddy breathing. More than 15 items had been added. The course today is more comprehensive than it was a quarter century ago. I am sure it is true of pretty much all agencies.