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

[Colliam7]

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

At the agency level, though, there has been no loss of standards.

I wonder if we are approaching agreement here. Sure seems like it.

 

[boulderjohn]

I wonder if we are approaching agreement here. Sure seems like it.

I believe that is why I quoted that line in my post and emphasized it in my first sentence.

 

[kelemvor]

You're having a violent agreement

 

[Bob DBF]

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

I had a different perspective than other OW students as I had learned and been diving for years before the class. I had also spent time in classrooms in front of trainers and professors.

What you seem to be saying is that a longer class cannot be better than a shorter one. A substandard instructor will teach a substandard class regardless of time, an excellent instructor can use added time to develop a divers competence.

Then I'm not the instructor for them. I go well above and beyond the minimum

I was going back to the post to quote you for an answer to this but the post dissapered. In any event, the quote was along the lines of not having a mechanic take any longer than necessary to change the brakes...


Bob

 

[tursiops]

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

What you seem to be saying is that a longer class cannot be better than a shorter one. A substandard instructor will teach a substandard class regardless of time, an excellent instructor can use added time to develop a divers competence.

He did not say a longer class cannot be better; he said a longer class is not necessarily better.

 

[boulderjohn]

What you seem to be saying is that a longer class cannot be better than a shorter one.

No, I never said anything remotely like that. I just wrote a post in which I said that many short classes, including the one I took myself, were accomplished by violating standards. That's not good. How you can read that post and say I am making the preposterous statement that shorter classes are always better is beyond me.

I said that people mistakenly believe that more time on task is always better. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. Unless you see the class, you can't tell.

 

[boulderjohn]

Here is a little parable that might be helpful.

Aliens discovered that there was life on Earth, and they sent scouts out to see what human civilization was like. One of them investigated the education system. When he reported what he saw, he summed it up as "a bunch of people sit in a room watching somebody work."

Well, scuba instruction learned a couple decades ago that students learned much more when the students did the learning themselves, and the long lectures ended. For some reason, some people do not understand that this was an improvement in learning, and they take the fact that modern instruction does not include many hours of watching an instructor lecture as proof that modern instruction is worse than the good old days.

 

[The Chairman]

I was going back to the post to quote you for an answer to this but the post dissapered. In any event, the quote was along the lines of not having a mechanic take any longer than necessary to change the brakes...

Yeah, why get the mechanic who takes ten times longer to do the same job and charges a lot more, rather than a much quicker one who produces a superior job?

I don't waste my student's time. They want to learn from me, so they're going to get an above average class and I'm not going to waste their time doing it. They'll come away with superior trim and buoyancy. They'll be able to keep up with their buddy, plan their dive, determine if any particular dive exceeds their limits and so on. They'll also learn how to spot problem divers and ways to avoid them.

 

[The Chairman]

Time is why I don't teach large classes. I can keep four people learning without wasting their time although I prefer two. Add more and the learning starts to suffer and the time needed expands exponentially. Instructors do it all the time and the length of their classes grow and grow as they add students. They have to add a lot more time or cut corners. So take the number of students compared to how long the class is and factor in how the instructor uses their time for a good idea as to how effective the class is.

 

[boulderjohn]

The hardest class I took in graduate school was on the theoretical basis of Romanticism. Just about every class period was the same--the instructor sat on the desk in the front of the room and read from his notes while we in the class hastily scribbled down what he said. To give you an idea of what he said and what we were putting in our notebooks, read a little of someone else's explanation of transcendental idealism, one of the topics we covered.

It occurred to me in one of my classes that what we students were doing was trying to transcribe the contents of his notebook into our notebook. As we wrote, we got the words down, but what did we understand of it? Again, go to my link, read a few sentences, and tell me what you understand as you see those words for the first time.

A modern skilled teacher would give the students the ideas in those notes ahead of time and then conduct each class in such a way that the students were able to digest, understand, and use those concepts in a way that led to understanding concepts. It would have taken a lot less class time that way. It would have been a lot less work for the teacher. It would have provided much more learning for the students.