Diver Training: How much is enough?

[smellzlikefish]

I've always maintained that divers should be trained up to rescue with their OW course, and that the intermediate half-steps along the way are pointless.

 

[TMHeimer]

Excellent thread DCBC. I agree that everyone should take up to Rescue if the agency used doesn't include much of that in OW. Though I dive solo a lot (due to location), the divers I've been with in our area seem to be pretty decent as buddies. Maybe not so much on charters in S. USA, but I haven't been with too many "idiots" so far. I think a problem may be that new divers (and others) don't review basic skills as much as needed. If one is proficient at everything in the (PADI) OW manual (again, except rescue stuff), one should be a pretty good diver. As far as more advanced training, I think one should have the training needed to do the dives one wants to do.

 

[Bob DBF]

So I feel that the training is adequate to allow a recreational diver to dive under guidance but not substantial enough to allow a diver buddy pair to go offon their own into the unknown. This is exactly what being OW certified allows you to do.

Not only does OW allow a diver buddy pair to go off on their own into the unknown, the Instructor certifies that you are are trained and able to do it. And you wonder why some of us old pharts occationally go sideways in discussions like this.



Bob
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I may be old, but I’m not dead yet.

 

[Thalassamania]

I'd point to what Lynne posted in another thread (Dangerous psychology- Diving beyond one's training) and suggest that it applies just as much to many recreational diving instructors evaluation of the adequacy of the open water training that they offer, as it does to what it was intended for ... an open water diver who wants to experiment with cave diving without adequate instruction.

This whole conversation is a BRILLIANT illustration of the very issue that caused the OP to start this thread.

We have what appears to be an intelligent woman, judging from her writing. She made a decision to do something that has caused an almost unprecedented thing -- unanimity on ScubaBoard! Despite a great many people with a lot more experience and training, and approaches ranging from harsh to very gentle, telling her that what she is doing is unacceptably high risk, she remains adamant that it is not, and that she will continue to do it. Furthermore, she has dismissed the entire body of collective wisdom about the kind of dives she is doing as being overly conservative.

You cannot change those people. They are not stupid and may not even be ignorant. They are arrogant in a particularly dangerous way, because they just aren't swayed by the input from anybody except someone who is telling them it's okay to do what they want to do. These personalities exist in every sport and probably in every walk of life. The only thing that EVER changes such people is having a close brush with disaster and surviving it . . . and as I know well from the ER, all too often, such people are capable of an internal dialogue that convinces them that the accident they avoided or survived was not due to their error in judgment, but due to some other factor which simply wouldn't apply if they were to persist in their behavior.

BTW: While LA Cnty has increased requirements from their lowest point, their current standards are still below what they were at the inception of the agency.

 

[Peter Guy]

Just because I'm generally p###$$ed off about life right now, I'll respond.

a. This topic is so old and tired that the horse is not only dead, but it has already been rendered into soap and the hide made into a drum set.

b. No, the standards have not "been lowered" but they have certainly been changed over the years and thank God. What may have been important to teach 43 years ago may well be totally irrelevant now (buddy breathing anyone? heh, heh, heh!)

c. Guess what, in the mid-1960s when I got my initial training BAD DIVERS also existed! There weren't as many of them if only because there weren't as many divers but bad diving certainly existed. Holy cow, you could get a card that said you were a scuba diver and you didn't even have to set foot outside of a pool. If you weren't there, don't believe all the cr##p people say about "the good old days." As my grandfather was fond of saying, "Good old days, good old days, Hell, there weren't any good old days!"

d. The OP did ask an interesting question thatis similar to one I asked in the Instructor-to-Instructor forum. What is the goal of scuba (or for that matter, any other) instruction? Is the goal to create a "finished product" capable of doing it all OR is the goal to create a person who understands the basics and has the humility/maturity to know how little she knows? For me, the goal is the latter -- others may have a different goal and that is fine, but I contend that doesn't make my goal "lower" or wrong, just different.

 

[rhwestfall]

My YMCA instructor from 1988, if teaching now, would likely be facing dismissal/sanctions for what he put us through... and I believe some didn't even end up with C-cards. This was a not-for-profit situation as he was a staff member at the University, and made the class available as a PE credit. With no hurry to move on to the next class, I'd say it produces some pretty competent divers...

I only realized what I had when I, after many years, took some con-ed (AOW, Rescue, and MSD programs). Somehow, it all was somewhat familiar to my initial training...

Somehow, in the diving I have done, and in various places, I have never experienced the DM led dives, nor was it ever expected by anyone on the dive. It was always "plan your dive, dive your plan". The briefing explained the site, explained potential points of interest, suggested approaches, and turned you loose. As I continually read here, what happened?

With no requirement to complete the "entire" training program (lets use, for example, inclusive of Rescue as it has been suggested should be the minimum qualifications), the modular system, IMHO, fails, or at the very least, provides a false sense of accomplishment...

 

[NAM001]

While in the service i did 2 stints of instructor duty. Over the 2 decades i was in, I could clearly see that Students are not required to meet traiing standards. Training standards are required to meet the Students. The training i received and the training i provided was day and night. When i was taught I was expected to understnad theory and then apply that theory to an appllication. Now the goal is to apply a skill to an applicaton with no comprehension of the theory involved. An example. a digital circuit symbol is associated with a table of inputs and outputs that describe its function. When i learned, we built those circuits out of switches ect. the switch configurations did the equivlant functions as a chip. The difference is that in the pile of switches you could access every part of the circuit and become one with it and then be given teh chip and the pin out designations that equates to the switch circuit. To this day someone says 3 input and gate and it functins as 3 switches in series. make it a 4 or 8 input gate and i can build the table because i knew the theory. |As it is,,, ask a new electronix guy and he will say that he doesnt know the table of a 3 input gate because they only taught 2 input designs in school. I could ask what is larger 6 or 2 pi. they went for a calculator. well you see what i mean. Too much trust is given to material being taught. The theory is not learned so a student can not tell if makes sence or not. |This leads to over simplifacation of taught material, with the student taking it in as advanced level info and hence there is nothing more to learn. Then practice is not required because they have a cert card that says they meet requirements to dive safely. You and I if leaving on a long car trip will check our oil level. Your kids wont cause there is a light. You dont need gas till the light comes on. You dont worry about the brakes cause there is a light fo it. Is it any wonder that so many brake jobs are done not because of bad brakes, but that the light came on , when you only needed a few cc's of fluid in the master cylendar to clear the low fluid sensor. Decades ago i had a sister that drove with the oil light on till the engine seized because yellow means caution, the light shuld have been red if it was important.

So yes to ones question about why they dive solo, I do understand. Yes it is sad the requirements have degraded. Untill we can get a group of students that can actually think for themselves and be willing to ask questions of what they dont understand. instead of living the goal of just passing a test, this trend will continue. Unfortunately quality trainers cant make a living graduating 1/3 of a class or make a course length 40 hrs for ow to drive the objectives home. I dont know what the answer is to the problem of not pososing the basic mental makup for this type of training. it sure is not fundies. Perhaps an expirable ow card is necessary and 50 dives to go to aow. I dont know. Either way ther are god instructors and bad, there are god students and there are bad. that is, at best, 1 out of 4 chance of getting a competant graduate.

 

[TSandM]

I was taught a lot of good things in my OW class. I was taught to dive with a buddy, and I was taught to do a buddy check before each dive.

One of the first things I saw, when I started my AOW class, was that nobody did any of those things I had been taught. They didn't do their BWRAF (or any substitute for it) and they didn't stay together underwater. It wasn't that these things hadn't been taught -- they either hadn't been LEARNED, or they had been abandoned.

No matter what you teach people, or what you emphasize, you will be fighting powerful peer pressure and bad models, once the person leaves your class. I try to make a real point of telling Peter's OW students that, once they leave us, they WILL see a variety of things done (or not done) that we warned against, and that it's important that they not succumb to modeling sloppy diving. But I know that even I (and I have a reputation for being stiff-necked about such things) have been pressured into being less than what I believe is diligent on occasion.

That said, I have also found that, if I stick to my guns, most people will honor my wishes. I tell folks that we ARE going to do a dive plan and a buddy check, and we ARE going to stay together, and if one of us ends the dive, the other will end it, too.

In the diving I've done over the last seven years, I've had buddies who had HORRIBLE skills (I call them two-state divers, crawling and corking). I've dived with airhogs and rototillers and people who think there's a prize for the fastest swimmer. The only people I can think of with whom I do not want to dive again are the ones who did not honor my request to stay together, and they are very few (in fact, I can only really remember two). Everything else, you can manage or even help someone with . . . but somebody who thinks it's acceptable to leave their buddy underwater simply sees diving too differently to make a good companion for me.

 

[Rogersea]

I see a different group of divers weekly. I just dont see this huge drop in diver competency that everyone is always bringing up. The vast majority of divers who I cater to have adequate skills to make the type of dives we are doing. These dives include Deep, Night and drift mostly on a wall. I make the majority of dives with a DM and the customers.

I am aware that we have lowered the bar in training requirements over the 35 years since I was initially certified, but I am still able to produce competent novice divers ready to enjoy the sport.. Nothing is restricting me from doing this... I teach mostly short courses but with 28 years as an instructor I am pretty sure I have figured out what items to spend more time on to produce competent beginners.

I think that anyone who is diving on there own with a buddy and not solely vacation divers should get certified to the point where they know rescue skills and have the ability to administer O2..

Cheers,
Roger

 

[TMHeimer]

I was taught a lot of good things in my OW class. I was taught to dive with a buddy, and I was taught to do a buddy check before each dive.

One of the first things I saw, when I started my AOW class, was that nobody did any of those things I had been taught. They didn't do their BWRAF (or any substitute for it) and they didn't stay together underwater. It wasn't that these things hadn't been taught -- they either hadn't been LEARNED, or they had been abandoned.

No matter what you teach people, or what you emphasize, you will be fighting powerful peer pressure and bad models, once the person leaves your class. I try to make a real point of telling Peter's OW students that, once they leave us, they WILL see a variety of things done (or not done) that we warned against, and that it's important that they not succumb to modeling sloppy diving. But I know that even I (and I have a reputation for being stiff-necked about such things) have been pressured into being less than what I believe is diligent on occasion.

That said, I have also found that, if I stick to my guns, most people will honor my wishes. I tell folks that we ARE going to do a dive plan and a buddy check, and we ARE going to stay together, and if one of us ends the dive, the other will end it, too.

In the diving I've done over the last seven years, I've had buddies who had HORRIBLE skills (I call them two-state divers, crawling and corking). I've dived with airhogs and rototillers and people who think there's a prize for the fastest swimmer. The only people I can think of with whom I do not want to dive again are the ones who did not honor my request to stay together, and they are very few (in fact, I can only really remember two). Everything else, you can manage or even help someone with . . . but somebody who thinks it's acceptable to leave their buddy underwater simply sees diving too differently to make a good companion for me.

I echo what you say. Most important buddy skill is to stay together--otherwise nothing else matters. BWRAF? I've seen pros not doing any of this, not to mention others. I do think that for 2 buddies that have dived forever together and know each other's eqipment inside and out, a "trimmed down" version of BWRAF may be OK. And this happens most of the time anyway. But I have RARELY witnessed two divers overtly doing BWRAF (other than classes, of course)--maybe 3-4 times in 7 years?