SharkOfBonaire
Registered
Maybe it's me, but on my discover dive I felt more comfortable in the ocean than in the pool...
Last Class...Problems
- Thread starter Finnatic
- Start date
Please register or login
Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
- Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
- A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
- You can make this box go away
This simply isn't true. When students are ready for OW a few minutes getting their weight and trim situated before venturing out gets things squared away. Especially on the first dive, my students don't have anything else except buoyancy control, trim and where their fins are to worry about. If they can't do that much we stay in a totally controled area or even go back to the pool until they can. An OW should not silt everything out. Controling your position and what you do with your feet IS diving. If they're not doing it they're just breathing underwater, waisting their time and messing things up for others.
Overweighting them just makes it worse. Any one can stay off the bottom when moving. The test is controling position when not moving and doing something else like clearing a mask. Overweighting students is a cheezy shortcut for instructors and does nothing for the student.
OW classes should not silt everything out and there isn't any excuse. They don't have to be perfect at the end of an OW class but they should be able to R & R their mask, handle a free flow or share air while neutral and off the bottom. They certainly should be able to tour the area without silting the area out. Telling people that they'll drop weight as they gain experience is just an excuse for lazy instruction that overweights people in an attempt to gain a shortcut. They won't learn right in the first place if they aren't weighted right.
This is just so much junk that's been drilled into the heads of instructors and passed down in the interest of teaching classes that are incomplete and too short.
NO! if you can't keep your students from making a mess of our dive sites then take them where others don't dive.
Take the time and invest the effort to find out there's a better way. It's that simple.
You know Mike --
One of these days I'm going to have to pay to come watch you teach a class. You must be the world's best instructor to keep churning out perfect students who do it right every time and right from word one.
I'm truly impressed. You are the man. I suck.
One of these days I'm going to have to pay to come watch you teach a class. You must be the world's best instructor to keep churning out perfect students who do it right every time and right from word one.
I'm truly impressed. You are the man. I suck.
JimC
Contributor
Just an FYI, none of the divers in the picture are on course. Most have advanced and higher training from there agencies and some have profesional ranks.
This is a VERY common sight. Frankely most divers look like that picture after a hundred dives, and ether don't care enough to stop doing it or don't know enough. Fortunatly there is a high current on most of my dives so the silt generaly gets blowen off quickly.
It is very posible to turn out students who can dive well - safer, more aware and vastly better in basic skill. The first step is leaving the boat anchor on the boat.
This is a VERY common sight. Frankely most divers look like that picture after a hundred dives, and ether don't care enough to stop doing it or don't know enough. Fortunatly there is a high current on most of my dives so the silt generaly gets blowen off quickly.
It is very posible to turn out students who can dive well - safer, more aware and vastly better in basic skill. The first step is leaving the boat anchor on the boat.
I expect new divers (not all... just some) to look like that and make a habit of schooling them to continue improving their buoyancy and trim. It is frustrating when you find out the diver you're schooling is an advanced diver or worse still a dive leader. If that picture were nothing but advanced divers, I would have spent the entire trip back to the dock taking "playful" jabs at them so as to make them think hard about their skills without offending them by coming right out and saying they're clueless (like I apparently am)
I'm afraid you missed my point. I'm not the the world's best instructor and I don't know that I turn out perfect students. I did notice early on though that there was something wrong with the way I was tought to teach. Especially since divers seen to keep the same poor habits sometimes their whole career. I also noticed that divemasters and instrucors dive the way they teach students to dive. I went looking for ways to make it easier and better.
The short version is that since diving is 95% neutral swimming, hovering and finning technique we spend 95% of the class working on that. Other skills need to be added to that foundation. It just doesn't seem to do any one any good to spend all thas time on their knees practicing things that need to be done midwater. Rather than spend a few minutes doing a neutral swim and a couple minutes doing a neutral hover (usually in a funny, useless position), we spend the entire class doing those things along with teaching the mechanics of trim (hovers are horizontal). That's the foundation we build all the other skills on top of.
It's really pretty simple and you're more than welcome to join us during any of our classes.
The same principle follows through the other classes. After watching many AOW nav dives where divers crawled around a square having no clue where their buddy was and seeing student sit on the bottom to tie knots for a S & R dive, I changes some things. I won't even start a AOW class with a student unless they can do a controlled descent watching their buddy, stop and hover before they touch the bottom, R & R mask there and share air while maintaining depth and attitude and then do an ascent (face to face with their buddy doing a stop on the way up. All basic skills but very few manage it without several dives to work on basics first.
What sense does it make to take a student on a deep dive when they haven't learned to do this stuff when shallow? At Gilboa we've seen it get students hurt.
No, it's not that I'm good at all but that the industry and mainstream dive training is so blasted screwed up with goals based stricly on numbers and equipment sales.
I see a hundred divers who look exactly like that every trip to the quarry. That is for the first 15 minutes when the vis is completely gone. Mainstream training is designed to produce divers who look just like that but in record time. LOL
A diver can't work on trim if they don't know what it is or how to get there. The PADI text never mentions it. I've seen and talked with enough instructors to tell you that most of them don't know enough about it to teach it.
Trim and real buoyancy control isn't a requirement of AOW, rescue, a DM class or even an IDC or IE. You can easily become an instructor without ever getting it.
The way we do it, it's usually the DM's who are overweighted.
The first part of dive 1 is always a bouyancy check. The students are usually weighted a couple of kg's too light and the DM's take along extra weights to give them during the buoyancy check. Unfortunately it often happens that we don't have any kind of surface support and the extra weight gets carried with us during the first dive. I make sure students log the amount of weight they had and their exact configuration after the first dive.
Surprisingly after you get most students properly weighted at the beginning of the dive they don't need the extra kg or so for the air they breathe off. I'm not 100% sure why this happens. My best guess is that they're a little tense and holding too much air in their lungs during the bouyancy check.
R..
OP
Finnatic
Contributor
Thanks to all who have posted so far. The tips and suggestions have been very helpful. It seems there are as many teaching styles as there are different ways to learn. What stands out is the passion for the sport and a love for teaching it to others that you all seem to have. Unfortunately, this is sadly lacking in my class. Obviously I need more pool time and to get my weighting issues resolved before the OW test. I feel the instructor should have offered more time but he never did and I feel intimidated to go back and have to ask for it, but I am going to do that today. To be truthful I have learned more from reading this board than I have in the class. Our instructor only drills us on the skills part on our knees. During the last 15 minutes we are allowed to swim around, but he didn't actually "teach" or stress trim and buoyancy control or advise us in any way to try and stay off the bottom. Of course it is in our textbook, but I mainly know this from all the comments here. He kind of keeps an eye on us while he puts things away. As far as my weighting problem, he handed me a 2 lb hard weight and told me to put in the pocket of the BC. I want to feel competent and confident when I graduate and not be a disaster in the water.
Similar threads
