So, what is the point of AOW???

[dkatchalov]

Thanks for the excellent response Mike.

I am currently OW with 21 dives. I am learning how to dive properly on my own basically. Trim, weight, moving through water, etc. I am learning all this stuff from my own trial and error. I am going for my AOW in January and will have about 27 dives by then. I have dived with AOW divers with 12 dives under their belt. It is scary to think you can be certified to go to 30 metres (100 feet) with 12 dives.

Once I get past AOW, I may consider doing a GUE course. I just need more confidence with myself and my new gear in the water first.

 

[MikeFerrara]

Thanks for the excellent response Mike.

I am currently OW with 21 dives. I am learning how to dive properly on my own basically. Trim, weight, moving through water, etc. I am learning all this stuff from my own trial and error. I am going for my AOW in January and will have about 27 dives by then. I have dived with AOW divers with 12 dives under their belt. It is scary to think you can be certified to go to 30 metres (100 feet) with 12 dives.

Once I get past AOW, I may consider doing a GUE course. I just need more confidence with myself and my new gear in the water first.

We shouldn't leave out the role that a good mentor can play. If you dive with good divers, some of it will rub off. Seeing it and knowing what to shoot for is probably 90% of the battle.

None of this is very hard or complicated. The only thing that makes it hard is being plastered to the bottom vertical and learning a goofy way of doing things. There is no way to get to where we want to be from there. You have to unlearn all that and start over doing things that work. You can dive trimed head up or kneeling for a thousand years and you just won't get much better. Practice does NOT make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

Put your balast in the right place, your body in the right position and you will be horizontal. Learn to use the controls you have, BC, leg, head, arm and back position and you'll be able to assume any position you choose throughout the dive across changes in buoyancy due to depth change and gas use. It really is this simple and I can't figure out why they want to keep it such a secret. LOL

Now that you're midwater, clear your mask. Notice that you do NOT need to look at the stars...if you do, you'll find yourself verticle and out of control. Never mind trying to do it one breath. If you suck in a big breath in preperation to clear a mask in one breath, you're just going to get buoyant and head for the surface. This nonsense only works when you're plastered to the bottom. The first priority is to control position and keep track of our buddy and our surroundings. Clear the mask while breathing to control buoyancy only exhaling out your nose and only raising your head slightly (if at all). It doesn't matter if it takes several breaths as long as you maintain control throughout.

Once we get all the individual little tasks in a diving context it's a simple matter to combine them...the mask floods during an ascent, while you're donating gas or whatever. That's diving. LOL all those things are going to happen when you are busy with something else. Nothing ever happens when you're just swimming around near the bottom with nothing to do. They come in two's and three's rather than one at a time and they come when it's inconvenient. That's what we're training for.

Once we can do this in a pool, lets go to open water. Once we can do it all on easy shallow dives, lets learn about the additional concerns that depth adds and lets go a little deeper. ect

You want to learn "technical" diving? We're adding more equipment and more tasks and a greater number of things are going to happen at once. I promise you'll have that leaky mask when you're shooting a bag. You will notice that the dry suit exhaust valve or the BC inflator is leaking/stuck when you have an hour of decompression ahead and probably when you're in the middle of something critical like switching gasses. What skills enable us to control position, prioritize and sort things out? The exact same core skills that make a shallow reef dive easy and fun.

I don't see any way to over-emphasize those basics that the rec agencies in their infinite cluelessness have decided to skip entirely. Getting that stuff from the beginning makes things easier, more fun and faster.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Bob, that might be what your AOW class is but the things you list aren't what you find in the performance requirements as written by some of the agencies.

Perhaps not, but nothing in agency standards prevents any instructor from making it a useful experience. Sure, I built my class from the ground up ... including writing the student materials I use to teach it. However, there's not a thing in there I didn't get from instructors I either took classes from or worked with ... either as DM or co-instructor. Those instructors were PADI, NAUI, SSI and YMCA. One of them (BDub) is a member of this board, and his AOW class is very similar to mine.

It's really not an agency issue ... any agency wants to believe they are turning out well-trained divers. It's really up to the instructor to decide how much effort to put into teaching, and up to the student to decide how much effort to put into learning.

To my concern, any student should approach a class with the idea that they want the most value for their money. It's no different than purchasing any other product.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Lets put agancies aside for now and talk about what I think we should be looking for.

Diving is like almost anything else in that the basics are probably the most important things to learn well. Why? Simply because everything else should be built on top of that. The basics are used on every dive and in all diving tasks.

IMO, the place to start is with an entry level class that provides a really solid foundation in the basics. Lets define that a little better. What is diving? 98% of it is just moving around midwater...or it should be. Controling your position and movement in the water column is the core skill. Regardless of how all those individual task related skills are introduced, eventually they need to be integrated with controling position and movement in the water column and without that midwater control you haven't done anything and you certainly aren't diving.

What's wrong with "traditional" dive training? They sit you on the bottom and teach you to clear a mask, reg, share air and whatever. Sometime during the class they get you off the bottom for a couple of minutes, and a couple of minutes is all that standards require. Often they never go back and integrate all those individual skills into a diving context and standards don't require it. So now you go to open water and again kneel to do these skills and take a couple of short tours bouncing off the bottom.They teach it all exactly backwards and never go back and finish. They have made kneeling the core skill rather than controling position and movement in the water column.

When the student says to the instructor "I still don't really get this buoyancy control thing" they're told they'll get it with experience or are told to take another class.

ok, your certified. You sign up for an AOW course and go to 60 ft to kneel and do "skills". You might do a S&R dive and kneel to tie knots. Where is the diving? Why go to 60 ft if you can't yet dive well at 10 ft? The AOW class wouldn't be quite so useless IF they had actally taught the basics that the AOW course assumes that you already know and you were actually applying those skills to those new environments. As is, it's just kneeling and sloppy diving in some different environments.

NEVER do they go back and teach what was missed in OW...not in AOW, not in rescue, DM or even instructor courses. The instructors can't teach it because they never learned it. Well, if you take a cave class you will finally have the mechanics and importance of trim explained but not everyone wants to cave dive and this is something that should be explained in the classroom before you every even get in the water.

Where do you find a class that lays down the solid foundation in the basics that I described at the start? I know individual instructors who do but the agencies don't seem to get it. I've heard good things about LA county but that's a little out of the way for the rest of the world. In regards to those basics, I think GUE has the right idea. I've sat in on a couple of their classes and everything I saw was great...but you have the DIR thing and the disappearing ink they use on their c-cards (they expire). I would expect their entry level course (which is up and running according to their website) to be really good. I think all the GUE instructors are also instructors with other agencies so I think an OW class with just about any one of them would be a good option. At least we know that they know the stuff.

For an AOW course, what Bob (NWGratefulDiver ) teaches sounds fantastic but you can't go to an agency for that, you need Bob or another instructor who has developed such a class. I think the folks at PADI (and the other agencies) should take Bobs class and learn how...after they take a good OW class so they see what one of those looks like. I also think the GUE rec triox or scuba diver2 or whatever they're calling it these days is a good option from a skill point of view.

Note here that I don't have any association with GUE and I've never taken any of their classes. I just think they do a really good job of teaching all those basic diving skills. In fact, I'm no longer an instructor with any agency so I don't have a stake in any of them.

What do you do? You can play the game, buy your cards and access (that's what you're really paying for is access) and then go learn to dive on your own like many of us did. You can search for an instructor who "gets it". That's pretty hard for a new person who doesn't know where to look or what to look for. Most divers just buy their cards and they go on just not knowing what it is that they don't know...just take your newly purchased access and go play in the water. I know some people get mad when I say this stuff and some argue but the fact is that we can go to just about any dive site and just watch to see exactly what I'm talking about.

This is getting long so I'm not going to go into any of the tech stuff. In any case, with a good foundation in the basics all that stuff is easy to learn. The only thing that makes it hard is having to go back and learn OW skills at the same time. All this stuff too needs to be built on that foundation in the basics that we should have developed in the entry level course.

Mike, I quite agree with you here ... the biggest problem with GUE is that they are incredibly small, and limited to a handful of instructors. They also don't have an entry-level (OW) class ... even though they've been working toward implementation of one for several years now. The reasons have been discussed and debated elsewhere, but it is my opinion that there simply isn't enough of a demand for it to make it feasible. The other big problem with GUE is that their instruction is ultimately based on a technical model ... and quite frankly not everyone needs to be diving a backplate or building a skills foundation that is ultimately based on what a cave diver on a scooter needs to know. Although I personally believe their training is excellent, in some fundamental ways it simply goes too far for the majority of the world's divers.

The agencies are businesses ... and as such are providing the product that the customers are demanding. Sure, to you and me that may appear to be a pretty poor product. But in reality, if they offered the class you and I would prefer most people would opt not to take it. I've worked in a shop that tried to offer a more comprehensive OW class, and the majority of the folks who asked about it ended up signing up for the $99 week-end special at the store down the street.

Ultimately it boils down to a business decision ... dive instruction is a service we are selling. If the customer decides they want quick and cheap, the agencies will offer it ... and the customer will get what they pay for.

FWIW - I offer my classes at reasonable prices ... but I still only get a handful of people who want to take it. Most people just don't want to work that hard, and don't care whether they have good skills or technique. That's a reality. You can't force quality down the throats of people who don't think it's important.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[jviehe]

Neither ... it's a reality check.

There are more than 2.7 million posts on ScubaBoard.

Unless you are extremely good at narrowing down a search ... or have some advanced degree in database management ... you can spend an entire day locating an answer to any particular question ... and not even get the satisfaction of having participated in a discussion.

There is absolutely no variation of a scuba-related question that hasn't already been asked on ScubaBoard ... if we expect everyone with a question to search for prior threads on the same topic, there will be nothing left to talk about but mindless chatter and threads complaining about the moderators ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

I dont think its unreasonable for someone to do some research first before posting, in order to come up with unique questions. Perhaps you wouldnt need a degree in databasing then.

 

[MikeFerrara]

Perhaps not, but nothing in agency standards prevents any instructor from making it a useful experience. Sure, I built my class from the ground up ... including writing the student materials I use to teach it.

Why did you do that. What was wrong with the class that the agency designed? What was wrong with their materials?

However, there's not a thing in there I didn't get from instructors I either took classes from or worked with ... either as DM or co-instructor. Those instructors were PADI, NAUI, SSI and YMCA. One of them (BDub) is a member of this board, and his AOW class is very similar to mine.

It's really not an agency issue ... any agency wants to believe they are turning out well-trained divers.

Obviously the agency and you have a different idea of what a well trained diver is because you designed a class from the ground up and wrote your own materials.

It's really up to the instructor to decide how much effort to put into teaching, and up to the student to decide how much effort to put into learning.

It's up to the agency to define the minimums and those minimums should be pretty good. Agency and instructor minimums define what the student MUST occomplish.

To my concern, any student should approach a class with the idea that they want the most value for their money. It's no different than purchasing any other product.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

I think we disagree on the level of responsibility the agency has. Most of the classes I see are taught to the standards. That means that nothing is left out and nothing is added. That's all the agency requires of either the instructor or the student. Bob or Mike may require more but the agency doesn't. In my years of diving and my time teaching I have seen no evidence that "the agency" even understands it let alone encourages it. I realize there are some differences in approach to additions between agencies but the minimums are, IMO, all telling. That's all the student can count on getting.

This thread is another of the MANY threads that illustrates that very well. You say that you don't like to see divers say that they take an AOW class for the card and that they didn't learn much? Well that IS the norm. It IS the way the agencies have designed it. If you don't like it the people to be talking to are at the agency HQ. They could change it with a sweep of a pen across the instructor manual.

You say that you learned this extra stuff from other instructors. I didn't. I was taught to teach to the letter of the standards and be fast and efficient about it. I probably had the same instructor cards in my pocket that you do. Tell me that you don't know instructors who would be lost listening to your gas management workshop. If you don't, I'll introduce you to a bunch. They never learned it because it wasn't part of any class they ever had and they can't teach it because they don't know it. So, ok, if a diver or instructor LUCKS into instructors who LUCKED into good instructors, you MIGHT end up with a good class here and there. Sounds kind of hit and miss doesn't it?

Go out and audit some classes and see what you see. Then ask yourself who is responsible for designing of what you saw. Talk with a few of those instructors about some different ways of doing it and notice the deer-in-the-headlights looks you'll get. I feel comfortable recommending a Bob AOW class or the old Mike OW class but I can NOT recommend a PADI class. I have the standards right here next to me and I can read in black and white, plain as day what is and isn't there. Heck, you read the responses in this thread. Who designed those classes? You want to make the instructor responsible for teaching things that they were never required to learn and aren't required to teach? Do the instructors learn it by osmosis or something?

The "minimums" as outlined in the standards are what defines the agencies product.

 

[shoredivr]

I guess you have to define wrong. Standards require 60 ft and not much diving. Often classes descend a line, kneel, do their timed task, compare guages and ascend. That meets the requirements of training standards so how is it wrong? It may not be ver useful as far as training but I don't think it's "wrong".

l

After I typed "wrong", I thought about it and decided to change it to "that's part of the problem". I'm thinking of shops I know where descending down the line to the training platform, doing a skill, surfacing for a minute or two and then redescending for another skill was counted as two distinct dives for training purposes.

The concept that deep diving starts magically at 61 feet instead of 60, so that someone could get a card for deep diving after having gone to say 62 feet in their training dives is what I'm concerned about.

 

[MikeFerrara]

FWIW - I offer my classes at reasonable prices ... but I still only get a handful of people who want to take it. Most people just don't want to work that hard, and don't care whether they have good skills or technique. That's a reality. You can't force quality down the throats of people who don't think it's important.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

As they say "Been there and done that." If the card you issue says PADI AOW and every other class in town results in the same credential and access privilages, what is there to distinguish one from another? For all the intents and purposes they are the same product. Why work harder or pay more to get the same product? It seems like a no-brainer. The student goes where it's quicker and cheaper.

 

[TSandM]

What is diving? 98% of it is just moving around midwater...or it should be. Controling your position and movement in the water column is the core skill. Regardless of how all those individual task related skills are introduced, eventually they need to be integrated with controling position and movement in the water column and without that midwater control you haven't done anything and you certainly aren't diving.

This is so powerful and so true that it deserved to be set apart and quoted. This is what a Peak Performance Buoyancy class ought to teach, and doesn't. This is what a diver should have before they even think about going to 100 fsw, because without control of your position in the water column, you are at risk for a major incident if anything goes wrong when you are deep.

But what hurts my soul is that, without neutral buoyancy and control of your position in the water column, diving isn't much fun. And fun is what it's all about, it's why we go there. Hovering, utterly weightless and motionless as you watch the turtle eating coral, instead of kicking constantly and flailing with your hands because you're unstable in the water. Half of the fun of diving, at least for me, is the freedom in three dimensions and the perception that you are flying. If you don't teach basic skills, most divers will never experience that. (And if more did, we might have a better retention rate in the sport . . . )

Mike, as usual, you rock.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

As they say "Been there and done that." If the card you issue says PADI AOW and every other class in town results in the same credential and access privilages, what is there to distinguish one from another? For all the intents and purposes they are the same product. Why work harder or pay more to get the same product? It seems like a no-brainer. The student goes where it's quicker and cheaper.

That's because they're taught to value the card, rather than the knowledge and skills that it implies.

Someone complained that GUE cards expire. Who cares ... what you learn in the class doesn't.

Choosing a class because it's quick, easy and cheap is a form of masturbation ... it's fun while you're doing it, but in reality you're just screwing yourself.

Ultimately it's up to the student ... the agencies provide the services that their customers demand. Instructors can only affect how their own classes are presented ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)