Teach Different. Dive Different.

[TSandM]

I do believe that GUE has meaningful quality control. Students cannot get their cards without completely a course assessment, and I know from experience that significant student complaints are investigated.

 

[boulderjohn]

I do believe that GUE has meaningful quality control. Students cannot get their cards without completely a course assessment, and I know from experience that significant student complaints are investigated.

Bot Rob is not talking about complaints. He is talking about how an instructor's standards can move either up or down over time until that instructor is either much more lax than the agency would like or much more strict than the agency would like. Students have no way of making the comparison, so there will not be a complaint.

 

[Pullmyfinger]

I appreciate your thoughts on that Diver0001,

It's food for thought as I set new goals for myself.

-Mitch

In educational terms making sure that all the teachers have the same *interpretation* of "mastery" is called "calibration".

What happens over time is that instructors can, and often do, lose calibration, or in other words, their bar changes. This can also go both ways. Some instructors' bar will lower and other instructors' bar will raise. Both are losing calibration, meaning that they are both no longer doing what was expected of them when they were first trained.

I guess you could argue that an instructor whose bar "slips up" isn't as dangerous as one whose bar "slips down" but in both cases the agency *should* (but do not) make use of their network of CD's in order monitor and if necessary re-calibrate individual instructors in their area.

Doing so would fall under something that could be called "quality control". No agency out there right now (including PADI, who does lip service to quality control but does nothing to follow through with meaningful action) has a meaningful quality control system. In my opinion, without this, no measure you can take (whether steering to "mastery" or steering to a given number of hours for the course) will make a damned bit of difference to the real quality being delivered where the rubber meets the road.

In other words, an instructor whose bar has "slipped down" isn't suddenly going to start delivering a better course because he's forced to spend more time on it. All he'll do is spend more time delivering the same crap he does now.... worst case, the students will also have to pay more for the same crap.

If you ask me, this touches on the biggest problem in scuba diving training bar none. There is *no* meaningful quality control at all.

NASE will have the same problem. Standards, which is nothing more than a checklist, and nice promo-videos and threads on the internet don't teach students. Instructors do. So the most relevant question to NASE is how they are organising their QA, because that's what's going to make sure that instructors don't lose focus on quality ... and without meaningful QA, it will have the same problem that all the other agencies have.

R..

 

[Thalassamania]

... it reaches out to prospective instructors. And the very category of instructors it targets is made up of people who already question the status quo. Further, given the negatives in the wording of the blurb, it actually fails to reach out primarily to those we might term "seekers," but instead to actively disaffected instructors. In other words, that blurb preaches to the converted.[/FONT][/COLOR]

But the "reach" is more of a "stretch." The negatives are clearly there, snorkel=stroke, etc. The NASE program is "superior," I have to ask superior to what? To average recreational diver training? Do you think that bar is placed a bit low to have any real meaning? The NASE program is innovative. What does it "innovate?" Getting up off the bottom like many have instructors have been doing for decades? I guess the innovation is not in new things have been learned, but rather in things that have been dropped. The plaintiff is going to eat NASE alive in the first case in which an NASE student embolizes on a "claw" to the surface: "Your honor, teaching students how to properly perform a CESA in such a circumstance is done by every other agency, why on might call it a standard of practice of the community that NASE has decided, unilaterally and with supporting scientific or validated educational data, to stray from. Oh boy, do I ever smell a directed verdict?

Let me just add that I am in no way discussing the standards or the approach adopted by NASE. I am saying only that I find the blurb in the OP singularly ineffective because:

1) It doesn't tell us what NASE instructors teach, but rather what they don't teach.
2) The strong implication that teaching through these NASE-rejected techniques is flawed carries the risk of alienating potential cross-over instructors since the message is that because they are using unsound methodology, they aren't doing a great job as instructors. Who wants to be told that they're below par in their work?

In other words, my position is that regardless of the validity or lack thereof of the approach, standards, and methodology adopted by NASE, this blurb may not be doing what it is intended to do as a marketing tool.

I'm happy to find out that I'm not doing the best possible job as an instructor, that is how I improve, but to be told that by some new agency that is doing nothing that I am already not doing, that's claim to fame is that it is NOT doing things that I am that are clearly both useful and defensible, that is using the rationale that they are doing things the way cave divers do, and that is automatically better, well ... welcome to the poor man's George Irvine ... but at least George was a hell of diver with a track record of turning out a hell of a product.

What NASE really needs right now are tons and tons of disaffected instructors. Well, as many of them that are out there! Currently, the "converted" are dispersed all over the place trying to make their round peg courses fit into square whole training agency's courses. Many have no clue that NASE even exists and that they have a home with a nice, smooth round hole that matches up with their training ideals. Those whose mind is made up about the efficacy of the Buddha position during an OW dive probably need to mature a bit and open their minds before they would make good instructors for NASE. Of course, once the core has been established then they can move on to change the way the world dives. At that time, I am sure the message will be a bit more inclusive, but right now NASE needs instructors willing to be neutral while they teach. The best place to find those instructors is right here on ScubaBoard and the best way to attract them is to make things a bit controversial. Personally, I think they've done a good job here.

For me NASE is not really different than most of the recreational agencies, it is just another differently wrong shaped and wrong sized hole. But more than that, it is insulting. It is insulting to those who have taught neutral buoyancy for more than half a century, it is insulting to the WKPP and its descendants, who re-popularized it, it is insulting to the PADI Instructors in John's group who saw the value of this technique and showed that it could be used, with great success, even within the confines of one of the more rigid teaching structures. NASE need to be more careful, they are infants standing on all our shoulders and yelling to the world that their are ten feet tall.

In educational terms making sure that all the teachers have the same *interpretation* of "mastery" is called "calibration".

What happens over time is that instructors can, and often do, lose calibration, or in other words, their bar changes. This can also go both ways. Some instructors' bar will lower and other instructors' bar will raise. Both are losing calibration, meaning that they are both no longer doing what was expected of them when they were first trained.

I guess you could argue that an instructor whose bar "slips up" isn't as dangerous as one whose bar "slips down" but in both cases the agency *should* (but do not) make use of their network of CD's in order monitor and if necessary re-calibrate individual instructors in their area.

Doing so would fall under something that could be called "quality control". No agency out there right now (including PADI, who does lip service to quality control but does nothing to follow through with meaningful action) has a meaningful quality control system. In my opinion, without this, no measure you can take (whether steering to "mastery" or steering to a given number of hours for the course) will make a damned bit of difference to the real quality being delivered where the rubber meets the road.

In other words, an instructor whose bar has "slipped down" isn't suddenly going to start delivering a better course because he's forced to spend more time on it. All he'll do is spend more time delivering the same crap he does now.... worst case, the students will also have to pay more for the same crap.

If you ask me, this touches on the biggest problem in scuba diving training bar none. There is *no* meaningful quality control at all.

NASE will have the same problem. Standards, which is nothing more than a checklist, and nice promo-videos and threads on the internet don't teach students. Instructors do. So the most relevant question to NASE is how they are organising their QA, because that's what's going to make sure that instructors don't lose focus on quality ... and without meaningful QA, it will have the same problem that all the other agencies have.

R..

If you ask me (and you didn't, but this is the internet) QC after instructor qualification are a small part of the problem. The larger problem is that the bar for becoming a diving instructor has, over the years, drifted ever downwards, to the point where now simply being in possession of an Instructor Card, in many cases, doesn't (or at least shouldn't) really mean much any more. What is NASE going to do to change that? What is NASE going to do to make me think of their folks in the same way that I do GUE instructors or UTD instructors or Scripps Model Instructors or other quality instructors whom I know personally? Attracting tons and tons of disaffected instructors ain't gonna cut it, unless the cross-over process is harrowing enough to really separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

[The Chairman]

For me NASE is not really different than most of the recreational agencies, it is just another differently wrong shaped and wrong sized hole.

Give it a rest Thal. After all of your bluff about who's insulting who, it would actually be YOU who attacks all the agencies you mentioned. I know this is an election year, but you don't have to post like a politician and try to smear any and everyone who is not like you. All methodologies have their strengths and their weaknesses and this includes yours. Trying to force NASE to fit into your failed paradigm of what all the "other" agencies are about is disingenuous and serves only to promote your course as the "uber course". All this accomplishes is to silt out the discussion to further your agenda of "everybody else sucks". We get it. Like most in this discussion, I'll never fit into your program. It's way too regimented and lacks imagination and refuses to evolve. NASE, as well as a few other agencies allow the instructor to adapt and teach in a manner they see fit and they aren't afraid to think outside of your box. Yeah, I know that this is upsetting for an old timer who thinks the scuba world is going to hell in a hand basket, but we just don't think like you. We are cutting out the stuff that normal scuba divers just don't run into. That makes the courses less intimidating and smarter, not dumber. There's a lot to be said about this, but in reality, this thread is about how NASE differs from the other agencies. If you want to go really off topic start a thread somewhere else about how badly you think NASE sucks. [/rant]

 

[Thalassamania]

I don't think NASE sucks, I don't know enough about them to make that determination. They seem better, in some ways, than the other recreational agencies, and somewhat negligent in others. I am not promoting my course to you, I don't promote it to anyone, people who want it know where to find it and it needs no further promotion.

What I am trying to do is share sixty years of institutional memory and fifty odd years of personal memory concerning what I know to work and what I have seen tried that had a deleterious effect. You talk of elections and politics and then launch into double think that is worthy or George Orwell. NASE, while less regimented than PADI is far more regimented than say, NAUI. Far from, "thinking out of the box," NASE seems (at least to those of us who've been around the block a few times) to be rehashing of things (some good and some bad) that lots of folks have been doing for decades and that lots more folks have discovered recently, by watching GUE and UTD.

Please, please, tell us something new that NASE is proposing besides the elimination of things like snorkels, freediving skills, compass work, CESAs, rescue (?), etc.? (all of which I assume all be available in a separately priced product).

What is NASE doing that is "new under the sun?"

 

[John_B]

OK, just what the heck is WRONG with a good Budha hover?

View attachment 139677

Y'all act as if it is something bad when it is merely a method of hanging out.

Being neutral is just that, being neutral.

The problem is that new divers have zero awareness of where their feet are, let alone their feet plus the length of their fins. And they have no idea what neutral feels like. Add what comes natural from a lifetime spent on dry land (being vertical, doing a bicycle kick) and it's instant rototiller action for the reef below.

 

[Thalassamania]

The problem is that new divers have zero awareness of where their feet are, let alone their feet plus the length of their fins. And they have no idea what neutral feels like. Add what comes natural from a lifetime spent on dry land (being vertical, doing a bicycle kick) and it's instant rototiller action for the reef below.

That's not a GOOD Buddha.

 

[John_B]

That's not a GOOD Buddha.

Were we talking what an experienced instructor is capable of, or what a brand new diver will mimic (poorly)?

 

[Peter Guy]

Netdoc and John_B -- query -- does the woman in the picture (she was just someone on the boat diving on Molokini -- as I recall, she was a marine biologist) look like she has problems with being neutral? Really, does she look like she doesn't know where her fins are? She happened to pick a pose that was just right for what she wanted to do -- and isn't that the point of being able to control yourself in the water column?

I do not "teach" the Budha hover -- to the contrary, I do my best to teach all of my students how to calmly, repeatedly and comfortably be horizontal and quiet in the water in no small part because I want all of them to be dry suit divers in Puget Sound one day. HOWEVER, if one of them wanted to play patty-cake with me while "sitting in the water" I'd ecstatically join them. This woman was just sitting in the water letting herself be drifted along and taking in the whole picture -- what could be wrong with that?

BTW, Netdoc, your comment about not wanting to do a Budha Hover while looking under something is just one of those comments that perhaps shows you don't understand that everyone should be able to maintain many different "hovers." It is just as bad as being a cave diver and saying you should always be horizontal -- Hmmm, try going UP a small chimney while horizontal when, in reality, you may well want to be (or need to be) vertical. The key is being neutral and controlling your position -- not the position itself, is it not?