YOUR OW course: What would you have changed?

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*dave*

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If there were one thing you could have changed about your OW certification course, what would it be? Would you make it shorter, longer, more intense, easier,.......? Are there skills you would have liked to have had instruction on?

What would you have changed?
 
To long ago to remember---just a wild guess though: nothing--we've (myself, wife & oldest child age 13) all made it home in one piece with no hopsital stops @ any time...Isn't that the ultimate goal on every dive??

What would you have changed?.....
 
thankfully they changed already, ended 10, 8hr days of classroom before even getting to swimming and snorkel skills.
 
I would not have passed me.

I would have told me that I needed some more work (I would not have argued).

I think the two biggest things is that you have to have a standard to which you hold people before deciding if they should be certified, and the instructors need to understand what that standard is and what it looks like.
 
I don't know that I would have changed anything. I took the NAUI program in '88 and it was EXPECTED that a new diver would take OW I, OW II, Advanced OW and Rescue in quick succession. So this was the program and it was spread out over about 3 months.

The Rescue component was much more involved that the current offering from PADI (I don't know anything about the current NAUI offering). Among other things I had to write a paper on common diving injuries and state the appropriate first aid for each. This included, of course, injuries from marine life. This paper was the better part of a dozen typed pages.

Since all training is local, we didn't talk about the problems of wetsuit compression, huge amounts of ballast and the complications of venting air during ascent. We sure didn't talk about run-away ascents. I had to learn that when I got back to Calif.

Still, I think highly of the program and the instructor.

Richard
 
I would have done it 15 years sooner than I did
 
i'd have liked it if my instructor stressed something like 'i'm teaching these things on the bottom, and that's fine for now, but *this* <examples of skills while hovering> is what you'll want to be doing in a few dives'. i think most instructors don't stress the idea that your skills are expected to improve and what diving looks like should be <hovering, no silt, trim and buoyancy in control> instead of <huge leaps up and drops down while way overweighted and swimming at a 45 deg angle>. i guess what i'm saying is that knowing what 'the bar' looked like might help everyone not think that how they are when they finish ow is *finished*. i hope this makes sense...i mean, we all hear that ow is a 'license to learn', but don't somehow seem to make the leap that how you are when you end ow is expected to smooth and polish and your weighting will change and you don't have to kneel to clear your mask, ya know?
 
I would have liked more dives before certification and a set of more realistic skills taught. There should be enough water time to adjust weights, teach basic boyancy and trim, test basic awareness, dive planning and adherence to the dive plan, and navigation. All these were mentioned in classroom, but were never trully put to the test during the 4 OW dives.
 
Having an instructor that wasn't an egomainac! Having more info and demo of buoyancy control. In the 80's [in the private class I took] the only thing on buoyancy I was told/taught was to TRY and keep off the bottom because in some areas in could damage the enviorment.

It took YEARS to learn by trial and error that buoyancy control is the KEY to a good dive and diver.
 
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