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Is there such a thing as TOO MUCH training?


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#16 WreckWench

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Posted 14 October 2005 - 09:51 AM

Okay, I get your point now... You have no way of verifying your instructor is teaching you everything you need to know according to the agencies standards. Other than I hope this person takes their job seriously. Good point..


P.S. Wreck you started this........LOL...... Any way, in my opinion, I did not see any bashing ...yet. and I think the point being made here ( it's the individual instructors that make the difference, not their agencies)

Yes I did start this...and you are correct that there has been no agency bashing yet...and I agree that instructors are the integral key here. My reminder was merely to keep it respectful!

Thanks to all for your :lmao:. Respectful discussions of delicate subjects like this is a hallmark of SD and I want to keep it that way! :birthday: -ww

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#17 Walter

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Posted 14 October 2005 - 09:56 AM

The individual instructor is one important key in the process. The individual agency is another important aspect of the process. If it wasn't, there would be no need of agencies and standards.

Some things are better than others, turning a blind eye to it and forbidding discussion of it doesn't change how things are.
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#18 TraceMalin

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Posted 14 October 2005 - 10:32 AM

In the Open Watercourse I took with PADI. I list of "skills" to perform in order to complete that segment, or dive. The tests asked specific questions which required specific answers. I would have to state, thought that I did get the feeling that very few people actually "Fail" the course. I did have to re do some of the skills till I got it right. So I guess with this long winded statement, is "what does successfully completed" mean? The point to your secret standards

I've been teaching scuba diving since 1989 and not one student has ever asked to see my instructor C-card nor has a student ever asked to see the course requirements.

The first thing I do in my AOW course after I complete skill evaluation dives and do 2 or 3 dives in which I get the students dialed in with buoyancy, trim and basic technical diving skills is to do a navigation dive and "correct" their heading to get them hopelessly lost. Then I chew them out for trusting me and not asking to see my renewed C-card and my liability insurance card. I'll have to add the course standards to this first beating... or, maybe I should keep them secret as I am now?

As a PDIC instructor, my materials tell me the basic standards the students need to meet. They are in my book for each course. Students can ask to see them and I would gladly show them. I could choose to show them without them asking, but I don't. Unlike PADI our student materials don't clue them into the skills they need to complete. It's pretty easy to figure out at the OW level, but the AOW course & the varuious specialties leave a lot more for the instructor to interpret. Because the minimum standards are not known to a student, they are in a sense "secret."

My "secret" is that AOW students only need to complete 5 dives consisting of a skill evaluation dive, a natural navigation dive, a compass navigation dive, a night or limited visibility dive and a deep dive. I don't tell them this so they assume that MY PERSONAL standards are PDIC's standards. Because, they never ask. So, I usually do up to 25 dives at the AOW level with my students. They need to learn boat diving so, yep, we'll be diving from boats at some point during the course. They need to learn natural navigation so we'll be doing that too and they'll be getting hammered about their trim, buoyancy, team, equipment & environmental awareness (the PDIC manual states they are to practice "total awareness" so to me that means the stuff I learned that GUE called "total awareness") as an introduction to the beatings yet to come. If they didn't already figure it out from the sticker on the bottom of my doubles that says, "the beatings will continue until morale improves," this isn't going to be a cake walk for them. They need to learn search & recovery so they will search & they will recover until they get it right. We need to cover diver stress and rescue so we'll spend a couple days going over rescue skills on the surface & underwater. I'm told to do a limited vis or night dive, so guess what? Yep! We're doing BOTH. Night dive? Isn't that like cave 1? Same skills? Yeah, I think so! They need to learn deep water & decompression diving. I'm told to simulate a deco dive between 60 and 100 feet with at least a 10 foot deco stop so we'll be doing dive(s) to 100 feet and doing decompression stops. We'll be doing Pyle Deep Stops in my course. Since I'm told that I need to practice total awareness, air reserves, time, depth and comfort level... hmm... total awareness? What is that? I think it means that when the team gets too far apart or they lack canister light communication skills we'll be testing out those 1/3 rule air reserves by having OOG/OOA situations. Not monitoring your gauges? You don't want to know your time or depth? That's okay. Since you aren't looking, you don't need to see! Bye-bye facemasks! Comfort level? Comfort level? These are MY students & I love them. I want them to be VERY comfortable at depth. How about a no masked, lift bag launch, air share from 100 feet then reach your stops (good job, guys, you tied knots in your line every 10 feet!) and don't forget the deco (counting in your head one-one-thousand... two-one-thousand) and coming up within two minutes of their v-planned run time... GOOD JOB GUYS!!! 25 dives later, butts kicked, smiles of accomplishment because they see themselves already diving better than most instructors & know they've earned it, gone to sea in a dive boat, done shore dives in surf, etc. Yes! You get your PDIC AOW card!!!

But, guess what? Ssshhh... you guys only had to do 5 dives to get this. That's the secret. Honestly, though, don't you feel better having done the 25 or so?

My students often think I didn't charge enough for all that I taught.

Good thing I'm a lifeguard. I'll never have any money as an instructor.

Trace
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#19 Diverbrian

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Posted 14 October 2005 - 11:10 AM

Good answer Trace,

My view on "secret standards" is pretty simple. I don't like people having easy access to the minimums. There is a reason that so many students in college/school get mediocre grades instead on WOWing the instructor. There are still many students that figure what it takes to get exactly what they want and will do exactly as much work required to get the mediocre performance when they are capable of so much more.

Likewise, our instructors add stuff to the class which is not and won't be required by standards. I would respectfully think that most instructors here do that as well as they care enough about training to research and comment on it. (Let's have Trace write training standards, eh. I guarantee you good divers from those standards. :teeth: )

The ones that don't care to do that work(like the instructor in the sad example earlier in this thread who can barely handle a dive deep enough to meet a deep cert and some days not even that) aren't going to change and will continue to be mediocre instructors at best because all that they care about is getting by. That is sad, but true.
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#20 Diverbrian

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Posted 14 October 2005 - 11:26 AM

If they didn't already figure it out from the sticker on the bottom of my doubles that says, "the beatings will continue until morale improves," this isn't going to be a cake walk for them.

A sticker besides MOD and current VIP on your tanks...

...we'll have to tell your favorite tech agency on you.

Shhhhh!!! I have stickers like that too.
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#21 Walter

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Posted 14 October 2005 - 12:00 PM

Brian, that's easily fixed. Some agencies allow instructors to add requirements to a course. With that proviso, having students understand requirements can only add to the quality of the course. Keeping them secret only makes it harder for the consumer to comparison shop for quality.
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#22 TraceMalin

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Posted 14 October 2005 - 12:37 PM

If they didn't already figure it out from the sticker on the bottom of my doubles that says, "the beatings will continue until morale improves," this isn't going to be a cake walk for them.

A sticker besides MOD and current VIP on your tanks...

...we'll have to tell your favorite tech agency on you.

Shhhhh!!! I have stickers like that too.

Brian,

I usually keep the bottoms of my back gas free of decals, but I couldn't resist that skull & crossbones decal with the quote from... who said that anyway?

For those who don't understand what the big deal is, most tech divers now believe in keeping tanks clean of any non-essential decals. The VIP stickers go on every cylinder in a spot that is out of view, the back gas cylinder(s) usually will just have the diver's name, in my case, my tanks say, "TRACE", and a sticker or piece of duct tape stating the fill information (O2/He/MOD/Date/PSIg/and the initials or name of the person who analyzed it). Deco bottles will have all the same info, but are often coded with the maximum operating depth of the gas in the bottle. So, a 50% O2 mixture would simply say "70" so divers know that 70 feet is the max depth at which that bottle can be breathed. The back gas isn't marked by MOD because that always changes with different fills, but the deco bottles tend to be dedicated to one gas. This makes it safer for mixed gas divers to understand the mixes at depth and avoid a possible fatal error by breathing the wrong one and experiencing an oxygen toxicity hit.

There are two good locations on tanks for VIP/O2 clean stickers on the back tanks. One is on the bottom, but setting the tanks down tends to chew these up, and the other is the area of the cylinder(s) that lie(s) under the backplate. I prefer hiding them under the backplate. For stage bottles, I place the decals on the bottoms. For fun, and to be rebellious, you can always make up daily sayings with duct tape such as, in small letters, "If you can read this, I'd better be out of gas!" That of course carries a double entendre. :teeth:

Trace
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#23 Dive_Girl

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Posted 14 October 2005 - 02:10 PM

I have been known to write one-liners to my buddies and tape them to my tanks, that my buddies don't see until we're in the water.... :teeth:
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#24 WreckWench

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Posted 14 October 2005 - 02:25 PM

For fun, and to be rebellious, you can always make up daily sayings with duct tape such as, in small letters, "If you can read this, I'd better be out of gas!" That of course carries a double entendre.


You bet your sweet ass it does! :teeth:

Contact me directly at Kamala@SingleDivers.com for your private or group travel needs or 864-557-6079 AND don't miss SD's 2018-2021 Trips! ....here! Most are once in a lifetime opportunities...don't miss the chance to go!!
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#25 peterbj7

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Posted 14 October 2005 - 03:02 PM

Going back to the original question, I don't think there can be too much learning, though there certainly can be too much training. And although you want your instructor to be well qualified, I've come across too many "card collecting" instructors, who seem to measure their virility by the size of their ..... card wallets.

#26 jholley309

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Posted 14 October 2005 - 06:07 PM

I know I'll probably catch hell for this, but Jim, I find it interesting that you would be willing to express an opinion that differing philosophies of training are equally valid after first telling us you don't have enough experience diving to have seen if it were true  or not.

In truth, it's difficult to compare certifying agencies, because in nearly every case the agency was formed to cater to a specific segment of the diving community that wasn't being well served at the time.

No problem, Walter! That's part of the reason I posted that, to see what differing opinions were out there.

In hindsight, I meant to edit the "nearly every case" statement to clarify my thought: I was mentally lumping the more recreationally-oriented agencies together (such as PADI and NAUI; SSI might go in there too, but I never got around to researching them much before getting certified), as opposed to GUE or TDI. So, I stand corrected there. The point should have been along the lines of this: "It is difficult to compare agencies that cater primarily to rec diving with agencies who cater to the more technical crowd, due to differing quality-of-training philosophies." Rec agencies just want to get you in the water; tec agencies want to get you in the water in a condition to handle any concievable contingency, so the standards that dictate when a person is considered "certified" are going to reflect that, as well as the intensity of the training itself. Different missions, different yardsticks, if you will.

The overall point I was after is that no amount of training is going to ensure that any one person, once blessed by the powers that be, is going to conduct themselves in a manner that reflects that training. For example, someone fresh out of OW, merrily descending to 140 feet "just because it's on the dive tables". They were certainly told not to do that, that 130 feet was the recreational limit and then only with further instruction and (ideally) additional safety equipment, but off they go. You've seen them; you may have even had to bail a few of them out of the jam they got themselves into by disregarding their training.

By the way, I'm new to diving, but not at all new to training environments. Diving, satellite communications, land navigation, emergency medicine; training is pretty much training in a fundamental sense. There is a minimum set of standards that trainees must meet, and a formal process for evaluating whether they've met those standards. How you get the trainees from no knowledge to certified may differ slightly (independent study vs. classroom instruction, for instance), but the overall process works pretty much the same way.


Anyway, I'll hush now and toddle off to other parts of the pool to avoid "silting up the water" any further. :teeth:

Cheers!

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#27 ScubaDadMiami

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Posted 15 October 2005 - 12:05 AM

Training is a start. Great training makes a much bigger difference than having a larger quantity of marginal training.

All the training in the world does no good unless you continue to practice, develop and employ what you got from your training after it is over. :teeth:
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#28 WreckWench

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Posted 15 October 2005 - 12:21 AM

Anyway, I'll hush now and toddle off to other parts of the pool to avoid "silting up the water" any further.


Hey Jim...you can toddle to my end of the pool anytime! :teeth:


and don't worry about silting up the water...braille diving is great! :evilgrin:

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#29 TraceMalin

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Posted 15 October 2005 - 05:43 AM

All the training in the world does no good unless you continue to practice, develop and employ what you got from your training after it is over. :P

And, if you start practicing too much, then real dives become... DULL.

Practice! Practice! Practice! Let's go practice!

Hmmm... maybe there can be TOO MUCH training after all? I think we've lost the kelp forest for the g... u... e's? :helpsmily:

Trace
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#30 Diverbrian

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Posted 15 October 2005 - 07:20 AM

Actually Trace brings up another pet peeve of mine.

I have seen divers that want their skill set to be absolutely perfect before hitting the open water. The result with many of these is literally spending every weekend at a shallow lake or quarry doing nothing but skills.

This sounds good and in some respects it is. But, they never see what situations look like to forced them to learn those skills in the first place. The result is a diver with 100-200 dives in the same lake/quarry that has never been on a boat or built any other "real" experience. This turns into the equivalent of the diver who has never dived out of a class. I guess that what I am saying is that if a person doesn't push the envelope a little bit, then they don't tend to grow more confident. This is why I like Trace's course outline :helpsmily: . It forces students to push the envelope a bit and not simply be content because they can do all of these skills. It teaches them when to apply a given skill and proves to them that they can do it under pressure.
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