Building Better Divers

When I took my first IDC, Instructor Development Course, there were zero scuba skills taught. In fact, there were not even any scuba skills corrected or improved. To be honest the Instructor Examiner looked the same underwater as he did in the classroom, standing behind a podium.
I traveled across multiple states for this leadership transformation and expected some kind of personal growth. However, there was no magic underwater, no revelation that awakened the underwater spirit of evolving from basic scuba diver to instructor hero or underwater badass once we submerged below the surface. Teaching a scuba class was not much different than teaching wood shop, algebra or home economics.
It was well known that we were supposed to show up knowing all the skills, equipment, and physics because what we were being taught was not how to dive better but how to present the agency’s program and marketing agenda.
How to teach a skill was covered but not how to do the skill, or do it well, or do it well in a practical environment. By this, I mean that the focus was on slowly showing the critical attributes of a mask clear, step by step, so it was easy for a student diver to see, on your knees so it was easy to be seen, negatively buoyant so multiple students could semi-circle around you and view it at the same time. But never once was the idea of how we really do this in real life discussed or practiced.
This was in the late 1990’s and the problem I see is that decades later, this is still the formula for most instructor development.
There is no time in the standard IDC to teach or correct buoyancy and breathing. The agency standards and forms and quality assurance and insurance alone are multiple days of curriculum.
The Divemaster program has been adopted as the place where a diver learns how to become a leader and develop a leadership level of performance with their diving skills.
But the Divemaster Candidate too has so much to learn and focus on that most programs just get them to improve their basics, just enough to slow them down. But once again it is not in an environment or application that is representative of real diving. These performance skills are constructed for a perfect world, perfect student, nothing will ever go wrong anyway, sugar-coated presentation.
So, if the DM candidate shows up not knowing how to apply real diving skills into a real diving environment, or a real diving emergency, and they don’t learn it in the DM course or the instructor course… what chance does an advanced open water diver have or a newly certified open water diver have in understanding and applying their weekend scuba class to the realities of long-term growth as a diver?
Although buoyancy control is a big point of discussion today, or rather the lack of its importance in elementary development, the rest of the skill set is just as miserable.
Standard open water diver course skills like forcibly swimming to the surface on an ascent, dumping gas and falling to the bottom to descend, and pre-dive acronyms that create more anxiety over my dive buddy’s competency than preparing our buddy team for a safe dive; all of which are systemic viruses that need a cure.
The focus on growth and comparing our dive industry to other recreations has created a general acceptance of the lowest possible common denominator regarding the interest and ability of the student diver. The assumption that they will not be around in five years, so we need to get as much out of them for as cheap as possible while we can, negatively effects the long-term possibilities of the new diver.
This thinking has been destroying the lasting viability of our industry for decades and unfortunately it has been foolishly adopted and accepted by the uninitiated mainstream as the way we do things.
If we want to be serious as a community about improving the overall quality of divers out in the field, we must demand from the entitled collective of agencies that we need to raise the standards, as well as the required experience and abilities of our instructors.
 
Are you an instructor? Divemaster? Concerned diver who cares? What do you think?
Please let me know.
Send me a message, call or email.
James Mott
[email protected]

Do you want to improve your diving or your instruction of divers and ascend above your competition?  E-mail me for a free private talk.