What’s Wrong With This Picture?

You know what’s nice about digital photography? You no longer have to tell people “No, I actually saw this…” You can simply show them. Case in point:

I took this picture at 3:59 pm on Friday, November 19, 2004, at a popular dive site in north-central Florida. It shows either two instructors or an instructor and (what one hopes is) a certified assistant working with nine or ten open-water students.

So, what’s wrong with this photo? Strictly speaking, there is only one possible standards violation here. The site is not sufficiently deep to meet most training agency standards for a valid open-water location. There is also the issue of whether the site is truly reflective of “open” water (many local instructors use this same site for confined-water training; most of us have taught in swimming pools that are substantially bigger).

Mind you, I don’t have a problem with instructors using this particular spot for a first open-water training dive with students — if doing so doesn’t violate applicable agency standards. It can be a nice transition to other sites in the area (some on the same property) which are larger, deeper and less clear.

What really concerns me about this picture are issues that have nothing to do with standards. It comes down to this: What is really being learned here?

Let’s start with the issues of ratios. Yes, ten-to-one with a certified assistant does meet some agencies’ standards — but is it most conducive to learning? With so many students to work with at one time, the instructor can do little more than go through the list of required skills, one student at a time. There won’t be much time left over for students to get out and actually dive (which is where learning really takes place in open water).
In contrast, if the instructor were to have broken the class into smaller groups, he could move through the required skills more quickly, leaving more time for students to dive. Of course, the problem here is that, even if students did have time to actually go diving, the site is so small there is no place for them to go.
Note that both the instructor(s) and students are all firmly glued to the bottom. If they were properly weighted for the type of exposure suits being used, they’d be much closer to neutral buoyancy, even with no air in their BCs. Given that the students spent most of their open-water training dives this way, the lesson learned is that it’s okay to be overweighted and in constant contact with the bottom. This “neutral buoyancy” and “environmental awareness” stuff must not really be important after all.
As mentioned earlier, even though it’s technically a violation of standards, I personally don’t have a problem with instructors doing a single open-water training dive at this particular location. What these students told us, however, is that they were doing three of their required training dives in rapid succession, on a single day, at this one site. This is what really drives me nuts. As a dive boat captain, I know that this type of “training” does almost nothing to prepare students for the real world of diving. In contrast, teaching students in something like a rock quarry — even though it has little in common with the ocean — at least helps prepare students to deal with environmental conditions more challenging than those encountered in a swimming pool.

The bottom line is, these students learned almost nothing about diving in real open water and, at best, did little more than repeat the skills they were supposed to have mastered in the swimming pool — in an environment that may not even have been as challenging as that pool.

My 22-year-old daughter was with me when I took this photo. She learned to dive when she was a senior in high school — only slightly younger than many of the students in this photo. Apparently, this was a college class (which may have been how the instructor justified the mass-production approach — you know, “It’s not as though they’re actually going to dive once certified.")

This guy is obviously more concerned with meeting the letter of his agency’s training standards than he is actually teaching students to dive in the real world. Would I have wanted my children to get certified by this guy? Do you really have to ask?

The Other Side of the Story?

There are two sides to every story. It occurred to me after I first wrote this that there may be more going on here than meets the eye. For example:

What if the reason this instructor (or these instructors) were trying to rush through and get as many of the required dives and skills done in as short a time as possible was that they were preparing their group for several days of “real” open water diving in the Florida Keys, Gold Coast or elsewhere?
What if their goal was to have everyone in the group certified by the time they arrived at their destination? This might actually increase the amount of time available for the students to make real open-water dives — under instructor supervision — without the added burden of having to do skills.
Under these circumstances, what we observed may have just been part of a larger overall learning experience that might actually result in better divers.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, if this is not what was happening, it makes what we observed at the spring all the more heinous.

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