6.4 Learning to dive

I jumped into doing low-vis, cold water diving without an instructor from the start—I mean not alone, but with a buddy with only a little more experience than me. We had lots of hassles, but sheesh… everyone acts like if you get certified it might as well be an ‘Instant Suicide’ certification: Just add water. When I heard all kinds of stuff (mostly from dive shops) about how you have to have a divemaster nearby if you want so much as to blow your nose, it just made me more resolved to figure things out on my own.

Of course, I wasn’t doing dives to 85’ until I had some more training, but that made more sense to me... I wish the OW cert course was good enough that people could safely dive on their own afterwards, which is what is sort-of implied by the cert. Of course, being a student, not an instructor, I tend to think that ‘it’s not the agency,’ and it’s also not the instructor—mostly it’s the student. Some people are motivated enough to get a lot out of even a bad course, and some people won’t get much out of the best course possible. My regular buddy just breezed her way through our nitrox course without having read more than 10% of the book. That’s a non-motivated student. (I told her we weren’t diving nitrox anyway until she read the book, cert or no.) As for me, I ran out and bought two other basic nitrox books to read on my own right after the course. The point being that there can be a huge difference between the quality of an educational experience based on the student’s motivation.

You can’t take the responsibility for learning out of the hands of the learner. It’s not actually possible to do someone else’s thinking for them. At some point, teaching a class, you have to draw a line and say ‘if you can’t learn and be serious with at least this, then you are liable to die.’

I have had the chance to help out at a few advanced open water classes, and I’ve seen things that just made my balls shrivel. I mean, some of these students just must not have given one shit about anything they heard in their OW class. Maybe I’m being a bit hard on them from my perspective—not being a teacher, but with some of these people if they got hurt I would have a hard time blaming the teacher. Some of them just needed an ass kicking, frankly.

2003.6.11
based on a post to rec.scuba