Recognizing The Purpose

What is the purpose of taking a class, in particular a UTD class? Is it to receive another card, gain access to a deeper depth, to stay down longer or to go further? Should we enter a class with these thoughts as our goals? Or should these achievements be the bonus we get for improving something even better? The education at UTD strives to teach our students something more than just the namesake of a class.

There is a pretty severe line that separates success from failure and too many developing divers get lost in that line, they fear failure. It toys with their mind during class, it is the catalyst for poor decision making and the very thing they want to avoid becomes their team mate underwater. It is why so many students entering a class try to learn everything before they arrive… from friends, from youtube or some other internet resource… in hopes that they can simply show up, perform for an instructor and receive a card.

My job as a UTD instructor is to see beyond your ability in the water, beyond your skills and into your mind and where it is that you need to be challenged most. What you really get out of a class should be much deeper than a few new skills. It should show you how to take the basic UTD/DIR skills you’ve been working on and correlate them into new situations, environments or circumstances. As instructors we must challenge you in a way that requires you to adapt. No matter how good you are, it is our job to take you out of your normal, comfortable way of doing things, to make you look deeper inside, and think.

Both students who are having difficulty with skills as well as students who have flawless skills need to be challenged. Being put in a class situation that causes you to fall down, to make mistakes, to fail at the job will be your best learning aid. However it is not failure. In fact, it is anything but that. It is productive educational development.

Tags: class, fail, passing, success

0 members like this

< Previous Post

Comment

You need to be a member of Unified Team Diving to add comments!

Join Unified Team Diving

Comment by Mary Jo on February 23, 2011 at 7:05am: As a new member and PADI diver I want to know the differences between class given by PADI and Unified Team Divers.

Comment by James Mott on October 30, 2009 at 11:07am: You are absolutely correct Lynn, and I hope I didn’t come across as suggesting that a good class does nothing more than press you until you are crying in the fetal position.

Something as simple as moving the class location to a new dive site, where the student doesn’t know each and every rock, stone and fish by name, should not break down an otherwise efficient group of divers. Spending day after day trying to correct 2 degrees of trim, under the same conditions, over and over is pointless. Especially if trim changes by 89 degrees and all understanding of buoyancy control is lost every time there is the slightest change of environmental conditions.

My point being, there is something bigger that the student is missing. Finding it is the challenge for the instructor, accepting it is the challenge for the student, and most importantly conquering it is the challenge for the whole team.

Regardless of the location, water temp, color of fins, etc.

Comment by Lynne Flaherty on October 30, 2009 at 10:02am: Although I agree that it is tremendously important to be challenged, and to stretch your capacities, I also think about my oral surgical boards. I went into each of a series of rooms, to be asked questions. The questions started simple, and got harder, and continued until I failed to answer several correctly, at which point i was sent to the next room. Since I only exited a room when I failed, my overall feeling from the course was one of repeated failure. Of course, I was only failing when the questions reached research technical level . . . but I still failed.

It's very important, when you are challenging people in this way, that you allow them some success. Any class can break a student -- we all have limits. It is very important that the student understand that the point at which they failed is well beyond the passing point for the class in question, and even then, if you let every dive end with the breakdown of the team, the students will feel demoralized when it's over.

There has to be a careful balance between challenge and success.