Quote: (Originally Posted by s75952004)
ken
nice point .sorry I have to disagree .my scuba experance is very short ,but I have had 4 seperate instructors ,2 were just fav,1 was middle road ,1 just plain bad.
I will explain the one that was just plain bad ,made the course very hard (now I do not mind being pushed ) when do my aow navagation part we had to drag along a tide bottle at surface (tied to 6'of line) with newbies in drysuit at that depth bounyacy was just plain tough .padi manual does not have this requriment (I checked) .he did not connect well with students and allow free flow of discussions . most of the other studenst did not mind the man (maybe it is me).why do I say this well when I took my ow confined ,I failed a couple of the skills .the instructor said go and practise "do not give up"very encouraging ,came back did the skills "no extra money" offer to buy him dinner and he said "my reward is you came back to a sport I love now you will get to enjoy it"
I never have accepted defeat well I am a fighter ,might be bad student and need to do skills more than once to get them right
Thanks for your commentary. It seems that even before your class started there were some unknown expectations: Example: tide bottle. A literal drag!
With that in mind, genius instructor should have let you and the other participants know up front that there were changes to the original course structure. Stuart mentioned protocol; PADI would require an instructor to get departmental clearance when altering a course. That's the way I remember it.
In my original commentary, I had mentioned that the best learning outcomes occur when instructor and student are on the same page relative to course expectations and skillsets. If the instructor was OK’d he/she should have provided some pre-course experience related to his "new" skillset before initiating it in real time.
The instructor in your second scenario epitomizes what should occur in all teaching experiences.
Additionally, I find a lot of the tech.& recreational teaching materials deficit when it comes to knowing how learners actually learn. Many text authors mistakenly think that knowing the material makes them qualified to write. It doesn’t. It makes them a SME (Subject Matter Expert) only. I’ve seen enough mindless, text based Powerpoint presentations, accompanying stand-up lectures, ambiguous written assessments, non-scaffolding practice equations sets, and nonsensical constructed response questions to make me writhe. I’m sure many of you have too. What’s strange is that given the amount of time it takes to create a comprehensive text that a multitude SME’s don’t bother to ask educational editors, or instructional designers to have a look. What makes these texts passable is the intellectual qualifications of the students beforehand and the skill of instructors who decipher what sometimes amounts to Sanskrit.