Thursday, September 27, 2007
Membership Has Its Privileges
I’ve got a shiny, new instructor’s card I’ve been showing off to anyone willing to look. Yeay me! I am pleased with myself and the accomplishment, and I’m happy to be able to tell people some of the things I know. There are armies of reasons to enjoy being an instructor which revealed themselves to me in wave after wave while I was training to teach.
The vast majority of people who make the decision to get certified do so for the same reason I initially did. They have a vacation planned for the not-too-distant future to a destination warm, blue watered and skied, and known for its diving. More often than not, it is a couple who figures they’ll give it a try together. You find people are at their best when they’re working on a class for this reason. They behave as though it’s a vacation appetizer and, as such, are easy to smile and laugh which makes them fun to be around.
I am always grateful for this sort of opportunity also because I am an eco-hippie. It is comforting for me to know that once these folks have finished with my course, they will do their absolute damnedest to never, ever touch the coral and to otherwise do their best to minimize their impact on the dive site. Every course mentions, “Don’t touch the animals,” in passing and I think divers, by and large, are more ecologically aware than most. But, I believe this knowledge is worthy of more than passing mention and I treat it accordingly.
Then there is the satisfaction in seeing a student’s eyes as they master this or that task or skill. Mask clearing especially gets me smiling. Everyone freaks out the first time or two they try to clear their mask. Often you see wide-eyed dread when they blow and blow and blow bubbles into their mask just to open their eyes to find themselves still blind and underwater. If someone is going to go charging for the surface during any skill… this is the one.
They get it in the end. Their eyes tentatively flicker open, then focus, and smiles form in their gleaming look as they return an “OK” sign. They’d accomplished something they’d never imagined they’d do in a million years, an impossible task in an alien world, and they can do it! The memory of my own pride the first time is reflected in their happiness and relief, and I am proud again.
Getting people interested and informed: that’s what it’s all about. Which is why it is so triply-pleasing when divers find themselves excited enough about the sport to return for advanced classes. Nitrox and Advanced and Night Diving and Rescue. There’s so much to learn in each course and eager divers eat up the material. As we all well know, the academics of diving aren’t that hard, but they are of vital importance. So when people absorb the guidelines and the rules of diving it is not a painfully intellectual experience; it is people studying up on a pastime, which can make the study itself a pastime. At least that’s what I think any instructor worth their weight in ditchable weight should try to do.
Don’t get me wrong. Teaching for teaching’s sake is noble and groovy and all, but I ain't Don Quixote. There are a jillion selfish reasons I enjoy the experience, too. One, of course, is the incredible fame and wealth that comes with being a dive instructor. It's just like being a star quarterback, it is.
Another one of these selfish reasons got me thinking last night, as I was helping teach a technical class. One required skill is no mask, sharing air, touch-contact communication while following a line, trading a small tank you have clipped to your BC, then deploying your spare mask. It’s a relatively task-loaded skill.
As I demonstrated, I was trying to remember my mother’s pesto recipe so I could stop on the way home at the supermarket.
“Your mind is wandering, Jerk,” I thought, “Get back to the task at hand.”
“What am I going to do?” I retorted, “Keep an eye on the students? I got no mask. All I see is fuzzy blobs.”
“Good point,” I had to agree and got back to thinking about Basil.
That’s when it occurred to me just how comfortable I was. My hands moved mechanically, knowing where to be without being told. My body responded to this and that movement automatically. When I had to pull off my mask, to let the cold water slap me in the face, I did it without hesitation or fear, having performed the task somewhere in the range of a quintillion times before.
I thought, in that moment, “Thank god I get to do this.”
I became grateful for the opportunity to teach because, in teaching I continue to learn. Talking to students, hearing their questions, I have the chance to constantly improve my own skills and my own procedures. Demonstrating techniques so often gives me the comfort of muscle memory so that if/when I do find myself in a situation which requires emergency measures, I’ve performed them so often the emergency can be reduced to an inconvenience.
Of course, if I was a wiser man I would have always been doing this, practicing and over-practicing skills constantly. I would have flooded my mask from time to time, just so that I’d be comfortable with the feeling and able to clear with a simple motion. I would have spent a few minutes at the beginning and the end of a dive to just hang and check my buoyancy. I would have been an absolute master of every skill I could think of.
I am not a wiser man. I had let most of my skills become stale, having performed them once in class, then filed them away as memories. It took the pursuit of an instructor’s certification to kick my ass back into gear.
In diving we hope not to learn from our mistakes, because diving mistakes can sometimes be really bad. We learn from research and from others’ mistakes. So I’d suggest you learn from mine: over-practice your skills. That way when they are called upon, you can try to remember what that movie with the two Coreys and Heather Graham was called while your body automatically bails itself out of trouble.
Or… become an instructor. It’s awesome fun.
The vast majority of people who make the decision to get certified do so for the same reason I initially did. They have a vacation planned for the not-too-distant future to a destination warm, blue watered and skied, and known for its diving. More often than not, it is a couple who figures they’ll give it a try together. You find people are at their best when they’re working on a class for this reason. They behave as though it’s a vacation appetizer and, as such, are easy to smile and laugh which makes them fun to be around.
I am always grateful for this sort of opportunity also because I am an eco-hippie. It is comforting for me to know that once these folks have finished with my course, they will do their absolute damnedest to never, ever touch the coral and to otherwise do their best to minimize their impact on the dive site. Every course mentions, “Don’t touch the animals,” in passing and I think divers, by and large, are more ecologically aware than most. But, I believe this knowledge is worthy of more than passing mention and I treat it accordingly.
Then there is the satisfaction in seeing a student’s eyes as they master this or that task or skill. Mask clearing especially gets me smiling. Everyone freaks out the first time or two they try to clear their mask. Often you see wide-eyed dread when they blow and blow and blow bubbles into their mask just to open their eyes to find themselves still blind and underwater. If someone is going to go charging for the surface during any skill… this is the one.
They get it in the end. Their eyes tentatively flicker open, then focus, and smiles form in their gleaming look as they return an “OK” sign. They’d accomplished something they’d never imagined they’d do in a million years, an impossible task in an alien world, and they can do it! The memory of my own pride the first time is reflected in their happiness and relief, and I am proud again.
Getting people interested and informed: that’s what it’s all about. Which is why it is so triply-pleasing when divers find themselves excited enough about the sport to return for advanced classes. Nitrox and Advanced and Night Diving and Rescue. There’s so much to learn in each course and eager divers eat up the material. As we all well know, the academics of diving aren’t that hard, but they are of vital importance. So when people absorb the guidelines and the rules of diving it is not a painfully intellectual experience; it is people studying up on a pastime, which can make the study itself a pastime. At least that’s what I think any instructor worth their weight in ditchable weight should try to do.
Don’t get me wrong. Teaching for teaching’s sake is noble and groovy and all, but I ain't Don Quixote. There are a jillion selfish reasons I enjoy the experience, too. One, of course, is the incredible fame and wealth that comes with being a dive instructor. It's just like being a star quarterback, it is.
Another one of these selfish reasons got me thinking last night, as I was helping teach a technical class. One required skill is no mask, sharing air, touch-contact communication while following a line, trading a small tank you have clipped to your BC, then deploying your spare mask. It’s a relatively task-loaded skill.
As I demonstrated, I was trying to remember my mother’s pesto recipe so I could stop on the way home at the supermarket.
“Your mind is wandering, Jerk,” I thought, “Get back to the task at hand.”
“What am I going to do?” I retorted, “Keep an eye on the students? I got no mask. All I see is fuzzy blobs.”
“Good point,” I had to agree and got back to thinking about Basil.
That’s when it occurred to me just how comfortable I was. My hands moved mechanically, knowing where to be without being told. My body responded to this and that movement automatically. When I had to pull off my mask, to let the cold water slap me in the face, I did it without hesitation or fear, having performed the task somewhere in the range of a quintillion times before.
I thought, in that moment, “Thank god I get to do this.”
I became grateful for the opportunity to teach because, in teaching I continue to learn. Talking to students, hearing their questions, I have the chance to constantly improve my own skills and my own procedures. Demonstrating techniques so often gives me the comfort of muscle memory so that if/when I do find myself in a situation which requires emergency measures, I’ve performed them so often the emergency can be reduced to an inconvenience.
Of course, if I was a wiser man I would have always been doing this, practicing and over-practicing skills constantly. I would have flooded my mask from time to time, just so that I’d be comfortable with the feeling and able to clear with a simple motion. I would have spent a few minutes at the beginning and the end of a dive to just hang and check my buoyancy. I would have been an absolute master of every skill I could think of.
I am not a wiser man. I had let most of my skills become stale, having performed them once in class, then filed them away as memories. It took the pursuit of an instructor’s certification to kick my ass back into gear.
In diving we hope not to learn from our mistakes, because diving mistakes can sometimes be really bad. We learn from research and from others’ mistakes. So I’d suggest you learn from mine: over-practice your skills. That way when they are called upon, you can try to remember what that movie with the two Coreys and Heather Graham was called while your body automatically bails itself out of trouble.
Or… become an instructor. It’s awesome fun.
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