So, I’d thought I’d take a few minutes to illustrate some of the reasoning behind the seemingly extreme scenarios students may run in to in the critical skills dives of their UTD training.
First, it’s important to stress that the failures that the students experience in the critical skills dives are not meant to mimic reality. They’re meant to force the divers to think, problem solve and manage the problem. Many times, a failure will be initiated by the instructor for a reason completely different than the obvious. In other words (to Josh’s example), a mask isn’t taken just to see if that student can calmly put on their backup or hold their buoyancy. In fact, in many instances it’s taken to test another teammate’s ability to think or manage the problem. It may even be used to set up another failure for an entirely different reason. In fact, sometimes failures are even setting up a future skills dive.
Likewise, in reality, it’s very unlikely a team of 3 is going to experience a catastrophic failure on 4 of their 6 posts. However, even the smallest failure changes the entire dynamic of the entire team in several ways. A second failure changes everything equally as much. Add a third, and well you get the point.
The point of these failures is not for the instructor, believe it or not, to harass the students for his or her own enjoyment (I know, I know, none of you believe this....It’s just “Evil Brian” talking). It’s meant to a) build a broader awareness, b) force the student to think and not just follow a protocol and c) increase their bandwidth, forcing them to maintain the basics/fundamentals while performing tasks under duress. By increasing that bandwidth, when a real issue does arise underwater, it’s a non-event, since its much less extreme than was experienced in their training.
Every failure is performed for a reason, and much of it is (somewhat) planned before even descending in the sense that we have a specific goal or criteria that we’re looking for. Typically, this criteria is from a behavior or weakness observed in a previous dive. 9 times out of 10, the student has no idea what that goal or criteria are, as they’re focused on something else, like running the line. Many of the simulations we run are meant to address student or team weaknesses in class so the instructor can work with students to develop them as divers. They are not random events thrown out there.
How do we perform failures? We (UTD) have a playbook. This playbook looks much like a football playbook, and illustrates the different failures, and strings of multiple failures, that we perform, what that “play” addresses, what the end goal is and what the likely outcome is. This is an incredibly valuable resource for the instructor and students. Failures are also broken down into levels. There are 4 levels- Level 1, level 2, level 3 and level 4 and like the entire building block methodology of UTD, the stress level is heavily increased with each level. In addition to the failure levels, we have compounding and non-compounding. Head spinning? Well, it took 9 instructors and Andrew 20 hours to develop this 30+ page playbook at the ITC and an additional 8 – 10 additional hours of time collaborating online at home to get it finalized.
Of course, a Rec 1 class isn’t going to experience in level 4 failures, as that wouldn’t be a building block scenario. In other words, students need to be proficient in the fundamental skills of their current level before moving to the next. However, Rec 3 (Helitrox) is a completely different ballgame (sorry Jake and PPants
).For instance, Intro to Tech is a personal skills class, with no failures. It’s meant to teach the students the fundamental skills of technical diving in a stress (failure) free environment. Once they’re proficient with those skills, they enter Tech 1, which is primarily a “bottom-based” class with a single deco/stage bottle, meaning most failures are experienced on the bottom. The reasoning behind this is the students must be proficient handling bottom failures before moving on to mid-water failures, which is addressed in Tech 2, where stages are also introduced.
The end result? A very comprehensive curriculum, that while seemingly random and chaotic, is a very calculated teaching approach targeted at each individual student to make them better divers, in turn allowing them to enjoy their dives more, because diving is all about having fun. The problems may seem disconnected at the time. But they are presented in a coherent fashion with specific goals in mind to develop student minds and bodies at their own pace in a controlled manner.
This isn’t meant to be a sales pitch for UTD. It’s meant to clarify some of the misconceptions and comments I’ve heard both first hand and second hand about how the scenarios that happen in training would never happen in real life. There is a clear and calculated methodology behind every single skill in every single dive and no 2 critical skills dives are ever remotely the same, in terms of the failures presented and the outcome.
I hope this helps explains how UTD, as an agency, tries to develop students and class teams into confident, mature, thinking divers.
Brian
