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At 12:32 PM 6/07/1998 -0400, Thomas A. Easop wrote: >billyw wrote: > >Don't feed me the instructor forced them to dive a dangerous rig. If >your in a tech class you should not be a newbie. You should tell a >dangerous rig by your previous experience. Trials in a pool or safe >water will help this and should be part of the class. Check the archives and inform yourself on the bondage wing incidents. Bondage wings steel tanks and wetsuits are a dangerous combination. Their lethal characteristics don't show up in a pool. There are tech instructors who still dive this combination. If those instructors can't figure how inappropriate it is, how can you expect all students to? >It is my opinion that if a student does not ask questions relating to >his own safety, his diving an entirely new rig in open water without >previous use of it in a controlled situation, is in much deeper water >than they ever were before, then when there is a problem, ultimately >it is the student's fault. See above. >I'm not sure, but so far, I believe that everyone who rebuts my opinion >here are instructors themselves. Where have you been for the last three years? In the past, whenever this "blame the student" line has been delivered on these lists, it's been by instructors. >I am not an instructor. Maybe that is why I feel that the students/divers >have primary responsibility. Dive students are divers first, students >second. I have had many instructors, in diving and other pursuits, mainly >medicine. They are the messenger. You require higher standards of the students than the technical agencies do. You then place responsibility on the students for problems which may occur on courses. But you fail to realise that it it not the students who control the gate, it is the agencies and their instructors. THEY have control of the gate. Only THEY can raise it. THEY are responsible for admitting unready students to the courses. Since you like analogies, here's another one for you: The reason why novices don't climb into race cars at Indy, go racing and kill themselves, is not because no novice has ever wanted to (hell, there are enough tostesterone-enhanced novice drivers out there to make a complete starting grid) but because the controlling organisations don't allow it. And Thomas, we haven't even got to commercial realities yet. You have discounted ENTIRELY the pressure which commercial imperatives exert on organisations and individuals, buyers and sellers. A technical course is NOT like a course in medicine in that it is a commercial transaction. Economic forces are at play. Growth is a pre-requisite for survival in a growth economy (whether you believe in the need for economies to grow or not). If the organisations don't attract new customers, they shrink and die. To answer this imperative, when one market approaches saturation, for survival, the organisation has to open the gates wider attract new markets. Commercial sensibility tells the agencies to keep the barrier of entry as low as possible in order to maximise recruitment. Blaming the students for the resulting tragedies is like blaming the fish for indiscriminate trawling or the trees for clear-fell logging. rgrds billyw -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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