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Spring has sprung, the UK diving season is spluttering slowly to life, so it must be time for the next UK IDC…
This time it’s a part time course, to accommodate those Divemasters and Assistant Instructors among us who (like me) want to go on to the next stage, but have already used up all their leave from work on Divecrew holidays.
The course kicked off in style at 8:30am on Saturday morning, with special gifts for each of us – our own coffee mugs, which we quickly personalised with our names and orders. The first day is an ice breaker and preparation day, a chance to take stock of where we were and the things we needed to work on during the course.
With so much classroom training to get through, it’s important to give our brains a bit of a break, so we headed to the pool after lunch for some skills and rescue practice. Finally it was back to the classroom for the first proper session of the AI course. Being such an amazing group of candidates, we were all done shortly after 7pm, and it was off to the Chinese for more bonding, bubbly and crispy duck.
Sunday morning, we had an unexpected emergency – we were out of milk! Luckily Tim was just pulling up, so we sent him straight back out to the garage, and soon we were all sipping our morning caffeine.
Day 1 of the IDC consists mostly of learning about the PADI way of teaching. This gives us all of the tools we need to teach and adapt the PADI course materials for our future students. We learned how to present the courses, and how to teach confined water skills in a way that will let our students build on what they learn and master.
While most of what we were learning wasn’t entirely new, it helped to put a lot of bits of information together in a way that made a lot more sense. So now, we’re ready to learn how to teach the specific courses that we’ll be qualifying for, hopefully, in a couple of months time.
The IDC is taught in a style that follows all of the other PADI courses, so not only were we learning from what Collin was saying, but we could also see it in practice at the same time.
All in all, I found it really interesting and impactful, as I wrote about in more detail on my personal diving blog.
While it was nice and sunny outside, we headed out for some Project AWARE promotion, all wearing our day 2 gifts of Project Aware Diver t-shirts. Collin wanted Mark and I to get into Dive Crew boxes for the photo, but the boys thought it was funnier to tip me out …
For our last classroom session on teaching in confined water, we split into groups to plan a Confined Water Dive – Duncan, Tim and I tried to figure out how to run Dive 2 in Farnborough pool. There are many different ways to skin a cat, or run a dive, and we ran out of time trying to figure out whether to snorkel then disconnect a low pressure hose, or descend and remove a mask – but the lesson was learned.
By 8.15, the wine gum packet was empty bar a couple of green ones, all of our brains were aching for a rest, and it was time to go home and reflect on the course so far, oh yes, and finish our homework.
Nearly two weeks until we all return for four days of fun over Easter … when we’re all hoping the Easter Bunny will bring us some yummy chocolate eggs!!!
