Day 9, The Final Day and Final Thoughts

The day dawned......calm?  Not too much wind but that may change as the day goes on. Last night, it seemed we should have some fun with Chantel around mid day. This morning, all reports show the storm has moved a little farther south and will miss us and come ashore on the island farther west. I guess we dodged a bullet.   Over the course of the day we had scattered showers and some rain but nothing that bad.

Did I mention it is the last day of the class?  Many of us are already reflecting on the class, the process, the change in the groups, what we have learned and what we take away. More on this later, we still have some unfinished business. Our last group presentation from the staff is on The Role of the PADI Course Director.  As the top dog in the food chain, people may give us a bit of look.  Some act weary when the "PADI Police" are around, others look up as mentors and still others could most likely care less.  That will be a blog post in a few months. 

After our final presentation from the PADI staff, it was back to our break out rooms for one final presentation and one final evaluation of another team mate.  These have been both easy and hard.  Easy when someone runs through their presentation, hits the numbers and makes it easy to score 5's across the board.  Hard when they miss something, even harder when they miss something big.  Sascha had to give me a 1 (A FAIL) when I missed the distance on the compass run earlier in the week.  He then had to give a 1 in the afternoon to another teammate who had some issues with their lift bag.  He felt terrible but he had to do it!  You don't do anyone any favors by being easy and hurt yourself if you don't agree with 4/6 of the control scores.  Needless to say we really did rock the final!  It was lunch and then back to the big room for final consultations.  PADI Asia was in one room, PADI EMEA (Europe) in another and PADI Americas in a third.  You were called in one at a time, had a quick meeting with the staff from that office and they conferred the news that you passes or failed.  Needless to say WE ROCKED IT AND ALL PASSED!!  You came out to a large applause from the other candidates and waited until all were done.  We had some time to kill until the Graduation Banquet that night.  It was amazing to see how fast the news took to the digital world.  I'm sure CDTC was trending pretty high on Facebook as EVERYONE jumped online and started sharing the news.  A few hours later cocktail hour lead into James' slide show with photos of all in action.  The winner of the marketing plan was announced, "Sojou" was the winners with the GreenGos getting honorable mention. 

One at a time we were called up and received our packet with new cert card and diploma.  The party went on until 10:30 when the room was closed down but the party was reconvened to the pool until the wee hours of the morning.  Toasts were drunk, cigars lit and the fat lady finally sang!

As we decompressed and tried to make sense of the last 9 days, I was left with two very lasting impressions.  First was the world wide market that PADI has.  There were 6 candidates from Playa del Carmen, Mexico there.  What that means is that Playa has a market, already full with CD's, but needing 6 more!!  It is staggering to think of the numbers they move through.  But the most important thing I loved about this experience was the exact opposite of what I had been dreading.  I am pretty laid back.  I'm kind of modest (at least on the outside) and don't like to either toot my own horn or hear others toot theirs.  I can care less about what you did to get here, we all did similar things.  I assumed I would be surrounded by guys who thought they were the top of the heap and more than happy to let the rest of us know that.  That couldn't have been farther from the truth.  Whether it was Paul from England, who loved the Guide to Teaching reference during a religious discussion to Martin from the Netherlands who after a few drinks wanted to combine all the guys into one big super group so we wouldn't have to compete with each other, these were incredible people. 

And of course the most incredible of all were my team mates, the GreenGos.  I think eventually all the groups bonded but not as fast or as hard as us.  By the end of the first day, there was already a feel about the group and by day two a few kindred spirits recognized each other and the game was on.  Inside jokes about bolt snaps, the profanisaurus, man hands, brain coral, PADI laser pointers, Grogans, lasagna, knocking on the wrong door, brass is ***, the Lake of Constance and the 10,000 wrecks off Belgium were the norm.  It wasn't a competition, it wasn't trying to one up each other, it was seeing ideas of one person and pushing them a little farther.  We may have flirted with 1's on some of the academic presentations, but that was the challenge of pushing the limits and the joy of getting away with it.  Creative subversion that made us love our craft that much more. 

James Morgan promised a significant emotional event and he didn't let us down.  We are able to teach people to teach people to blow bubbles underwater!! (restated objective)  Don't forget to buy some gear and take a class.

Day 6

Day 6

Houston, we have a problem!!  Nothing like a little gut check to be you back to Earth. The day started innocently enough.  A little bus ride to a little resort and a little surface swim out to do a little skill training and then encountering a little problem.  

And then I woke up.  An hour bus ride to a mega resort, a monster surface swim completed 3 times round trip, a little surface skill with a huge mistake. 

Alright, it wasn't really that bad (the surface swim was) and I recovered from the mistake. During the CDTC we are being graded as we present and also as we evaluate. The presentations take place in the classroom, pool, confined water and open water. They include material from any and all PADI courses, from Open Water, Adavnced, Rescue, Divemasters, Specialities and of course Instructor Course like the IDC, Specialty Instructor and IDC Staff. 

My first skill was the 50 yd compass surface swim from the Open Water course.  Normally most instructors will do this in small groups but I went conservative and started one at a time. Waste of time!!  (and I got dinged on it). But my biggest screw up was catching a problem and then not restarting, thus while he finished the skill correctly, he did not meet the performance requirement of doing it correctly for 50 yards. 

Rescue assessments and the afternoon presentations went much better but after it was all said and done, the morning was the best part. Bear with me, the best part was the failure.  Up to that point I was breezing along.  I was scoring pretty much max points on everything.  I was having a blast and probably acting a little too cavalier. This was the proverbial slap to the face that woke me up.  This is the counseling point that will stay with me through all my future courses.  Empathy is a word that was stressed at the start of the week.  Empathy for your fellow candidates here and future candidates in the future. I have empathy!!!

Day 4 at the CDTC

Good morning, says Alan Jans. Good morning, we all response, almost eagerly, awaiting the next words that will come. We will be receiving extra points for our team? Is there a summary of the days events? Will he surprise us all with a clever joke or perhaps a long lost nugget from the PADI treasure trove of instructor development? A tip that he has withheld for the last 10 years? The holy grail of marketing that will cause all dive business within a 100 mile radius to flood your doorway? Perhaps today is the day he has waited for soooo long. He patiently bided his time all these years, perhaps there was no one worthy enough, no one deserving. Many had been close, many shared his passion but alas, had fallen short some small way or another.

Alas, it was but a dream, nothing more. Instructor Development Presentation workshop, which of course was a gem in it’s own right. We paired off again and worked on teaching presentations that we will give later in the week. This was followed up by James giving part 2 of the Marketing pitch. Social media! If you are reading this, then you my friend are our #1 target…Do you want to learn to dive? Do you want to partake of the diving lifestyle? Like a child being lured by candy, be warned. One breath underwater and you may be hooked.

On to lunch at the very lovely Beach Grill with the proverbial perfect Caribbean view. Faithful reader, this is why we dive. This is the picture that launched a thousand vacations. Forget about 6 pack abs and a perfect body, what I am selling today is what all people want. I can take your deposit as soon as I get home. But nothing gold can stay and we soon head back to our conference room. Nothing like a little Risk Management to settle your stomach and remind of what can go wrong.

The rest of the afternoon was spent giving and evaluating classroom presentations. Some Rescue Diver, Divemaster, Project Aware, Advanced and of course the old standby of Open Water. Needless to say, we rocked it!

PADI CDTC Day 3 July 4

Other then the American rubbing their Independence Day celebrations in the face of the Brits, the day went very well. As with every morning, it was breakfast in La Cuna (the main eatery where we breakfast and lunch daily) followed by a 8am start. The first topic of the day was Instructor Development Standards followed by the Prescriptive Teaching Workshop. Standards are what guide every class a PADI instructor teaches. These are the “how, where and how many” questions that we answer every time we hit the classroom or pool. As Course Directors, we are looked at as experts when questions arise regarding interpreting standards. We don’t need to know all the standards but we do need to know where to look to find them. Our second seminar covered Prescriptive Teaching. This is a technique we use when teaching almost all of our classes. With so much of the classroom knowledge the student needs being delivered via their books and videos, we don’t need to get up and teach EVERY little detail. Prescriptive teaching covers the little details that students may have missed or need further clarification on. We teamed up with other candidates and worked on our own presentations that we will give later in the course.


Our lunch break is usually 1 1/2 hours. This gives you time to prepare gear or materials for pool or class presentations that afternoon. James Morgan began the last conference session of the day with Marketing. Obviously, we need students if we want to teach. He also unveiled a challenge to each team. We need to prepare a marketing plan to sell a fictitious Divemaster (James Morgan) on taking his IDC with our team. More on this after we present (you never know what other group is reading this!!) Enough to say that this blog is part of it!
That afternoon we jumped in the pool. It was time for our first confined water presentation. We had been assigned a skill for the Open Water Class. Yohan had alternate air source use, Barbara had the CESA, Sascha had mask remove and replace, Alex had reg clearing, Thierry had full mask clear, Milo had partial mask clear and Dave had neutral buoyancy-oral inflation. We also had the pleasure of evaluating each other during our presentations. Needless to say, we rocked it!!