INTENSE

INTENSE:

Well its been a hectic couple of days. The IDC (Instructor Development Course) has started. Its a well structured program that prepares you for the actual IE (Instructor Examination) conducted by PADI personnel.

The most difficult part has been learning to do something called Micro Presentations. You are given a specific topic to discuss. You look up information on that topic and there is always a slide available to help in your presentation. However, you must include several additional items in your presentation including the selling of another PADI course and the selling of an item from the Dive Shop. The presentation must also meet very specific goals designed by PADI. In a normal 1 hour lecture this might not be difficult but in a 3 or 4 minutes lecture its very difficult because everything is repeated so frequently. You have an introduction that says way you are going to say, a body where you say it, and a summary where you say what you've said. To make things more complex, the intro and summary include information from an entire lesson while the body contains only one specific item. It was extremely challenging but I got through two of them and I don't think we'll do that again.

We were suppose to have practiced some rescue skills and skills but we ran out of time so we are just a little behind. Today we'll be making presentation in the pool. We were given specific skills and we must present them to students just as if they were taking a class. You use erasable slates to help with this exercise. You get all of the required information in advance, mark it onto a slate and then use that slate to aid in your presenation to the students. You have to explain the skill, show various hand signals you'll use, demontrate the skill, have the student do the skill and then evaluate how they did. They will be told to do at least one part of it incorrectly and you have to figure out what they did wrong and correct it. Most of this is done underwater.

Because the class is so intense and I have homework every night, I may fall a little behind in updating the blog.