Tom took ‘no crap’ during the IDC!

My evaluation of the IDC and the IE are somewhat variable, but pretty specific. IDC Delivery and the quality of staffing and preparedness: You and Jill get high marks for the way you delivered the course and in the no-nonsense approach to identification and correction of deficiencies. Your personality is particularly well-suited for teaching the diversity of future instructors that you meet – and you would probably do well teaching in some institutions too. A great (sick) sense of humor kept the students engaged and was good for team building. Jill was always friendly and the two of you were approachable when any of us had questions or wanted to obsess on a particular point. Good delivery by a skilled and compassionate staff – this part was great. I enjoyed the course and left with a sense of accomplishment. And you took no crap. For the pool session of the IE, there were people struggling to do a fin pivot and trying to keep something / any thing on the bottom. You identified the defects early and gave clear direction to fix them. Pizza night was successful and maybe a lot of help for the interns who received the material late. I did remember the answers for a couple of IE questions and enjoyed the evening. Course materials and structure for delivery. This was not your fault, but I think that the structure and the volume of the PowerPoint slides is terrible. To have you read or elaborate from the slides and for us to listen to material that we could have had as pre-reading was an inefficient use of all our time. Why not have most of this material as a prescriptive lesson. We do the pre-work, take a programmed, comprehensive test, and based upon the answers – there are a few areas to remediate. Then we could spend many available hours on elaboration of points of interest or spend hours in the pool working on teaching or having the IDC staff do some “Master Class” sessions. No one arrives at the IDC as a surprise. We plan this in advance and I am pretty sure that everyone could have done another 20 to 40 hours or pre-work – freeing-up a couple of IDC days for the elaboration, demonstration, and practice. There is such an opportunity for productivity and enrichment with the prescriptive structure – to abuse future students without prioritizing the resources to make improvements is nearly criminal. PADI has made progress with several of the courses to reduce the deadly classroom time – why not apply a good idea to the instructor course. Someone needs to fix this! Doing the IDC through Rainbow Reef – This worked great for me – better than I expected. My reasons for applying for your IDC were: You do this almost each month of the year – IDC scheduling should be able to match my “day job” and by now you should be pretty good at it. Both expectations were correct. And you have a high rate of students successful in the IE. Cheap housing. This was a secondary criteria. However, the Scuba House was just fine and for the price was GREAT. I really wanted access to a kitchen and it worked fine. The fellow students and the RR interns were all very livable. Especially the interns – they gave us the run of the house and didn’t interrupt our study and prep – EVER. Interns were GREAT. An unexpected benefit was rooming with two other IDC students. This was far more helpful than I would have expected. Aside from the fact that you teach this course monthly, rooming with fellow students was probably the 2nd biggest benefit of signing-up for your IDC through RR. And who can forget the IE and examiners: I thought that Scott and Gary were good at what they did and were pretty nice guys. Maybe not quite as funny as you, but they kept the whole thing moving efficiently and tried to manage the stress levels. Once we finished the pool work on Saturday morning, I thought it was easy sailing to the end. I liked the examiners – they seem like guys you could drink with. In the future, if I know of someone considering the instructor course, I will certainly direct them your way. The whole experience was good for me and I will try to represent you will in the industry. Thanks again for your help and direction. I enjoyed the experience, Ron Karash