So here’s the next status update on this month’s PADI IDC group.
First off don’t leave your cereal in the classroom…unless you want ants for breakfast… Didn’t stop me from digging in. Mmmm
Anyways,
Over the past few days we’ve been getting hit by wave after wave of information, evaluation, positive reinforcement and feedback, resulting in waves of progress. 
We’ve all individually had to prepare and present 2 separate knowledge development presentations. To start off, we are all given a different question that our group of “open water” students struggled with. We then have to take them through and reinforce values, key points, application to upcoming skills they will face in both confined and open water situations and make sure that by the end, everything is simplistically understandable and crystal clear. We get to use things like the PADI prescriptive teaching guide which makes things convenient offering video’s and other interactive tools. Overall, it’s a great way to get us experienced and comfortable. It allows us to execute lessons to a variety of students while also teaching us presentation structure and how they should be conducted more effectively. So far I’ve scored a 5 and 4.5 out of 5 so confidence is at a high and hopefully I can finish off strong with the final knowledge development! Everyone else’s 
presentations have been great and quite animated which makes things fun for both us the students as well as the course directors. Definitely no shortage of laughs with the charismatic, creative bunch we got packed into that classroom.
The next thing we’ve been putting our nose to the grind on is our confined water presentations as well as today, we had our first open water presentations. These entail a real life simulation of teaching students to both correctly and safely perform a skill according to PADI standards. You get marked on everything from the briefing, highlighting objectives, describing the value, signals, organization, making proper use of an assistant and most importantly, identifying assigned problems and correcting them appropriately. Finally we must do a debriefing describing what the students did well and what things they need to remember for the future. This may all seem fine and dandy in the pool but when it comes to open water, it’s another story. Today, for example, we all were out in Sanur taking turns being the instructor. I was the last to go and just my luck, as I was preparing for a hover skill using a Jon line attached to a buoy line, a massive mob of seaweed came out of nowhere and engulfed 
the line. I literally had to get out a knife and saw and rip away for about two minutes until I could finally free up the line. I really wish a picture was taken because words just can’t describe how big this clump of seaweed was and how funny it must have looked as my students watched me tackle this monster. I guess we can say this was a great learning experience of what can happen in a real open water situation with a actual group of students… My hopes are that it never does…
So for the final 6 days of IDC we have one more knowledge development presentation, 2 more confined water presentations and one more open water integrated skills presentation. All this as well as a couple more workshops, a couple more pool sessions and a day out in Penida which I think we’re all looking forward to. Things are busy as can be, but lots of fun too. Finally, 2 days before the IE we have 2 days of mock IE. This is our final assessment to make sure we are ready for the 3 day IE (instructor exams) as well as fine tune any last little bugs in the system. Our group is full of positive thoughts and I can’t wait to become instructors with such a great bunch…Fingers crossed…
