Tax on instruction or tariff of students?
Tips to avoid or reduce class downtime
It's tax season, and a good time to think on ways to avoid taxation, instruction taxation that is. Or maybe it's a student tarif? Regardless, the outcome is the same.
Class time spent dealing with:
Suboptimal gear selection
Unlearning suboptimal practices
Suboptimal gear selection
After years of attending and instructing canyoneering courses, I've come to identify certain conditions that hinder students from maximizing their learning experience.
One big ticket item is students showing up to class with lack of gear, or not the optimal gear for canyoneering. One prime example is students that show up with a rock-climbing harness, and not a canyoneering / caving harness: Vertical ventral point vs. Horizontal ventral point. While rock-climbing harnesses work ok for rappelling with tube devices, with figure 8 based devices, students need to work harder to add friction on the fly and lock-off because the descender friction and lock-off features are not visible due to the vertical orientation. This vertical hard-point was designed for tube devices.
As a patch or solution to this problem, some install a "rapide" or a sling extension at the hard point to correct the rappelling device orientation. This fixes the orientation, but introduces a free moving linkage that now students are fighting every time they add friction or lock-off. Every time they try to do these maneuvers, the device rotates away, and now they need to hold it in place while they maneuver. This becomes a bit scary for newbs adding friction on the fly while holding the device from rotating: Fingers and gloves uncomfortably close to running rope. Eventually things work out for rock-climber harnesses, while canyoneering ones breeze through all these exercises. A portion of class time becomes devoted to deal with all these issues.
More examples of suboptimal gear:
Homemade pruiks, done with the wrong cord, and/or wrong length.
Wrong safety tethers, improvised with slings.
Lack of proper ascenders
Wrong carabiners, and/or not enough of them.
All these, end up eating quite a bit of instruction time, but more importantly, they end up changing the instruction outcome from:
Learning the most safe, efficient practical version of a particular technique
to...
Learning a lesser adaptation that requires more effort, and is more prone to error.
Ironically, good instructors usually shine offering "adaptation" sessions because they know 2,3,4 or more ways to improvise and perform a task when gear is missing or dropped. But while the student ends the class knowing how to work with their deficient gear, they may miss altogether a better way to perform tasks.
Ways to avoid the Instruction Tax, or Tariff on Learning
Gear list: Provide students with a gear list. The more specific the better
Consider bringing spare gear for students missing items on the gear list
No matter what gear they bring, establish the task-base-line with the optimal gear and make sure everybody learns that. If class time permits, humor gear deviations and improvisations.
If there is non optimal gear in the class, use the gear discrepancy to compare the optimal way vs. the improvised way.
Allocate part of your class for a gear-review and address the impact of optimal gear vs. sub optimal gear.