I’ve had many learning experiences in my life but the best one was unsurprisingly not in school. In September of 2021 I signed up for a Scuba diving course, it consisted of online learning, practice pool sessions and 5 ocean dives. For the online learning a behaviorists approach was taken, the course was taught in a style where you had to do readings and then complete a quiz to show that you understood what you read. For any questions which you got incorrect you had to go back and redo the quiz to make sure that you fully understood the content. The content that we were being taught was mostly to do with the basic rules of diving. The in person dives were a constructivist approach. Because most of the teaching is going on while you are underwater you are unable to verbally communicate with your teacher. I would watch my instructor perform a skill and then would need to interpret how I could perform that same skill while wearing a dry suit, 25 pounds of weights and an oxygen tank. It allowed me to make my own meanings of everything we were being taught while trying something in the real world. Right after I finished my pool dive I became ill and wasn’t able to continue the course until January 2022. Instead of having to redo the online and pool sessions the put me right into the ocean dives and because the constructivist way of teaching I picked up right where I left off. During the rest of my ocean dives I saw gigantic ling cod, seals and even had an octopus climb onto my arm. Overall the scuba diving course was the best learning experience I’ve ever had as it was something I really wanted to do and the learning process was as much fun as the end result.
