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From: Faure, Marin (no email)
Date: Tue May 17 2005 - 14:53:30 EDT
>I was recently convinced by a USCG Aux person conducting my annual
vessel safety inspection that spending the day attending a 10 hour USCG
Auxiliary Boating Safety class would be worthwhile....The results were
frightening!
I'm sorry to hear the USCG Auxiliary course Gil took was not what it was
cracked up to be. But I would be hesitant to apply the experience of
this particular class to the program as a whole. My wife and I took the
USCG Auxiliary course soon after acquiring our first boat. The course
consisted of several 2-hour sessions taught in the evening at a local
community college, and while we "knew" much of the material already, it
proved to be a very valuable experience. It served as a refresher of
things we may have known but had forgotten or were unsure of. One of
the evening classes was devoted to weather, and was taught by one of the
areas most respected broadcast weather forecasters, a boater and pilot
himself. Another evening was devoted to man overboard procedures and
hypothermia. The hypothermia section was taught by an authority on this
subject from the University of Washington's College of Medicine, and it
alone was worth the time and effort of taking the whole course.
Like all education, the value of the USCG Auxiliary boating safety
course is dependent largely on the instructors, guest instructors (if
there are any), and how the course is planned. It sounds like the
course Gil took was not planned with the real needs of boaters in mind.
And I wonder if trying to pack all this information into one ten-hour
session is the best way to convey information. When it comes to
learning things, we have increasingly shorter attention spans thanks in
large part to the nature of the media we're accustomed to watching and
reading these days. Something has to be really dynamic and interesting
to hold our attention for ten hours, let alone get us to retain any of
it. This is why I think several shorter classes are better than one
long one.
But regardless, I would not hesitate to recommend that a new boater take
the USCG Auxiliary course. As we found ourselves, they can certainly be
taught in a very effective way. And even if a particular course is less
than effective-- as Gil experienced-- some education is better than
none. If a class, however poorly planned or taught, inspires a boater
to find out more about a particular subject on his or her own, then it
has at least accomplished something positive.
______________________________
C. Marin Faure
GB36-403 "La Perouse"
Bellingham, Washington
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