"I never thought I could be doing anything like that!"
Posted By Phil Mucci on 10 October 2007
How was Indika in the water? Steve, Phill, Bjorn and Nikki all commented immediately on how comfortable Indika was in the water and how good his skills were. So, my job was to tutor him on the classroom material. And so we began, in the mornings from 7 to 9, and after dinner from 7 until, very frequently 2 or 3 in the morning. After 3 days, we took another exam. His result, 89%! I couldn't believe it. I'm not that good of a teacher. But so it was, and we began to relax a bit, which was a mistake. The issue? The practice exams vary tremendously in difficulty. These exams were easy and when the next set came in a few days later, the results were very similar to the first. Our strategy was simple, work through every missed problem. When an area indicated significant difficulty, we would stop and do an extensive review of the topic, each of which needed to be followed by a verbal confirmation that it was understood. At this point, we were 1/3 through the IDC, we were stressed out, out of sleep and no one was having much fun. Then we hit another bump, the study habits instilled by the Sri Lankan school system. The problem? There were none. Indika was not taking notes and thus doing the problems in his head! I emphasized the importance of writing everything down, notes, problems everything. Now halfway to the I.E, we had another exam to take and we were both exhausted. We had to stop our all-night study sessions and needed to get some serious sleep. My own test scores had been slipping since the first day due to exhaustion and stress. The next day, we did better, down to 2 out of 5 sections that we needed to pass. Physics was killing him. Strangely, all the laws made sense to him. Indika knew what happened to gases and liquids when various parameters where changed, temperature, pressure, etc. But when moving on to the advanced tests, the numbers we were dealing with were no longer even divisors of he other and thus basic algebra was needed. The bomb was dropped. Indika had learned little basic algebra years ago, and no math competency was required to pass his high school exit exam. Ugh. So after swearing never to enroll my kid in that school, I set out to teach the basic principles of interval arithmetic, variable substitution and algebraic reduction. Even the word 'variable' was a hurdle. Imagine trying to teach someone about what a 'variable' is, that it can have any name, any number of letters, often implicitly has a multiplication factor in front of it and that there may be more than one in an equation. Are you frightened yet? I was and wishing terribly that I knew the Thai word for Valium. Another tricky one: The concept of negative numbers. -1 + 1 = 0 could never be more difficult. And the rules of reduction; remember how easy it was to 'multiply both sides by a constant factor'? So, in addition to dive planning, we worked algebra every day. Indika never broke, his attitude never failed. I asked him to trust and believe and he did. He was up before me every day and asleep after me every day. And no matter how tired he was, he never said “I can't do this”. Many of the other students gave us strange looks when I'd ask Indika over breakfast what -3 plus 1 was.
Steve Spruce, Master Instructor and Phill Rogers, IDC-Staff Candidate talking over the performance of the group.
The rest of the course was going reasonably well. Indika performed well in the water, especially during the problem solving scenarios. The only other challenge was the teaching presentations, which needed to be in a defined format. He wasn't the only one having difficulty with that, as others in the class also wrestled with changing their focus from the notes to the class to the white board and back. But his smile and enthusiasm just blew everyone away. No matter what he did, he was having fun when we has in front of people. So, with just a few days to go, the next hurdle came up, a practice standards exam. Indika came to me the next day and said it had taken him 2 hours to get the answers to 3 questions. As we both had electronic versions of the Instructor Manual, this one came down to a bit of computer tutoring and the wonders of the search button. But the language barrier was still killing him. Even with the search button, it takes a fluent speaker to absorb the context of the results to see if the match is appropriate. But we continued to work with it. Bjorn, the course director, spent an extra amount of time going through each of the standards sections in the manual, in an effort to make us all more familiar with the material.
At this point, we were at the end of our IDC. The exam was around the corner and we had one more practice exam, both Theory and Standards. On the Theory test, Indika was close to passing but not yet over the hump. On the standards test, he was beaten up pretty badly with a 60%. The course director suggested we reschedule our EFR training (Emergency First Response) to another day so we'd have another 18 hours to study. And so we did. Again, working through every question of that 3-hour test over the next 18 hours. Indika was looking worried still. And, unbenounced to him, I had started emailing the rest of Paavima to prepare him for what was the inevitable. Indika would fail this test and I had failed him as a tutor and we needed to have a backup plan. Bjorn had spoken repeatedly about the big party that was happening after the I.E. and all I could think of was being at that party without Indika. I gathered my thoughts and said to him, “You are doing the best you can, that is all anyone can ask. Tomorrow, go into the exam and do exactly as you've been doing. There is another I.E. in a week if things don't go our way. This is not an all-or-nothing affair my friend, this is just you doing the best you can. We will get through this together.” Now, when you give such a speech to a 24 year old, you don't really expect them to listen. But Indika did, he looked visibly relieved and we set out on a marathon study session that mandated 6 hours of studying, 6 hours of sleep followed by 6 more hours of studying before the exam the next day. Upon review, I was given new hope! 75% of the questions Indika missed, he did so because he did not understand the question! This was good news, as we were allowed to ask as many questions of the examiners as needed to make the question clear. Upon review of his score with the questions that he could have gotten correct, he just might pass. I told all my friends that night to pray to their god of choice for a little help. We were going to need it.
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