Since P****** the other teacher left I have primarily been teaching all the classes myself. TBI
Bekasi typically sells it’s courses as 50:50 native:local teachers. Ok initially after P***** left it
could be justified that he had classes at 50:50 as he wasn’t expecting P******* to leave.
However, for new courses throughout the rest of the year he has continued to sell the
courses at 50:50 even though he knows perfectly well I can’t teach every single class 50%
as several classes are scheduled at the same time.

TBI Bekasi has three periods during the week 4pm to 5:15/5:30pm, 5:30-6:45/7pm and 7-
8:30/9pm. Most classes are taught twice a week Mon-Wed, Tue-Thur & Wed-Fri. Saturday
classes run from 9-1:15 so 4 hours plus a 15 min break. He runs about 6 Saturday classes
so it’s not possble for me to teach every class 50%, hence why he gets in Ted, but even
with Ted he still can’t provide 50%. He was using an EF teacher on a Saturday but he quit
as Binsar wouldn’t offer any more money. For some reason he’s scheduled all the
childrens’ classes at 4-5:15pm Tue/Thurs. Some of them are listed as 25:75 but most are
still 50:50 even though again it’s not possible for me to teach every class 50%. For the
other classes, some of them are taught at 50%. Others are taught closer to 25% whilst
others get 0% native speaker.
This matters because the prices of the courses differ drastically on the amount of time with
a native-speaker. You have the new price list but the old one had the same differences in
price so between 25% and 50% the price increases about 330,000 (old price list from
memory), between 0% and 50% it’s more than twice that at about 800,000Rp. To my
knowledge Norwich is the only class that complained they weren’t getting 50% and they
got refunded. Other classes may have complained but I don’t know about that. Either way
at best Binsar is guilty of miss-selling his courses at 50% and failing to deliver (he’s still
selling courses at 50% even though I’m leaving and he has no native speaker
replacement). At worst if the students don’t notice (which is probable as their parents
probably pay for the course and they may not know the difference between 25% and 50%
and the students generally don’t come every session so wouldn’t know the actual
percentage, plus Indonesian culture is generally against making complaints and
accusations) then he is scamming off students between Rp330,000 and Rp800,000, per
student, per course. This is quite a lot of money and when set against the income balance
that I sent you shows that it’s quite possible that most of the profit TBI Bekasi has made is
from miss-selling courses and scamming students for native-speaker classes they don’t
recieve.
Another scam I think is in relation to textbooks and appropriate levels. Recently TBI
changed from using Chatterbox to using Kid’s Box. When using Chatterbox the class had
been at varying levels from book 2 to book 4. However, when changing to Kid’s Box
suddenly all the classes were at Kid’s Box 2. Maybe it’s a good idea to move student’s
down and re-cover material in a new book so they can revise and find it easy. However
one class in particular, Kitty class, is surely in the wrong level. The children are at a very
basic level and can barely produce simple words in English. They should be on book 1 but
for some reason are in book 2 when the book is clearly way too hard for them.
Consequently I’ve had to spend a lot of time adapting and supplementing the book
because the activities aren’t suitable for their level.

Similarly another class called Mickey was a children’s class. However, they were
upgraded to a teen class, English in Mind book 1. Even though the age of the students isn’t
teen but is at around 8-11. They should be doing the Project books but I suspect the
reason is that Binsar doesn’t want to order Project books and so consequently only 1 class
in the school is doing project. The English in Mind books that we have are the old edition,
a new edition was brought out last year. So my suspicion is that he’s moved them to this
class merely to use up the old out-of-date books. But if they’re supposed to stay in English
in Mind until they’re 14 or so then they’re be studying English in Mind for 4 or 5 years
which is going to get rather boring, I’d have thought.