Binsar seems to have a problem with properly scheduling classes and managing numbers.
He assumes that students will keep on doing more and more courses and that any dropouts
are the fault of bad teaching. He’s recently introduced a new student survey after the
first month and specifically mentioned that teaching was the main issue he was looking at.
So obviously it’s the teachers’ fault that TBI is failing not his bad management/poor
facilities/lack of investment in materials and resources.

Most TBI courses simply follow a coursebook where you have to teach x number of pages
a class. There’s simply no variety for the students. If you wanted to you could create your
own lesson from scratch, but that would require a lot of preparation and you don’t get any
credit when you do. Often some teachers do teach the book too fast and then you’re left
with some classes where you have to make it up for yourself but this is in an ad hoc
fashion. This is very different to EF or Wall Street who offer social classes/life clubs, video
lessons, EF practise & play, computer research and presentations which TBI Bekasi
doesn’t. In short after a while I think the courses at TBI are boring and stale so I can’t
blame students for thinking likewise, there’s only so much a teacher can do. If you do too
many games then Binsar will shout at you (ask P**** the previous teacher) and Irene
monitors how much of the coursebook you teach in your sessions.

Consequently for Intermediate level classes, student numbers usually drop to below 5
students, often only 1 or 2 students paying for a group rate. So TBI Bekasi has dropped it’s
student standards in an aim to encourage more students to come. A class is only cancelled
if students don’t come until 75% of the time has passed. This means a Saturday class isn’t
officially cancelled until you’ve waited 3 hours out of 4. What this means though is that
students are under no obligation to come on time. So particularly teenagers, once they’ve
been here a while and know the rules, often come 30-45 mins late for a class and you
can’t do anything. This encourages a lazy, apathetic class. If you don’t have strong rules
and standards then you lose respect, so I think a lot of students have lost respect for TBI
as an institution.

There’s also no penalty for missing classes. You can miss as many classes as you want
and still pass the course, your attendance isn’t recorded on certificates even though the
certificate says ‘You have attended a 60 hour course’, it doesn’t say how many of those 60
hours you actually attended. . You can even miss the final test and have the teacher make
up a score. The standards are actually higher at EF East Jakarta. At EF if the student is
late more than 30 mins they are marked as absent. If no students arrive after 50% of the
time the class is cancelled. The attendance is marked on the certificate as a percentage. If
students miss more than 8 out of 24 classes then they can be asked to retake if they have
bad marks, officially more than 10 is automatic retake but in practise it’s negotiable.