A complete waste of time

Today V and I met with T's teacher, the school principle, another teacher as a translator and T's tutor. Let me back up...

Last Thursday we contacted another school, which has more immigrant children and a larger program to teach German to non-German-speaking kids. We asked if we could bring T for a visit and see what he thought of the place. They told us they needed permission from T's current school first, so we called them and AM, who was translating for us on the phone, got yelled at for a long time by the principle, denied the visit, said it was illegal, ... so we arranged a meeting for today to discuss. At the meeting before they could start talking I said the most important thing was for T to learn and in order to do that he needed to communicate. They seemed to nod agreement to this but it went downhill from there. Most of all it turned into a blame fest, they blamed us in various ways of not being good parents because T hadn't learned enough German yet, that this was entirely our fault, despite hiring a tutor, taking him to German school in the states and so on. We brought up that even German high school students that we arranged to help T with his homework, did not always understand the homework instructions. then the teacher illustrated to us how she tells him to do things, she slams her hand down on the desk and yells, she did this a couple of times in front of us (the example she used was to teach him cursive handwriting). I was amazed but the other people from the school there were unphased. We told them that he doesn't react well to that and that it was exactly the wrong way to get him to pay attention and participate, he will just withdraw further. --we can blame them and they can blame us but in the end it doesn't help T at all, isn't that why we're there? Then we restated that all we wanted was permission to visit the other school. They said of course we could but that it was a bad idea, T "shouldn't have a decision in this" because he would see it as a better place and want to go there because he had already had a bad time at their school--I kid you not. To cut a long story short they demonstrated they did not care at all about T learning but only that they wanted control over him, to keep him at their school. Why, I have no idea. If he is happier at the other school and learns there then that is what is important, but not to them. Then they listed examples of other kids from other countries that learned German in four months at their school; a) what does this have to do with T, b) T hasn't even been in school in Germany for four months, they moved him to a lower grade in only weeks and expect miracles over summer break, c) why should I believe them after all the other things they've said. Next we used the example of his last homework, there was a book he was supposed to copy a poem from, but he didn't have the book. His teacher smiled as if she could use this point against us and said yes, all the other kids took their books but his is still on the window shelf in the classroom. I asked if she told him it was his book, she said she told all of the kids, then I asked if she told him in English. She said she uses only German with him, but (saying this infront of the principle) that she will start to use English. My point seemed to be lost on them. If he doesn't understand German, then how is he supposed to know to take the book home for his homework. Then towards the end I asked the teacher if she could understand T when he speaks English (her English is very bad) she said no because he speaks in a dialect--which makes no sense to us. I pointed out again that this results in no communication, so how is he supposed to learn, but they seemed more interested in what small rural town we were from in order to verify their "dialect" excuse. They grinned to each other as they awaited the answer but V smartly said "New York". (Explanation, to many Americans New Yorkers do have a funny, sometimes hard to understand accent, but to many here in Europe it is seen as the ultimate cosmopolitan city and there seems to be a strong bias here in that direction as far as dialects and speaking.)

So that's it. Instead of expecting any help from them we're now focused on how to get him out of that class/school. Homeschooling is illegal in Germany so that is not an option. We even inquired with the education ministry and received a letter denying a waiver so we could homeschool. There are two other schools in the area that we will pursue transferring to next.