Life On A Hutterite Colony

From the outside looking in

Of the many different jobs that I have held one of the more memorable ones was the time I spent working as a teacher’s aide for a young Hutterite boy who had a shunt in his brain as a result of hydrocephalus.

The Hutterites live in a closed self-sufficient communal society. They have a school which usually has two classrooms one for the older children and the other for younger ones.

The children have German school in the morning and again in the evening.

Between 8AM and 3PM there is English school which is administered by the local school board. There are two teachers and if any students have severe learning disabilities they get an aide.

That was my job I was the teacher’s aide. Nominal I was there to help Philip, however I did a lot of other jobs such as photocopying, supervision during recess, and was the substitute teacher if either of the other two were absent.

Discipline is never a problem. The German teacher is responsible for the children. He comes in each day to check on how things are going and the students know that things had better be going well.

The last day of school for the older students is the day they turn 14. As luck would have it I happened to be teaching the older students on the day when Jacob and Mary-anne had their 14th birthday.

Everything was quiet when suddenly Mary-anne stood up knocked over her desk and began throwing paper at other students. Jacob ran over and started chasing her around the classroom. They pulled books off the shelf and ran out of the the classroom. A little while later the German teacher brought them back to pick up the books. He was smiling and laughing about it. He told me they had turned 14 and were now ready to leave school.

This is the first of my know like and trust-you stories. From a suggestion by Tree Langdon

Jim McAulay🍁 says:

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