Page 22 - C.A.L.L. #47 - Winter 2020/2021

She was sitting on the Roths’ porch, trying to keep her face mask in place while explaining

the intricacies of Brothbush Academy. On the other side of a big front window, Gabe was
playing a sequence of notes on a guitar and having the little kids echo it back to him on piano.

“We just decided, who’s to say we’re not family?” Kristen continued. “Not that we wanted to
break any rules. But it was so beneficial to all of us, and we’re being so careful.”

Staying in was the order of the day. All groceries were purchased online and delivered. Food
was shared. No one outside of the three families and Wayne Gordon, a visitor from Brooklyn
who was stranded at the Roths’ for nearly three months, was allowed inside the homes. No
grandparents. No friends.

“We’re really trying to compensate for the luxury of being together by being extra vigilant in
our contact with everybody else,” Gabe said during an interview at his roomy, brown-shingled
home.

Students at Brothbush Academy have
learned a few things that aren’t in the
curriculum at what they call “real school.”

At 9 a.m. on a Thursday in April, Andie

Bristow was already at the kitchen table,
her head peeking up over her sky-blue
laptop. Her hair was tied up in two little
buns and she was munching on cantaloupe,
clutching her baby doll, ready for school.
Students and parents of “Brothbush Academy” walk
The Brothbush parents are not fans of from the Bristows’ house to the Furbushes’ for a
distance learning for the youngest

students — children such as Sylvester Roth, 8, and Andie, who are still learning the basics —

but twice each week, Andie clicks into a live video chat via Google Classroom with her two
teachers and 20 or so fellow first-graders at Benjamin Franklin Elementary School. The
group’s done video scavenger hunts and guessing games and accomplished a little math here
and there.

Penelope Roth, 11, and Carmen Furbush, 10, were at the Bristows’ dining room table, heads
bent over laptops. Kat Bristow, at 12 one of two middle-schoolers in the bunch, was curled up

in an overstuffed chair, typing fast. Her bare feet hung over the chair’s striped arm.
The highlight of every school day starts at 1:30 p.m. Lunch, music, art and silent reading have
ended, and the students gather around the Roths’ dining room table. Sometimes there is
instruction, but often the students are paired up — a young child with an older one — and
given a research assignment that ends in a presentation to the group.

They’ve looked into nutrition, reporting on what happens if you have too much or too little of,
say, carbohydrates or protein. They’ve researched life in other countries, and what makes
people tick, sharing the intricacies of culture and diet.

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