Graduating From 'Family'

"When you walk into the room, there's a sense of people who are really comfortable with each other," Frey said. "Most 10-year-old boys are not that nice to each other. Here, there's a group looking out for you. It takes care of feeling good about yourself."

During the last few weeks, as the end has neared, the class worked on memory boxes and picture books, as well as shared journal entries confessing their fears of the future. Many of their concerns are universal among children about to enter middle school and adolescence: bullies, lockers, changing classes. Other concerns focused entirely on their close relationship with Fleischer.

"I won't like nobody," Madeleine Stern, 11, scrawled in her notebook. "The teachers won't teach me enough and I will get behind. I can't share everything that I share with Miss Fleischer with my new teacher."

Madeleine entered Fleischer's group in fourth grade and said it absorbed her quickly. She learned the goofy way these students cover their eyes with their fingers, forming "specs," when someone takes their picture. She discovered that first-grade habits die hard among students together so long that they even have an enduring system of walking through the halls. The first student in line holds the first door, while the second student holds the next one. The door is not to be closed until everyone has passed.

In a class with many immigrants or children of immigrants, Fleischer, who was born in the Dominican Republic while her father worked in the Foreign Service, said her instruction goes beyond math, reading and writing, to include practical "life lessons."

For example, when student Jake Maines threw a laser-tag birthday party this year, he invited the class. But most of the students forgot to RSVP, so Fleischer devoted a lesson to party etiquette.

Looping has posed its challenges, Fleischer admitted -- especially having to learn a new curriculum each year. And she reminds students that she can offer them only so much. "There's all kinds of teachers out there that are going to give you things I could never give you," she said.

Still, they cling. With her, they have experienced the birth of siblings, the divorce of parents, the deaths of grandparents, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the sniper attacks. They laughed and learned on a field trip to Camp Hemlock and another to Luray Caverns. Last weekend, they crammed into the summer home of a classmate's grandparents on the New Jersey shore.

"As a teacher, you plant all these seeds but you never get to see them grow," Fleischer said. "I've been able to see them bloom season after season."

At a farewell dinner last week, students momentarily forgot their double-digit ages and let themselves cry as they pondered a year without her constancy. Although she acknowledged that she, too, was sad, Fleischer quoted Dr. Seuss to them: "Don't cry because it's over -- smile because it happened."