Ms. Myers is Jess Aarons and Leslie Burke's teacher in Bridge to Terabithia.
Role in the film[]
The first thing we hear about Ms. Myers is that she's very nice-acting on the first and last days of school and the rest of the time she is really strict and hardcore. With her strictness and severity, she comes off pretty poorly in comparison to the music teacher, Miss Edmunds.
Ms. Myers favors Leslie a little because she's a fantastic student who turns in work well above the quality of what the other students produce. But praise from Ms. Myers just gets hers the wrong kind of attention.
Jess usually experiences Ms. Myers as an eagle-eyed person who can tell when he's not paying attention and tries to keep him in line. He realizes she's more than that, though, when he returns to school after the tragedy. When, Scott Hoager makes a mean-spirited remark to Jess, leading him to turn and punch Scott in the face, Ms. Myers calls him out into the hallway. He thinks he's in trouble with Ms. Myers and is judging her as mean and uncaring, but is in for a rude surprise when he sees that she does care. She says she wants to offer him sympathy and explains how sad she was when her husband died. This humanizes her to him, who never knew about her personal life.
It's possible that the grief Ms. Myers carried about her husband is the cause for her short temper and strictness with the other students; certainly she's one of the few people in Lark Creek who saw Leslie's value and potential, although not as deeply or in the same way as Jess did. Of all the adults who interact with Jess after Leslie's death, she is the one who helps him the most: "Ms. Myers had helped him already by understanding that he would never forget Leslie." He was wrong to judge her so harshly. She's really a good person, who cared for Leslie and who cares for him.