Ms. Bixby's Last Day

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains a description of death. 

Anderson begins the story with the three narrators approaching a classmate, Rebecca, and telling her that they have diagnosed her with cooties. The ensuing conflict involves discussions of mythical illnesses, attempted contamination, and a chase scene only ending through the intervention of a teacher. Thus, the author captures boys’ fledgling early, pre-teen awareness of girls, seen through the filters of mystery and taboo. Given the boys’ age, the book frequently connects to themes related to growing up; it constitutes a coming-of-age story about the shift from childhood ignorance to a more grown-up understanding of some of the harsh realities of the world.

Still intact, however, among the boys who are the main characters is the notion of the best-friend-forever. These are commitments the boys pledge as life-long vows of fidelity: Topher makes Steve promise to prevent him from ever getting married. Most of the jealousy described in the narrative is the fear that another guy will interfere with a friendship between two of the boys that has been solid for years. In the face of these carryovers from pre-pubescence, there are as well awakening attractions to members of another gender. In this case, two of the narrators—Topher and Brand—develop crushes on their free-spirited teacher, Maggie, and symbolically fight over her when Brand sees the wonderful portrait Topher has drawn of Maggie.

Another common feature of emerging adolescents is also prevalent in the narrative: the blending of fantasy and reality. Topher is the primary example of this, continually engaging in magical thinking: imagining himself strangling a teacher with his shoelaces, believing he can convince an adult stranger to purchase a bottle of wine and give it to the 12-year-olds to bestow on Maggie. However, Topher is not the only person guilty of this, as the three boys watch as virtually every aspect of their plan to skip school and visit Maggie in the hospital succumbs to reality.

Fox Ridge Elementary’s sixth-grade classes, as portrayed by Anderson, are not the beginning of middle school, as is frequently the case in many 21st-century school districts around the US. Rather, the sixth graders in the book are about to graduate from elementary school. Thus, as the final step of their primary education, the sixth graders present an air of finality, of finishing a step of their education. Maggie intends to make her students critical thinkers: She has the class discuss a story, poem or event; asks them to share the moral of the story; then tells them to think about what they have discussed and journal about it. Instead of a single answer, Maggie allows her students the freedom to decide for themselves what lessons a story holds. On separate occasions, she debates with Steve the possibility that soul mates might find one another despite the vastness of the human population, and she also debates with Brand the meaning of her failed childhood desire to be a magician.

Another somewhat unusual element of the sixth grade as described by Anderson is the lack of additional instructors and subjects. The narrators relate that there are two sixth-grade teachers, Maggie and Mr. Mackelroy. With her constant references to stories, poems, and writing, Maggie is an English teacher. Apart from Steve fretting about what classes he missed by skipping and Maggie pointing out where the boys would be if they were not at the hospital, there is virtually no mention of the Fox Ridge staff of teachers or the subjects they teach. Teachers are only indirectly discussed by Topher in Chapter 1 when he lists six different categories of teachers.