A once quiet, boring classroom transforms into a bustling student hub of all things biology when Elisabeth Merrill steps in the room. Many students, even ones she has never taught, regard her and her classes as inspirations to study not only science, but the current world around them. Seldom can you find a teacher with a journey more compelling than that of Merrill, a biology and anatomy teacher in the Upper School.
Students often credit Merrill with her ability to switch between having serious lectures and dynamic student-based discussions. Gideon Silkowski ‘26 is currently taking Merrill’s AP Biology class, which has a reputation for being a “GPA killer” in many schools across the nation. Despite this, Silkowski has found the class to be engaging rather than grade-draining.
“[The class] feels fairly college-like, which I really enjoy. She pulls up the OneNote, starts writing on her tablet for all of us to copy down. It’s very useful, and it’s incredibly efficient in terms of just getting notes down in time,” Silkowski said.
At the same time, Merrill’s class can also be discussion-oriented and more lighthearted. “When we’re talking Bio, we’ll be making jokes, we’ll be laughing… We’ll listen to her; we’ll talk. We’ll have a genuine conversation about where we are in the world and what we think of our current position going into the future,” Silkowski said.
This teaching style didn’t come to be accidentally, though. It was built early on.
Merrill grew up in Florida to a mother who dropped out of high school and had six children by the time she was 24. Her father, while very intelligent, wasn’t a good student, Merrill reported. So, education wasn’t especially emphasized in her household.
“Growing up, I had a speech impediment, so I was really isolated in the beginning and I always felt stupid. I didn’t think I was stupid, but I felt really stupid in school,” Merrill said.
After high school, Merrill made her way to Mercy University where she graduated with the top GPA in both of her majors (English and Biology) and became the first person in her family to attend college.
Merrill said. “A lot of the way I teach is really informed by trying to make things accessible… a lot of kids are smart in ways that schools don’t assess.”
While struggling to keep up with the rigorous material of AP Bio, Ash Munitz ‘27 saw Merrill’s patience firsthand.
“I always found that Ms. Merrill is super patient with me and she genuinely wants to help me,” Munitz said. “She’s really good at seeing me as a person and not just as a student who was struggling in her class.” Although Munitz made the tough decision to drop the class after the first semester, she is grateful to have a teacher that made it so conflicting for her to do so.
When starting a new unit in either of Merrill’s classes (Human Anatomy and AP Bio), an article relating to current events is often assigned to give students a real world perspective on what they’re about to learn. Before beginning the immune system unit in her human anatomy class, Susie Brown ‘27 read an article about vaccines and the recent challenges the vaccine approval process is facing in America.
“Due to changes in politics, a lot of people have been leaning away from vaccines.” Brown further explained, “That can be really harmful because immunocompromised people will now be less safe without what’s called a ‘herd immunity’.”
