Ms. Tracy Merritt is beginning her fifteenth year at Holy Family as the sixth-grade homeroom and social studies teacher, the seventh and eighth-grade language arts teacher, and the mock trial coach. She grew up in San Diego and attended Occidental College in Eagle Rock. After graduating from Oxy with a degree in Diplomacy and World Affairs and minors in English and Political Science, she moved north to attend Stanford Law School. She spent ten years practicing law, first as a clerk to an appellate judge, then as a trial attorney at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and finally in private practice here in Los Angeles.

To spend more time raising her three children, she “retired” from the practice of law. During those years at home, she rediscovered her love of literature and found that she really enjoyed helping her own kids with their writing and literary analysis. These discoveries led her to obtain a teaching credential at Cal State LA in order to share her love of reading and writing with young people. At Holy Family, Ms. Merritt has been fortunate to use her legal training as a coach of the mock trial team. The team’s 2015 and 2019 LA County championships were easily highlights of her professional career! She was also lucky enough to be selected in 2016 by the Museum of Tolerance for an educator fellowship in Berlin focused on teaching the Holocaust, an experience she has brought into her eighth-grade classroom with a literature unit based on Holocaust novels. In the summer of 2022, Ms. Merritt continued to enrich her Holocaust knowledge with a scholarship to study at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for ten days, and she has attended numerous other conferences and workshops on the subject.

In 2017, Ms. Merritt received a scholarship to spend three weeks in London at the Globe Theater studying how to teach Shakespeare to young people. Ms. Merritt has thoroughly enjoyed incorporating the Globe’s very active Shakespeare teaching strategies into her classes’ study of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ms. Merritt believes that every child brings his or her unique gifts into the classroom, and that the teacher’s responsibility is to uncover and nurture those gifts to benefit the student and the entire class. She seeks to incorporate a variety of activities into her instructional practice to allow each student to demonstrate his or her special talents. She also believes in meeting all children at their level (especially in writing) and challenging them to achieve to the best of their ability. She is dedicated to providing speaking opportunities in class, including a Shakespeare monologue competition, to not only have fun but to build confidence as the students head into high school. In her spare time, Ms. Merritt loves to travel, read, experience live theater, seek out new and interesting restaurants with her husband and friends, spend time at the beach, and try to catch up with her three grown children.