Cherie Shepherd

Cherie has been a Literature teacher at The Academy Tutorial since 1990, and served on the Academy board for 26 years.  During the course of her tenure, she has taught 7th Grade Literature and Composition, American Literature, and British Literature and has had the privilege of team teaching with the Academy’s founder, Colleen Whitver.  Mrs. Shepherd is a graduate of David Lipscomb University where she earned a B. A. degree in English and is currently earning a Certificate in Spiritual Direction.

Cherie’s experience includes: homeschooling eight children, all of whom attended The Academy Tutorial, teaching at Franklin Christian Academy, and traveling in Europe and the U.K. researching many of her favorite authors and their works.  She has journeyed to Paris which is the setting for The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Tale of Two Cities. While in Brussels, she felt a kinship with Charlotte Bronte who used this city as the setting for her novel, Villette.  She has traveled to England several times and toured the Tower of London where some of the great poets like Queen Elizabeth 1, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir Thomas Wyatt among other notables have been incarcerated.  During her visits to London, Cherie saw the homes of Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, and John Keats in Hampstead and has studied and visited many of the historic sites in London such as Westminster Abbey where many of her favorite novelists, playwrights, poets, kings, queens, and saints are buried.  She walked on the infamous Baker Street where the fictional Sherlock Homes ran his detective business, attended the longest running Agatha Christie play, The Mouse Trap on the West End and has traveled on a pilgrimage to Canterbury to visit the grave of the martyred Thomas A Beckett.  She has stood on the White Cliffs of Dover that were immortalized in Matthew Arnold’s famous poem.  She has twice visited Oxford where C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Lewis Carroll taught as professors.  She prayed at the small chapel where Gerard Manley Hopkins ministered.  She has trekked with her husband and fellow Academy tutor, David Shepherd, to the moors of Haworth to see the famous Bronte parsonage where this Yorkshire family produced three of her favorite Victorian novelists.  While in the U.K., Cherie traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland where she walked on the Royal Mile and visited Holy Rood Palace where Mary Queen of Scots was under house arrest.  While in Scotland she gained a new appreciation for Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Cherie brings all of these experiences and her Christian worldview to bear on her teaching of Literature.