Dave Shepherd
My mom taught me to read at a young age in western North Carolina, so I skipped the first grade. The next eleven years were not very exciting: I became interested in music in the fifth grade (the same year the Beatles came to America), but then we moved to a school without a music program when I was in the eighth grade.
After high school I attended the University of North Carolina, where I got a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dramatic Art. Having nothing better to do after graduation, I stayed on and got an MFA in acting from UNC. I met my wife in drama school, and we went to New York City to try the acting thing.
Acting didn’t make us quickly rich and famous, and it became apparent that we wouldn’t have much time together if we continued as actors. Since Barbara is, in fact, the Love Of My Life, we decided to shift gears. In 1981 we moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where I was going to make it big in music.
Well, I didn’t make it big in music, but I had a day job at Vanderbilt University, where I started sitting in on German courses. My brilliant younger brother Howard the Nerd had studied some German at UNC-Chapel Hill, and I had always found that very cool. One thing led to another, and in 1992 I earned a PhD in German from Vanderbilt.
As Dr. Dave I moved my family once again, this time to Washington, DC, the Capital of Obfuscation and Acronym. I took a tenure-line assistant professor job at American University (known then as The American University, and rather pompously abbreviated as TAU–no kidding!). I was on track to be a German Wunderkind at TAU. But the year I was reviewed for tenure, a long-absent full professor decided to come back to Washington and teach again. Pffft. That was it for my higher-education career. (Schadenfreude as of October 2005: the university president whose regime ousted me has been ousted. Ah well…)
Desperate for a job, in 1999 I searched and finally landed a job teaching high-school German in the Loudoun County, Virginia, public schools. This turned out to be a great thing, since I love teaching teenagers and now have a job that is more respected in the community than being a “liberal college-professor type.”
Oh. Somewhere along the way, in the mid-1990s, I developed an intense interest in performance magic. In addition to teaching and podcasting, I am also a professional magician, specializing in “close-up conjuring for elegant events.” In 2004, readers of a local magazine voted me “Best Bar/Bat Mitzvah Entertainer.”
I still play music sometimes, and I live with the Love Of My Life and our daughter (our son just graduated from college) in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC.
Life is good.
Email me directly: Dave Shepherd’s email
Check out my blog: Dave’s Midlife Blog
Howard Shepherd
Like my older brother Dave, the Node Nerd, I grew up on various rural routes in western North Carolina. With a pastor for a father and an English teacher for a mother, we were immersed in language from the get-go. In 1973 I followed my brother to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I was a physics major for a semester–just long enough to fail calculus.
I eventually meandered my way to an interdisciplinary humanities degree at UNC. After college I went to the Black Forest of Germany, where I studied German at a Goethe-Institut in a small town named Staufen. (The historical Dr. Faustus, made famous by Marlowe and Goethe, died there.) During my time in Germany, I did a stint as a street musician in the nearby university town of Freiburg.
When I came back to America, I lived briefly in the Capital of Obfuscation and Acronym (right in the belly of the beast, in the heart of DC not far from the National Zoo), where I worked in a law firm and specialized in operating a sophisticated piece of office machinery known to the uninitiated as a “copy machine.”
Feeling less than challenged, I changed jobs and worked in the publishing industry for five years, during which time I held the wonderfully euphemistic job title of “college traveler.” In the summers of 1981 through 1984, when I was not “college traveling” for Oxford University Press, I earned a master’s degree in Liberal Education at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland (the home of the Great Books curriculum).
Since 1985 I have been a high school English teacher�first at Good Counsel High School in Wheaton, Maryland (a northern suburb of the Capital of O and A), and for the last twelve years at Asheville High School in Asheville, North Carolina. At Asheville High, I have earned the reputation of “that Hamlet guy” and the biggest grammar curmudgeon on the faculty.
Email me directly: Howard Shepherd’s email
Howard Chang
As the youngest Word Nerd, I was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in small-town Chester, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond. There, I grew up as one of only two Chinese-American boys in my schools (the other one was widely believed to be my younger brother even though I had no younger brother and the kid had a different last name). Between Brooklyn and Chester, I had passed a couple of pleasant formative years catching frogs in Mineral Wells, Texas and learning to draw, read and write in Wayne, New Jersey.
By the time I enrolled in college at the University of Virginia, I had rejected my parents’ dreams for me to become a doctor and eventually succeed my father, a pediatrician. Instead, I chose to major in both Classics (fancy for “Latin”) and English Language and Literature, two of the least commercial academic fields known to mankind.
After earning my BA, I stayed in Charlottesville to attend the University of Virginia School of Law. Despite quickly realizing I had no zeal for the practice of law, I completed law school. The highlight of this period was serving as a humor columnist and movie reviewer for the Virginia Law Weekly.
After graduation, I took the bar to get my license (just in case) but began working in management consulting. I toiled away in obscurity for “the man” for nearly two years until, unable to stand it any longer, I changed careers to become a teacher. Now, I am putting my Classics degree (if not my law degree) to good use, teaching Latin at the Flint Hill School in Oakton, Virginia.
Besides podcasting with the Shepherds, I love film, travel and photography. My travels include Taiwan, Japan, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. My “top-five” favorite films are Rear Window; The Graduate; Cinema Paradiso; In the Mood for Love; and The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.
Email me directly: Howard Chang’s email