Russell Yee

Maxwell Park Elementary School (Oakland Unified School District) 1966-73
This was two blocks uphill from my home. I would have skipped fourth grade but I was deemed too small physically to adjust well (and good thing too, or I may have not synched up with my future wife–see below). In the early grades we were taught to read using “I.T.A.”–a 44-character “Initial Teaching Alphabet.” Some educational geniuses decided kids would learn to read (orthographically screwy) English earlier if all letters always stood for the same sounds. Or maybe it was just a racket to sell our parents more of the pictures books printed in the ITA. Pehaps we did learn to read earlier but I’m very sure ITA ruined my spelling for life. At least that’s what I blame. The site is now Melrose Academy, a Spanish-language immersion elementary school.

Hamilton Junior High School (OUSD) 1973
It’s too bad the musical Hamilton wasn’t out back then, we would have been on top! This was one step up from my neighborhood school (Frick) but I only stayed there one semester. I remember the glee of classmates discovering that the lunch counter was à la carte (unlike the set plates of elementary school) which meant lunch could be three bags of chips and a soda. The campus is now much remodeled as Calvin Simmons Middle School.

McChesney Junior High School (OUSD) 1974-76
The first day here, transferring mid-year in 7th grade, I met fellow transferer Lisa W. (she had left Anna Head School for Girls). If I’d known then we would get married fourteen years later I would have definitely been more at ease. She recalls me being stand-offish but–as I have tried vainly to explain to her–at that age, boys are cowed and confounded by the manifestly greater maturity of their girl peers. The campus is now Brewer Middle School (tiny claim to fame: Edna Brewer was our principal when it was McChesney).

Oakland High School (OUSD) 1976-79
Go Wildcats! We were the penultimate class in the old building. In my sophomore year we had the first-ever teachers’ strike in OUSD history. My older brother, ahead of me by two years, was taught how to use a slide rule, but by my time we were punching buttons on newfangled handheld calculators. It was via German class (Herr James Harlow) that I started my lifelong practices of crossing my “7”s, eating with an overturned fork in kept in the left hand, and using 24-hour time references.

University of California, Berkeley (BS in Nutrition and Food Science) 1979-82
Being an Asian guy, I think I had an internalized stereotype about being especially good at math and science (and so, e.g., started out as a freshman with the advanced Chem 4 rather than Chem 1). If I could do it all over I would probably have considered a different major focusing on history and ideas. Nevertheless I’m grateful for the science education, especially since Lisa fulfilled her childhood aspiration of becoming a physician, so I can better appreciate and understand her work. BTW, these were the years when card catalogs were starting to give way to computer terminals running early versions of the MELVYL and GLADIS online catalogs. But I still wrote my papers on a typewriter, very slowly and painfully. Those were the years of very few protests, just some light anti-apartheid rallies. Bookstores were giving way to clothing stores. But Top Dog still kept us going. (Much later in life I learned that the New Yorker–my favorite sausage–was actually from New Jersey.)

Dallas Theological Seminary (ThM in Old Testament) 1985-90
What I got at Dallas: an excellent education in biblical exegesis, four years of living in the South (iced tea! okra! southern hospitality! summer thunderstorms! conservative politics!), and a long-distance courtship with Lisa (we eventually got married between my 3rd and 4th years, so she got to spend a year there too, auditing classes and working at a private doctor’s office). At the time, dress code for men for daytime classes was coat and tie. What I didn’t get at Dallas: much dispensationalism (though I think eschatological questions about Israel absolutely deserve more attention than they generally get).

The Church Divinity School of the Pacific (Berkeley), 1990-91
While at Dallas I was introduced to Episcopalian worship by two Old Testament professors there, Alan Ross and Robin Cover. I took to liturgical forms like a duck to water and decided to get a Certificate of Anglican Studies to round out my seminary education.

The Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley, PhD in Worship, Liturgy, and the Arts) 1991-97
And I decided to stick around the GTU to help fill the gap in evangelical scholarship in worship. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person on the planet to have degrees from DTS and the GTU. At the time the only other U.S. school that offered a doctoral program in Christian worship was at Notre Dame (Indiana). While at the GTU I helped start a campus group, the Evangelical Round Table. I also served a stint on the admissions committee. Here’s my general advice on how to get admitted to a doctoral program.