How to Succeed at Math Without Really Crying

I guess it was about six or seven years ago that I first met him. He was sitting a couple of seats behind me in the row to my right. I was in the front row. I almost always sat in the front in those classes, the really difficult ones. I needed all the advantages I could get. I believe the class was called “Automata”. I think it was classified as a math course, sort of. Automata is really the study of “a finite machine”. It would be classified under theoretical computer science. This would be a course you would take along the lines of how to create your own compiler. Let’s just say I was lost from the moment I sat down in the chair. Who Am I and what am I doing in here?

The way I got through that class was first, I was always at the professor’s office, when the professor was there, getting questions answered that I was afraid to ask in class; because I knew I was the only one who didn’t know the answer to what it was I was asking. As I recall, he was pretty cool, many of my questions were very basic ideas that I should have known before entering his classroom. But like I said he was pretty cool, in his office, he answered them all. If I had put my hand up to ask one of those questions in the classroom he probably would have shot me down and I would have looked and felt stupid. But for whatever reason, when in his office, he was an entirely different person. Interesting huh? When he handed out the first exam he said to the class; “Is this ridiculously difficult? Well yes, too bad for you!”  You get the idea.

But let’s get back to the guy who sat behind me in the row to my right. He was quiet. He never asked questions in class but took lots of notes. I remember the first time we talked. I always showed up early for class but couldn’t get into the classroom until the class started, so I would sit at a table down the hall and stare at my book. He was sitting at the table too and asked how I was doing and I told him, “terrible!” He pulled out a blank sheet of paper and started sketching and explaining to me in the simplest of terms what the Automata instructor was talking about the day before. From that point on I would meet him at that table before class every day and be given a private lesson, of insightful and detailed tutoring on abstract machines. We became friends at that point. He was happy to show me whatever was needed for me to pass the course. I was to find out later that he already had a graduate degree and as a software engineer, was one of the developers of some major breakthroughs at NetZero a few years before. He was taking a few classes to brush up on some concepts and theories and preparing to launch an idea that he had developed with a couple other students at UCI. All I can say is I did very well in that course and was able to move on.

I didn’t see my extremely intelligent friend again for some time. Meanwhile I ended up in another of those crazy courses the Computer Science guys take. This one was called   “Combinatorial algorithms”. Another “math” course, so they say. Well, after a couple of weeks of struggles and the usual barely hanging in there, the professor said something unbelievable. In the middle of a lecture, he was commenting on how difficult this class is, and went on to say “if you ever get a chance to get Dirk Wagner as a tutor in this class you would get an ‘A’, because Dirk could teach it. Dirk? Hey that’s the name of my mysterious friend who helped me pass “Automata”!  I scrambled through everything I owned in hopes that somehow I had his phone number written down somewhere. The miracle was a number on a torn piece of scratch paper at the bottom of my old book bag, Dirks’ number.

I called him up and told him how much trouble I was in, again. I lived in Santa Monica at the time and he was in the Oxnard area. This was not close and he was not taking any courses at the school that term. However in his efforts to put his new idea into reality he was traveling back and forth from his home up north down to Irvine several times a week and he agreed to tutor me by stopping by on his way home each trip. Now, to make a long story even longer, Dirk used the same simple clear tutoring style as he had with me before. I remember the first exam the teacher handed back to me graded as an ‘A’ and I stopped the instructor and said; “there must be some mistake here!” Fortunately he didn’t agree. I got a ‘B+’ overall in that class. Wow. And the tutor, of course was launching his new idea onto the internet. The idea; TutorZ.com!