I really liked Dr. Naoz. I don't think she was exactly the best professor I had, but I only say this after having tons of other amazing teachers. She is definitely up there, but certain things kinda didn't do it for me. The class itself is super interesting, there is tons of fundamental and interesting concepts brought up throughout the quarter. The first 3 weeks are a review of freshman physics, especially oscillations. She particularly emphasizes these, heavily I should say, but they are extremely important. Then you learn calculus of variations and are introduced to the Lagrangian which you spend most of your time on. You do examples of this and then jump into Central Force problems, which I found kind of dull and information dense, so towards the last 3 weeks got boring for me.

I think a lot of times she is great, she heavily emphasizes derivation which I personally enjoyed. I think when derivations started to dwell a bit too far into pure math topics, she definitely got lazy and cut some corners, so when lectures around that time were a haze and I couldn't follow too well. She is fantastic when it comes to working with the class and I think she is better suited to teaching small classrooms. She would stop class to work on problems and she would walk around the class, but she could not ever get to most students. The thing I really HATED about the class is that she does not believe in curving. This was pretty scary, especially once you get so used to it from other classes. Her problem sets were challenging for me and took tons of time, but she offers extra credit and you need every ounce of it unless you're just a physics genius, which I am not.

On the midterm: KNOW HOW TO SOLVE NON-HOMOGENEOUS 2nd ORDER DIFF EQS. She asked this every year she taught, including ours. On the final, good luck, that shit was not easy, so just be extremely familiar with every problem on the problem sets and spend time with the TA's, they'll drop some pretty hefty hints.

Out of 82 people 20 people managed to get an A which is pretty low compared to the grade distribution shown for 2016 so don't get too deceived by how easy the class seems in the first several weeks and even past the midterm. I think she does an impressive job of designing tests that are pretty fair in difficult that they don't need to get curved. The midterms seemed stupid easy but the final will make or break your grade.

MATHEMATICA: This does not appear on your class planner, but it is 10% of your grade. Corbin hosts 2 hour labs on teaching you this crap which ends up being your life-saver and best friend on later problem sets if you take the time to learn it. A good majority of the class was lazy af and didn't do it completely but it is honestly free points, Corbin is pretty chill about grading if you get the good majority of it.