Historical instructor
Original student reviews · all captured dates
Physics 109 is taught by 2 professors. The first one, Pupa, was amazing, but Susan Coppersmith was just terrible. Coppersmith teaches the sound portion. She often messes up her own examples, and she doesn't know how to convey the material during lecture, which is frustrating. The HW gets more difficult because of this. Read the book.Rate My Professors ↗
When I took Physics in the Arts, the first half of the course was taught by the brilliant Pupa Gilbert, and I entered the second half hoping for an equally inspiring professor. Sadly, Professor Coppersmith seemed disorganized and unable to articulate her ideas clearly in lecture. I decided to stop going and read the textbook more. :(Rate My Professors ↗
This professor obviously has deep physics knowledge, but can't convey this to her students. She will go on tangents that have nothing to do with what we are learning, and will assume we understand concepts that we never learned. My best advice is to skip lecture and review slides online; it's less confusing than trying to follow her. Read the book.Rate My Professors ↗
Her lectures are so frustrating. She is terrible at explaining things and is completely flustered and unorganized. Tests and labs aren't terribly hard, but the homework gets difficult at the end of the semester. I didn't feel that the lectures gave me enough info to do the homework.Rate My Professors ↗
Hard to understand- pretty poor at explaining concepts at a high level. She's likely quite brilliant (UW Physics overall has a good academic reputation), but can't get it into words for her students. I stopped going to lecture because it wasn't at all helpful.Rate My Professors ↗
She is not a very good professor,but the whole fun for me in going to lecture is that she butchered every demonstration she did. It was really funny.Rate My Professors ↗
Personal experiences, not a representative survey. Profile matching and captured coverage are shown in the source details.
No teaching recorded in Fall 2026.
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Teaching history may be incomplete. Course pages contain course-specific feedback and citations.
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