DO NOT TAKE THIS AND I CAN NOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS WITH THIS PROFESSOR.
Although she seems like she would be a nice person, she is not a great professor. Lectures are not as helpful, the TA does a way better job of explaining the material.
practice midterms are nothing like the actual midterm. Class Average was a 68% for our first midterm. The homework is A LOT. Trust me there are way better professors out there. I am not trying to bash on her but honestly do not take Math 31 with her. It is not worth it.
Thank you for coming to my TED TALK.

I love Professor Greenfield. She is very helpful and patient. I didn't learn well in 131A because it was online.
And going from online and 24 hours open book exams to in-person timed closed book exams was very very challenging. But professor greenfield always explains the problems step by step and she didn't assume things I already know when I go to office hours to ask her questions. Overall, this class is very hard, but she gives a very fair final exam. As long as you try hard to understand her class notes and Homework you should be fine.

I took this class having taken calculus during junior year in high school, but I didn't touch algebra or calculus at all in between. Overall, I didn't dislike Professor Greenfeld as much as other people, but I wouldn't take a class with her again. The averages for both midterms were pretty abysmal, so there was clearly something wrong with how concepts were being taught. Often, during lectures, I needed to repeat what had just been said to make sure I understood it myself since it wasn't always clear. Professor Greenfeld seemed like she knew the concepts, but it was difficult for her to articulate her knowledge to the class. There were also questions on the midterms which didn't reflect what was in the homework and lectures. While I don't recommend taking 31A with Greenfeld, if she ends up as your professor, just know that you'll probably have to do practice problems and/or read the textbook to give yourself a better grasp of the concepts.

I wanted to refrain from posting my review until I received my final grade. Let me tell you that I am beyond surprised that I have a B-. I am appalled to think about how giant the curve had to be. I did not do well on either midterm or the final. I had only taken precalculus in high school and was nowhere near prepared for this class.

I will say this, often you could tell that Rachel was passionate about what she was teaching. Unfortunately, she falls into the elite class of academics that are knowledgeable yet do not know how to explain concepts clearly. This is not a great quality for a math professor, especially not one that teaches a foundational calculus course.

She was vague when she would answer questions, skirting around answering directly. We were wary that maybe she did not know what she was talking about, often reading off of a piece of paper to write on the board. Many times she would make computational errors or write down incorrect equations, but who doesn't make mistakes here and there.

It is true that the exams were nothing like the homework or problems given in the lecture. I can only assume she combined many concepts into the limited problems in the test. Surely this would be fine if we were adequately prepared; we were not. A lot of the exam questions were theoretical.

The homework itself was not time-consuming or strenuous, completely manageable. Unfortunately, it was not helpful.

I am not naive enough to know that it was possible to do well in this class. There were students that received As. However, it is frustrating to have a professor that is not going to be helpful in your learning. If you want to succeed in this class you need some sort of combination of prior knowledge of calculus, a tutor, help from the TA, and help from online sources.

As for Rachel herself, she is a very sweet person. However, I think she was personally affected by some of the comments we expressed during our reviews, even stating that she felt disrespected. Hopefully, if you take this class in future quarters, she will have had reflected on her teaching style and abilities.

I personally would not take this class unless you know you have a prior foundation in calculus and will do well.

As a double major senior student in ECE and Applied math department, I have took more than 30 upper div classes in UCLA and I never felt this lost in any of my coding, engineering or math classes. The professor doesn't know what she's talking about and I noticed she got all her notes and hw set from Professor Killip's fall quarter. Basically her lectures were the worst lectures I have attended (so I stopped going to live lectures after week 3 and read the book instead) and the test are ridiculously long, time consuming, and hard. My advise as a UCLA Alumni : AVOID HER AT ALL COST EVEN IF SHES TEACHING BASIC ALGEBRA

To describe Rachel's Calculus teaching ability would be like describing COVID-19, horrific. Rachel has no clue what she is talking about 100% of the time and copy/pastes Wikipedia word for word into her powerpoints and expects you to understand it without question.

Rachel stated that she moved here from Israel within the last year and her English shows. I understand it is not her first language, but if you are getting paid 6 figures to teach rudimentary calculus, please please please know what you're talking about and how to say it in English, not Hebrew.

I took Calculus in high school and received an A; however, I have never been more confused in my life in a math class. Rachel confuses herself and stops at the board for 5+ minutes to look at the work she has written down on her notes. When a student has a question, she goes back to the slide and rereads the slide, never answering anyone's question.

Her tests are damn near impossible for anyone. The averages were roughly 50 and 52% on both midterms. Most people in this class have also taken calculus before, which shows Rachel goes out of her way to confuse her students and make the tests unbearable.

For all things that are good in this world, DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT take class from her. Suffer through the 8am like I should have. Rachel, I hope you please read this and realize you need to stop teaching.

I love Professor Greenfeld very much. She is very patient and helpful during office hours and gives very engaging lectures. If you go to her office hours, you can not only learn how to solve a particular mathematical problem but also learn mathematical methods and general study advice from her, which are extremely helpful for a math major in the long run. She explains things very well in lectures and raises my greater interest in analysis. I will genuinely miss being in her class in the future.

I found the material of this class to be very challenging. However, Prof Greenfeld's lectures are generally clear and you can tell she tries her best to make sure everyone understands the material. When many students (including me lol) performed poorly on the midterm, Prof Greenfeld made sure to slow down during lectures, check for student understanding more often during lectures, assign shorter homeworks, and modify the final so that at least 75% of it would be based entirely off class notes and homeworks (so basically exact problems and definitions that we had seen before). She told us of her plan for the final two or three weeks before the final, so we were given plenty of time to prepare. She also welcomes students at her office hours and has never made me feel dumb for asking dumb questions.
I personally think that Prof Greenfeld's changes after the midterm helped me a lot in her class. Still, I had to put in a lot of work for this class (attending every single lecture, spending 7-8 hours on homework each week, and attending office hours whenever I had the chance) in order to get an A. This is definitely not a class to fall behind in!

Text me at 714-987-0551 for the PDF version of the fourth edition Rogawski textbook. I am selling it for $20. The hard copy costs over $100.

This was Greenfeld's first quarter teaching 31a, and it was painfully obvious. While she does seem knowledgable about the material, she does a horrible job explaining and teaching it. She fails to actually answer students questions, and to be honest you are better off learning from the book/discussions/watching youtube videos than actually going to lecture. The material on the tests is nothing like what is seen during class or homework. As for grading, she uses two different methods: 10%Homework+25%Midterm1+25%Midterm2+40%FinalExam and
10%Homework+30%Bestofthetwomidterms+60%FinalExam, she will use whichever will give you the higher grade. The top 25% will receive an A, following 50% a B, and the rest C & D's. If you don't do well on any of the tests, your only hope for getting a decent grade is praying that the curve helps you. Professor Greenfeld isn't a bad person, she's just a really really bad math teacher.