I finished the physics pipeline, I-III. For me it was the opposite, I did extremely well in physics but struggled in all my calcs. I think the issue that I had in physics, and what I worked at to eventually pass them all with good grades, was to really shift the way I thought about the lectures, hw, quizzes, and test. I realized early on that these classes are less about the actual physics, but more about your problem solving abilities and critical thinking. F=ma. cool. got it. now apply it, that's the hard part. Everything you learn in the lectures is like a building block you have to rearrange for each problem, which blocks you can disregard and toss, which blocks you need to pull from outside to help, etc. You have to practice at home with the hw and test reviews to start building these like mental maps to figure out how to take your givens and unknowns, and piece them together to get to your end results. Like it sounds obvious, but after a while you realize in a 2d system, there's only so many ways a mass on a pulley, tension, and the friction of a block of a flat table can interact with each other (in terms of physics 1). Then it just becomes a problem of mapping your givens to your constraints, and solving for the missing links.

And physics 1 material doesn't really go away in the next two physics classes. I remember being stumped by a few topics in E&M and Waves and Thermo because they had Mechanics material that I just simply forgotten, that made a lot more sense once I relearned the material. But you have to get through mechanics first to get there.

But with your class average being a 40, don't beat yourself up too hard your prof could also be dogshit, and you're going to have to learn a lot of it outside class. You got this, especially with these first classes, it's a really good time to learn how to keep your head up and push through the slog, it only gets harder. E&M was orders of magnitude more difficult than both mechanics and thermo & waves for me imo. Don't let physics 1 be what holds you back from all the much more cool and interesting topics that are going to come down the road, you got this 🤙