This is how geniuses teach students

Landau's students were all tragic cutlery, because Landau's IQ was too high, and his students couldn't understand him. When Landau lectured, he simply hung a painting on the blackboard: a shepherd was playing a flute, with a flock of sheep grazing nearby. The students were baffled and, risking a scolding, had to ask Landau for clarification. In fact, Landau's meaning was just four words: "playing music to a cow."

After discovering that his students couldn't understand him, Landau raised the bar for admission to his program to a monstrous level. If you were born in the Soviet Union, heard that Landau's graduate students were extremely difficult to get into, and decided to challenge yourself, the first thing you'd need is math, the second is physics, and the third is still math.

All of Landau's students had to prepare a thick notebook and solve thousands of problems. Finally, Landau would personally give them an exam covering all aspects of theoretical physics. The math portion alone was enough to make anyone flee in terror. A student seeing the exam for the first time might feel: How thick is this? Bang head against wall -- And we're not allowed to check books? Bang head against wall again -- How are the physics concepts so difficult? Bang head against wall -- The math is unsolvable. I might as well die.

In that generation of the Soviet Union, only about 40 people successfully passed the exam. Later, they all became the backbone of the Soviet theoretical physics community.

Landau's thinking was probably like this: Since low IQ can't be helped, he'd just have to help them build a solid foundation. It's just that his standard for a foundation was a little different from others.