Liseiwicz’s teaching rules

Jan Liseiwicz’s teaching rules made the classroom a place where students were expected to outrun their teacher rather than follow a prepared path. At N University, he combined strict conditions, deliberately unstable problems, and an equation-based route to top marks in a method designed to force independent thought and imagination.

Standing and Classroom Discipline

Liseiwicz taught in N University’s mathematics department for eleven years and became a highly respected instructor, even as his originality as a mathematician diminished. More than half of the handful of N University students who later achieved international recognition in their fields had studied with him during those years. His teaching was an honour and a beginning for promising mathematicians, but it was not an easy passage through university.

Students had to speak English to take his classes. After Hitler’s invasion of Austria, Liseiwicz refused to speak German again. He also prohibited note-taking, leaving students to attend closely and rely on their own understanding rather than a written record of the lecture.

Deliberately Unstable Problems

Liseiwicz did not always give students a complete or correct problem. He might present only half of one, or state part of it incorrectly, and would not necessarily repair the error at the time. If he remembered the problem a few days later, he might then give it correctly; otherwise, students were left to deal with what they had been given. The tactic drove many less capable students to abandon his class halfway through or transfer to another department.

The method made uncertainty part of the work. Instead of treating a teacher’s statement as a finished answer, students had to test what they heard, supply what was missing, and keep thinking when no correction arrived. Liseiwicz’s stated preference was, “An interesting but wrong theory is always better than a boring but perfect proof.” The deliberately faulty problem was not simply an inconvenience: it was a way of pressing students toward imagination and creative ability.

The Chase and the Equations

At the opening of each academic year, Liseiwicz described the relationship as a chase through mountains and forests: “I am a wild animal, not an animal trainer.” He told students they must keep running and that the faster they ran, the faster he would pursue them. If they stopped, he would have given up on them; if they ran deep into the woods and disappeared, they would have set themselves free. The image defined both the pressure of his teaching and its limit: the student was not meant to remain under his direction forever, but to become capable of leaving it.

That freedom had a precise classroom mechanism. At the start of each term, Liseiwicz wrote a tricky equation in the top-right corner of the blackboard. The first student to solve it earned 100 per cent and no longer had to attend class for the rest of the term, though attendance remained optional. He then put another equation in the same place and waited for someone else to solve it. The board thus offered a challenge in public view, while making release from the course depend on demonstrated ability rather than regular attendance alone.

A Course Designed to Be Escaped

Solving three equations in a row brought a further test: Liseiwicz set a new problem for that student alone, to serve as a graduation thesis. A student who solved it could graduate with top marks, even after attending the university for only a couple of days. The rules made the course an unusually compressed ladder: each solution could remove an obligation, but repeated success raised the standard and ended in an individual piece of work.

The challenge was formidable. After nearly ten years of teaching, no student had come close to completing that route; solving even one or two of his equations counted as a remarkable achievement. Liseiwicz’s teaching rules therefore held freedom out as a genuine possibility while making clear how rarely it was won. Their governing demand was not passive endurance of instruction, but sustained effort toward the point at which the student could proceed without the teacher.