Anarchy in the UK

We have the most wonderful English history teacher at the university. Her name is Jane. The best part about her is that she's not Swedish, nope, she's British. Which scoops up the credibility of the whole course, to say the least.

Every time we have history, she always tells us about some anecdote she's experienced herself. First I might mention, she's one of those people who strikes up a conversation with everyone and anyone, complete strangers or not. Every time she's flying, she ends up talking to the person next to her for the whole trip, which is hours long (she mostly travels to China). Once she started talking to an old man, and after a while she straight out asked him if he was Catholic, which he was. They had a very nice conversation about religion (Jane is not Catholic).

Her aunt and uncle live in the States, in Seattle to be more exact. So she has also spent a lot of time in America, which is often brought up these weeks when we're on American history on our course.

Once she was visiting the Martin Luther King Museum in Atlanta. She was walking in with a friend, and saw a black man lying on the ground.
"Oh my God, he's dead!" she said.
And her friend said: "Oh don't worry, he's only black."
Jane was appalled by this answer.

Today, as we were discussing the Berlin Wall, she told us about a man who was hiding Germans from the east side of Berlin to smuggle them over the border into the west side.
He was driving a van, and had a big couch in it, with room behind it where people could hide. He had driven over the border lots of times, and this particular day he decided to get a whole family out. The wife was heavily pregnant. There was also a young son, and the father.
The man had his own son with him in the front passenger seat, to make things less suspicious.

When they were getting closer to the border, the young son behind the couch started screaming out of fright. The only solution the driving man could find, was to slap his own son really hard in the face, so that he would start screaming and therefore cover the noise coming from the back of the van.
This is a true story.

I'm endlessly fascinated by Jane and all her stories. It's so much more interesting to listen to someone who has actually been there and done that.

She's also teaching us about literature - we've got ten English novels to read this term, and write a reading journal as we do so. Jane prefers to get the journals handwritten and not a computer printout, because "journals and notes should be living things, I want to see the red wine stains and the smeared chocolate on the pages, and notice how your handwriting changes". She also encourages us to mark with pens in the books while we read them (obviously not if they're library books: that's why you should get your own copy) - you should be able to see that the book has been read.
All of this is just a wonderful way of thinking, if you ask me.

I feel really lucky to know her, such an inspiring person.