What makes you feel guilty?

What do you get paid to do? Right now I get paid to watch movies. My wage works out to about R250 an hour for two hours to sit with a group of Chinese first-year university students and watch movies — usually of my choice as they forget to bring movies of their choice. The movies are every evening Monday to Thursday in a large lecture theatre.

Man, it is hard not to feel guilty. You know, somehow we have to feel we are achieving something when we work … but what is there to just watching movies and getting paid to do that? It was made clear to me by the leaders of the Academic Programme at this college that these were not lessons, just club activities, and being a movie lover, I went for that option. I suggested, “I can encourage the kids to write critiques of the movies and we discuss the different styles of movie reviews used in newspapers … ” The leaders solemnly shook their heads, “club activities, not lessons” they echoed. “We just need you to babysit them every evening, which is what their parents want. They do have lessons during the day and are tired. No lessons, just activities in an English language setting.” Yes ma’am. Of course this speaks volumes about the typical eighteen-year-old or even twenty-year-old Chinese student and the conservative culture. They are still treated like children by parents and colleges alike. The family and educational institutions strongly discourage dating and tête-à-têtes with the opposite sex, but, of course, that is like trying to switch off the Niagara Falls.

I digress. It is the issue of guilt, false or legitimate about the kind of work one does, that I am interested in. I am currently watching The Closer with the students, a detective series in which deputy chief Brenda Johnson finds the killer(s) in each episode and “closes” them in the police interview rooms, in a manner often equivalent to court-room dramas. And wow, she is good at it! She reminds me of Peter Falk in Columbo, and she is something of a klutz, dropping and losing things, banging her car, and an impulsive eater. In fact she is a kind of Columbo and Ally Mcbeal rolled into one. So to overcome my false sense of guilt, I have taught the students the meaning of “whodunit” and every now and then I stop the film and I ask, “who do you think is the killer? Why?” With some classes I am met with complete silence, others participate and discuss who is killer, who red herring.

Chinese university students are cool people, they really are. But at night they are tired, and the humidity in Shanghai this summer has been brutal. But the guilt is still there. I find my psychological conditioning fascinating. In the lecture theatre next door to mine a young Australian teacher has the same job: watching movies with freshmen. He has the same qualms. The other day he said he has just given up asking them questions about the movies to make it look more like he is “achieving” something. We both mutter about the fact that we start off the classes with a full crew — we take class register, a full two minutes of gratefully “achieving” something — but by the end of the two hours at least half the class has silently vanished through the back door of the lecture theatre. Some of the others are asleep or playing computer games on their mobiles. A handful are still watching with open mouths Kyra Sedgwick aka deputy chief Johnson rip the truth out of a hapless suspect we never thought was the murderer … I look forward to August when I teach the selfsame first-year students real lessons, preparing them through an orientation course how to research, write and substantiate their arguments in essays, how to understand tropes and schemes in literature. I know the guilt will then go away because then I will be achieving something (and getting paid more as I am required to do something more than just sit and watch movies, I suppose). But while it is here the guilt critter is a fascinating phenomenon to observe. So what makes you feel guilty? The midnight snack? You’re married but you often perve the opposite sex? You feel your job pays you too well? Is it legitimate guilt? I just can’t see our Stone Age ancestors feeling the same way: life was about food, procreation and relaxation, surely. Why get guilty about that?