Have you ever been to English class... on weed?

Yesterday before class, I was enjoying a nice summer breeze that was coming through the window when I was suddenly overcome by the smell of marijuana smoke. (Not that I have any reason to know what marijuana actually smells like, but I saw a movie about it once, and it gave me a pretty good idea.) I was stunned.. was I somehow emitting this smell? Were my students having a little fun before class..? No, of course not. (Incidentally, drug addiction is pretty unheard of in China, especially among college students.) It was everywhere in the room! I walked over to Shelby's classroom to check with her, and on the way over the hallway was absolutely filled with smoke. Shelby came out and confirmed what we were smelling. I ran downstairs to check with Ali, and yep, he had noticed the same thing. Where was it coming from? Was NPU unwittingly growing a field of marijuana? The peasant laborers doing the landscaping had no idea what it was and just decided to burn it...? Or could they be playing a great trick on the entire campus?! The point was, however, that my classroom was basically hotboxed the entire night, turned into a giant marijuana steam room! Not that I can really complain.. My students were so interested in my lesson (about Genetically Modified foods) and were laughing maybe a little too much when we sang "Apples and Bananas" by Raffi. Finally, they had to come up with their own genetically modified foods, and I really think the atmosphere helped them think a little "outside of the box." Some of my favorites: parrot DNA put into a flower to make talking flowers, a fruit that can change your gender from male to female and back again (or vice versa), a cow or pig that can regenerate its body parts when they're cut off-like a lizard.

As an interesting side note, the character for marijuana in Chinese (麻 ma) means plant that are grown inside a building, and as my Chinese teacher put it, "What kind of plants would you need to grow indoors?"