Teach, Dragon, Teach

This morning, I went against my previous post and gave a spirited lecture on the virtues and challenges of financial regulation at the domestic and global levels.

I began by telling students that I was wrong to hold back last week. If there is anything that we teach at an American university, it is critical thinking. Even if they will go into the financial industry on the money making side, they will surely benefit from hearing well-reasoned arguments from all perspectives, even from those, like myself, who have an axe to grind on regulatory hubris.

It's been a year now since I have had a painful sinus surgery trying to treat the accumulated damage that five decades of battling asthma and allergies have wrought upon my body. A few months later, I paid a few visits to a local expert on traditional Chinese medicine, who was surprised on my second visit to find out that I had read The Yellow Emperor's classical book on TCM after my first visit. His diagnosis was that I have been trying to make myself smaller for so long, that there is too much "fire" building up in my chest... I called it my dragon syndrome.

So, this morning, I decided not to care. If the dragon needs to roar and breathe fire, let it roar, and teach away!