What do you do with 30 minutes?

30 Minutes is the worst amount of time in an academician's schedule. It's too much time to waste and too little time to do anything truly productive with. You can't start any real projects, you can't wrap up any major undertaking.

If you’re lucky you have a few, small errands to run. The best you can hope for is to be able to check your e-mails and have enough to fill the time with reading and replying. Maybe you have to go to the office to check your departmental mail...that's rarely a good time-killer, though. When all else fails, you pick up a copy of the campus paper and skim that.

If you get really really bored, you put a new post up on your blog. Hence...

So, I'm waiting for my first (of what will hopefully be many) meetings with Dr. Morris Jenkins. He's a professor at the University of Toledo in their Department of Criminal Justice. Today he is going to speak to my Sociology of Law class about restorative justice programs and his hopes for northwest Ohio.

I really hope this relationship becomes one of collaboration. He has already told me that he can train me as a restorative justice mediator (a step I've been looking to take for a while now). I look forward to writing some grants for restorative program funding and maybe co-authoring some pieces for publication. I'm pretty excited about the whole range of possibilities.