Buy My Book - Short: Walking Tall When You’re Not Tall At All
By John Schwartz
Short: Walking Tall When You're Not Tall At All (Flash Point, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press, 2010)
This book is not really for you. That is to say, yes! Go ahead and buy it! But in fact, "Short" is written for young people -- kids from about the age of 12 to 17. It's about being short, which is a topic I know a lot about. At five foot three inches tall, my truth is that I am a short American.
I am shorter than my parents. I am shorter than my wife. I am shorter than my children. (My daughter has to stretch.) Growing up, it bugged me. Once I reached adulthood, I was no longer unhappy about being short, but I became increasingly unhappy with what being short had come to mean: flawed. Pharmaceutical companies, pushing for the government's permission to sell human growth hormone to children who were merely short, as opposed to those whose bodies can't produce enough of the hormone. In other words, the companies were offering to cure the condition known as idiopathic short stature.
We short guys weren't just little. We had a condition.
I wondered how that message is being received by kids growing up today, and worried about whether they would feel that they didn't measure up in more ways than the obvious. And as I did more research, I found references to studies that suggested short people have a harder time in school, earn less than taller folks and tend to be less successful. It seemed terribly unjust to me -- a burden on any child. But the deeper I dug, the more clear it became that the studies didn't actually doom shorter people to a second-class life. And so I decided to write a book to tell kids that they are, in fact, all right. And that they can walk tall. The book is part science test, part memoir and part manifesto.
It's a sneaky book, though. Randy Pausch, the author of the bestselling book The Last Lecture, his statement of hope while dying of pancreatic cancer, borrowed from the game of football to talk about "head-fake learning." On the field, the head fake tricks the opposing player into thinking you're headed in one direction when you actually plan to spring in another. But in the classroom, he said, head-fake learning is what the coaches did: "the one that teaches people things they don't realize they're learning until well into the process." So while a coach might seem to be teaching the rules of a game, the kids are actually learning things like teamwork and perseverance.
My head fake in writing this book is to entertain the reader with personal stories about growing up short and horror stories about the lengths people will go to in order to change their appearance -- the squeamish might want to skip over the passages about leg-lengthening surgery -- while giving them stealth lessons in science, methodical reasoning, statistics, sociology and psychology. And if I clown around a little to get a laugh, well, that's what the old Highlights magazine for kids calls "Fun with a purpose."
In a time when we seem most focused on teaching our children to score well on tests, I was hoping to give them a springboard to learn for the sake of learning, with a hook I hoped would excite them.
What does this have to do with justice and the law?
Back when our family was living in Maryland, I took on the role of a writing coach for kids preparing for their bar and bat mitzvahs. I would sit down with each one and go over the passage that had been assigned to them, and to help them explore the themes through the examination of more than a thousand years of scholarship and commentary.
What I found, over and over, was that the kids surprised me. They rose to the occasion, they had ideas of their own that they melded with the text. The kids responded most reliably to passages that touched on the theme of justice -- even if the greatest injustice one of them had known was overly broad restrictions on skateboarding in his local park. "It's not fair!" he said. "Put it in your speech," I said.
I had come to think that an injustice is being done to short kids -- and to any kid who is too short, too tall, too fat, too anything. Not meeting the norm is not a condition or a crime, but we were telling them they aren't good enough because of a factor they can't control. (The efficacy of the hormone shots is debatable, but many scientists believe that a child who receives the shots will go, as one put it to me, from being short to being short.) And so I teach them about the focusing illusion, in which we think that every problem we have flows from one problem, and try to help them think beyond it.
In my sessions with the Temple kids, we would not only discuss justice. We'd also discuss what's called tikkun olam -- literally, repairing the world. This small book, in its small way, is an effort at repairing the damage that we do to our kids by telling them they are not good enough.
John Schwartz, writes about law for the New York Times, and is the author of Short: Walking Tall When You’re Not At All.
