Two years running, I tried a hand in each camp: one edition of The Catcher in The Rye (what we fondly came to call the “Wee Version”–the maroon cover most readers recall) in my right for the students who’d purchased that one, and in my left, the other–larger format, red carousel horse, sunshine yellow title, a reissue with 1950s cover art. Given how much in-the-text work we do, this juggling made me feel even clumsier than I actually am, but mostly it just took too much time to get everyone on the right page, right paragraph, right line. What with all that, plus reading glasses perpetually slipping southward on my nose and having to get to the other side of the room to re-up the heat every once in awhile, it was just too much.

So this year, we English 1 teachers were determined: it would be all for one and one for all, the reissue.  No choice.  And for me, sadly, the one with dramatically less marginalia and far fewer Post-its marking especially critical annotations.

Of course, on the plus side, the print was significantly bigger. And, serendipitously, another benefit: I had company. A student who’d studied the novel last year had, on our first day with Salinger, come smiling through the door with the Wee Version, confident that his thoughtful 8th-grader scribbles and highlighting would give him a leg up on the nightly reading and daily discussions. I tried rallying his better nature with the cry of the Three Musketeers, clapping him on the shoulder for emphasis– we’d be fellow travelers on a sail through the pages of a fresh, unmarked copy of the novel.

“Really? I can’t just use this one again?” He smiled hopefully.

“I know you’re comfortable with it, but no. If I can do it, you can do it. We’ll both wean ourselves off what we thought we thought about Holden. It’ll be fun.”

As the chapters ticked by, we both saw parts of the novel differently or more fully than before. For me, the very words on the page–a different font style and size from what had become so familiar to me over several years–yielded more meaning as I read each night’s assignment. In a sense, the medium was a whole new message–an object lesson in the value of even small changes for opening the mind one or two cranks wider.