Dear Mr. Salinger,

I have been reading and teaching your novel The Catcher in the Rye and various short stories for about ten years now. The Catcher in the Rye is one of the few novels I teach that I see something new every time I teach it. Very selfishly, I try to teach it every year I teach.

I say “selfishly” because I feel as if I drag students through the book and show them what I see in them. I have framed dozens of questions on the book, read hundreds of essays, and led them through almost every page of the book. I force them read the book because I love the work.

However, they do not necessarily love the book. They read it through my eyes and my critical approach. The nature of teaching is that I have to train my students to read critically and use their minds. They have to take apart sentences and paragraphs, dissect metaphors, and cut up the characters. If I do my job well, my students become accomplished mechanics and surgeons. They take apart a work the way a mechanic takes apart a car. They can look at their own writing, check the oil, rebuild the transmission and do the bodywork.

However, if they can vivisect and operate on a text, it does not mean that they can love it. I teach the students how to read my way, but not how to read their way. They come to a text with the cynical tools and hard-bitten ear of their English teacher, not with the naivete of a thirteen-year-old.

I need to teach my students to read with their minds. I hope that their hearts will be picked up along the way. I teach Catcher in the Rye to students who know Sonic the Hedgehog better than “Old Eustacia Vye.” Love of a character only comes from the mature minds. We have to get smitten with Travis McGee, James Bond, and D’artignon. Then, once we go through all the infatuations and get our hearts broken a few times, then we are ready to fall in love. My students have not opened their hearts to any literary character. They are literary wallflowers, hanging around the punchbowl and the bathroom. They cannot approach the text as a mature person would, take a risk, and ask for a dance. Their teacher has to matchmake for them.

I think this “cheapening” of the text is a tradeoff that all teachers must make. On one hand, I think that Catcher is an important enough book for every student to read. I do not want any graduate of mine not to know the importance of the brass ring and the beauty of "Little Shirley Beans." On the other hand, my students are not good enough readers to understand the book. I have to use it to teach them the skills.

I think of this every time I tell the story of the cover of Catcher in the Rye. If you didn’t want the reader to be fooled by the artwork, how must you feel about us English teachers leading our students around with questions and examples?