When I began teaching high school English, I shared a classroom with a colleague who had papered the walls with various pictures bearing slogans designed to motivate our charges to strive to reach new and lofty academic heights. I don’t recall many of those posters specifically, but one that remains vivid in my memory was shaped like an open book. The two exposed pages read, “Literature helps us make sense out of life.”

Today, I appreciate the meaning of those words more than ever. Maybe that’s because one of my primary current responsibilities is to help convince teenagers, many of them reluctant readers, of both the long-term and short-term value of examining and carefully contemplating the printed word.

No one particular work of literature makes the light bulb go on for everyone who reads it. Some young people are transformed by “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but far from all of them are. Many find enlightenment in “The Catcher in the Rye”; others are left cold by it. Shakespeare’s works have enchanted and inspired more than a few high school students over the years, but countless others find them indecipherable. For such young people, mandated study of the Bard’s writings is equal parts frustrating and irrelevant.

The true secret of reading’s importance, one I’m earnestly trying to impart to the youngsters who enter my classroom these days, is that the value of absorbing literature actually appreciates as years go by. Perhaps that’s because once one’s formal education ends, whatever reading he or she does is primarily by choice, which heightens the chances of obtaining some enlightenment through it.

Some years ago, I read, with some difficulty, a lengthy, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of one of America’s founding fathers. And while historians inevitably compared the second president of the United States to any number of his contemporaries, I found John Adams more reminiscent of a fellow lawyer who was born more than a century after Adams had died, and who on the surface couldn’t have been more different from him. The individual I thought of was the subject and author of “A Lawyer’s Life,” which I had read previously.

John Adams’ family had been prominent in Massachusetts for generations. Johnnie Cochran was born in the segregated American south of the 1930s; during his boyhood his parents uprooted their family and relocated to the West Coast. Adams’ father was a respected farmer and town selectman who supervised schools and roads; Cochran’s dad sold insurance. Adams graduated from Harvard at 19, then interned with an eminent Worcester attorney. Cochran worked his way through UCLA, subsequently earning his Juris Doctor from Loyola Marymount University School of Law. Adams became renowned for helping to build a nation; Cochran fought tirelessly but relatively anonymously for justice throughout his life, earning a measure of fame only late in his career, and that was for defending celebrities. But far more significant than any nominal differences between the two men was what they had in common: The passionate belief that everyone was entitled to competent legal defense.

Adams’ serving as the attorney for the British soldiers accused of killing five civilians during the Boston Massacre made him no more popular amongst his peers in 1770 than Cochran was to much of 1990s America when he defended O.J. Simpson two and a quarter centuries later. Six of the eight soldiers defended by Adams were acquitted of murder; the other two were convicted on reduced charges.

“Facts are stubborn things, and whatever our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence,” Adams reputedly said after the verdict was delivered. He didn’t necessarily admire those he was defending, but he did his job by convincing a jury his clients weren’t guilty of what they had been charged with.

In a notorious murder trial that gripped the nation in 1996, Cochran and his legal “dream team” earned freedom ”“ if not exoneration ”“ for Simpson, though their client ultimately became an even greater pariah in his time than the British soldiers for whom Adams won acquittals were in theirs. But Cochran didn’t take Simpson’s case because he believed the actor and former football star was innocent; he took it on principle, the same rationale Adams had for defending the Redcoats. The important life lesson obtainable from the life stories of these two outwardly different men: What people have in common is far more significant than any real or imagined differences they have.

My mentor teacher’s sign was correct: Literature does help make sense out of life. That’s why I’ll continue to read voraciously; if I can find a common theme in the lives of John Adams and Johnnie Cochran, maybe someday I’ll unearth some printed information that’ll help me discover the meaning of my own existence!