trying to teach the skills or the literature?

The topic of this blog post is something that we have talked about a lot in my field instruction, but I don't think that t I fully understood the controversy until I began teaching the Odyssey to my ninth graders. The Odyssey is obviously a very difficult text with very formal diction, and although I think that it has been going well in my class, I leave school each day wondering if it would be more beneficial to my students to teach a different text. We spend most of our time in class covering the plot, and spend very little time moving beyond the text. I am not saying that working just on the plot is a loss, as the students are working on a lot of reading strategies, but I would also like to be teaching my students analytical skills. Would it be more helpful to use a text that we could spend less time spent on issues of plot? I can however see the other side of the argument in that the Odyssey, like many classic texts, is referenced throughout literature and our culture. I do not want my students to be disadvantaged because they did not learn the Odyssey in 9th grade like most students do. I really am struggling with this issue....I guess this something that I will have to work through in my teaching career.