The tempest

There are only two enduring questions in life: What do women really want, and what to do with ninth-graders?

I haven't a clue about the first and, in answer to the second, suggest finger painting and farm work.

It gets trickier when we ask ourselves what ninth-graders should be reading.

The Observer was so traumatized by his ninth-grade dust-ups with Shakespeare and Dickens that he avoided the two Brits for decades. I reread ''Great Expectations" on vacation last fall and was smitten. The big kahuna, ''Bleak House," with its phenomenal opening riff on London fog, now pulsates darkly on my bureau. To read Shakespeare remains a lunatic idea.

There's a strong case to be made that ninth-graders should be spared such writers until they can better appreciate their genius. Hell, they haven't even worked up a decent case of acne yet. Junior year sounds about right for Shakespeare, and there should be an ironclad law that a student must see a play of his before reading it. I finally got ''Othello" after watching Christopher Plummer's Iago on Broadway. Most 14-year-olds shrink at the leap of imagination from the printed to the spoken word because Shakespeare's brand of English is essentially a foreign language.

So what should a ninth-grader read? Anything by E.B. White. Then the clean narratives of Willa Cather, Hemingway, and James Agee. Graham Greene's lighter stuff, Harper Lee, Twain, and Fitzgerald. The poetry of Billy Collins and Elizabeth Bishop. (Ban Wallace Stevens.) Short stories from most of the above, plus Joyce and Irwin Shaw.

The kids should read them for enjoyment. Novelist Douglas Bauer, currently the writer-in-residence at Smith, asked his creative writing students what their memories were of early high school English. They loved Twain, Poe, John Irving, Haruki Murakami, he reports, but rolled their eyes at ''The Great Gatsby." Bauer was dumbfounded. How could they miss the allure of this haunting classic?

Because they were forced on pain of death to expound on the meaning of the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock. Enter the Godzilla of high school English -- the dreaded metaphor. ''Why the obsession with the green light? Because it's the way the teachers were taught," says Bauer. ''That's a graduate school inquiry at best. It's sad that eager readers will be taught out of the pure fun of it."

I dropped in on Mary Burchenal, the estimable head of the English department at Brookline High, to get her take on the subject. Is the ninth-grade curriculum broken? Not a bit, she said. Although the canon hasn't changed much in decades, the curriculum has.

''It's not so much the choice of the book as the choice of approach," she explains. ''Good teaching at the high school level today is very different from 20 years ago."

Take Shakespeare. Most Brookline High ninth-graders still square off with the Bard over ''Twelfth Night." To decipher it, they rely on a book from the ''Shakespeare Set Free" series that, among other things, plumbs the intricacies of sword fights. And then there is the text of the play itself. Each page is balanced by another of notes and definitions. Back in Jurassic Park, I subsisted on CliffsNotes and still missed the import of the dozen words on a page I looked up. These kids watch videos of dramatic scenes and often act out one themselves.

''If the objective in reading Shakespeare is to understand everything in the play, that will frustrate more than teach," Burchenal concedes. ''But if the objective is to expose kids to some sense of the beauty and fun of Shakespeare, it's fine."

Maybe. But what's the hurry? Some ninth-graders, face it, will be Shakespeare road kill despite a teacher's best efforts. Agreed, she says, but the more important questions are these: ''What sort of casualties will you accept? If one in 10 bites the dust, is that OK? What about three in 10?"

Speaking of road kill, listen to Charlie Garmel in a sophomore English class: ''I read Shakespeare in seventh and eighth grade, and it scared me out of reading one outside book for pleasure since then." I'm with you, Charlie.

It turns out, though, that Garmel represents a distinct minority of the two sophomore English classes I encountered. I was horrified to learn that most of them actually liked their ninth-grade Shakespeare experience. Why? Precisely because it's hard.

''It's good to read Shakespeare now because it's the hardest," says Max Hiersteiner. ''It's good preparation for everything else." Adds Sophie Hines, a fellow student in Garmel's class, ''It's cool to be able to understand it better."

This is grand. But Shakespeare and Dickens and the Fitzgerald translations of Homer are to be enjoyed, not endured. English class need not be some warped pursuit of a literary merit badge. It should be a seductive entrance into the sublime world of literature, a place where, with luck, you will reside for the rest of your natural born days. Anything that detracts from the early reading addiction is a crime.

Sam Allis's e-mail address is allis@globe.com.