For those that recall the show, hold that image in your head for a moment. You will need a steady grip on your thoughts to do so, given the current nature of education "reform" talk in our country.
If you are of a certain age, of course, you will have powerful memories of Kotter. These were the days of Network Television (3 channels kids!), when every elementary and middle school kid (and their parents) watched the same show on a given week night and returned to school the next morning to talk about said -- fresh with borrowed lines and modes of behavior.
"Up your nose with a rubber hose!"
Amongst other things, Kotter introduced America to Vinnie Barbarino -- played by John Travolta -- who -- before the show would end after its fourth season -- had starred in Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Bigger than US Steel, to borrow another line from that era.
For all its popularity and power, however, the show never seem to do well in syndication or have a strange cable/digital after life like some of its contemporaries: Happy Days, Mash, and so on. Maybe it was Travolta's contract.
I do now hear John Sebastian's #1 hit theme song song on Channel 7 of my Sirius radio.
Welcome back
Your dreams were your ticket out
Welcome back
To that same old place that you laughed about
Well the names have all changed since you hung around
But those dreams have remained and they've turned around
Who'd have thought they'd lead ya
(who'd have thought they'd lead ya)
Back here where we need ya
(back here where we need ya)
Yeah, we tease him a lot 'cause we got him on the spot
Welcome back
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6o0Cah5kQU
Perhaps the reason Kotter has disappeared from our cultural memory is embedded in these lyrics which, again, express the premise of the show and an increasingly distant part of American culture.
The idea, for example, that teaching was a profession that could move one up in the world ("your dreams were your ticket out") has been largely lost. Teach for America is -- along with other entities like the Department of Education, the New York Times, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the White House -- is refashioning teaching as a sort of charity position that one from privileged class does for a short time before moving on.
Because of the longstanding commitment of teachers' unions to the Democratic Party, this won't fully dawn on all until -- in a few years -- Chelsea Clinton acting as a reporter for EducationNation interviews Malia Obama, fresh from Harvard with a BA in Sociology ( like Arne *STEM is for other people's kids* Duncan), about her first year in a Rhee-covering DC classroom as a TFA student.
The corresponding idea, too, that a teacher who understands a particular neighborhood and culture will be best suited to teach kids is being systematically demolished. New teacher tests in my home state, Michigan, for example, pretty much guarantee that no kid from a Detroit neighborhood or inner ring suburb will be able to go "back to the same old place that they laughed about."http://bridgemi.com/2014/01/how-michigans-colleges-and-universities-rank-on-tough-new-teacher-certification-tests/ There will be jobs for a few Emergency Managers and Chancellors because, politically and symbolically, corporate reform will need a Kotter like face ..... but Mr. Kotter won't be in the classroom. He simply didn't come from a place that could prepare him for those tests.
Let's go back to Mr. Kotter, Gabe Kaplan himself, being supervised by the union rep.
Valiant public educators today would be thrilled -- not suspicious -- to see a figure like Kotter (funny, charismatic, engaged, innovative) teaching a small group of "sweathogs." But you won't see that kind of movie anymore (Dead Poets' Society, Mr. Chips, and so on).
Education has failed so much since the glory days of America, we have been told, that we need to "disrupt" to improve it. And the Kotteresque idea of teaching needs to be disrupted, too. As far as we can tell, neither President Obama nor Arne Duncan had a particularly inspiring teacher in their life. They are both like the proverbial turtles sitting on top of 6 foot poles saying, "I got here myself! By doing well on tests!"
From this English Professor's position, the position of a literary historian, what we need to do is disrupt the current narrative, rather than the profession.
We could start with simple things like recalling the fact that Mr. Kotter himself was the original "sweathog" at New Utrecht High -- in the sixties!!
The character wasn't imagined, then, to be someone who came from a golden age to help a generation that had fallen (Kotter appeared many years before A Nation at Risk/1983). Rather, he was imagined -- based on Kaplan's own experience -- as part of the complex, messy, always, trans-historical difficulty and thrill of public education since its inception.
Let's, then, put out the welcome mat for Mr. Kotter. We have teased him enough. And we need him.
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