Karen Valentine

I know it's unbearably corny to admit that the theme song to Room 222 loops in my mind at the start of each semester. (I am a part-time media studies professor at a Jesuit college in San Francisco.) The bounce of hopefulness in Jerry Goldsmith's composition is tinged with melancholy. Or is that just me reacting to an image of a time long past that seems to have finally vanished? Or been vanquished.

The series premiered on ABC-TV in 1969, eventually entering the Friday night line-up at 9pm, following The Partridge Family, a sit-com about a single mom and her four kids who formed a pop band that released actual hit singles. (The fictional group's "I Think I Love You" went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1970.) This is probably when Room 222's opening montage of racial harmony happily making its way to high school (dressed in Kodachrome reds, yellows, and blues) entered my kid consciousness.

Created by James L. Brooks (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Simpsons), the show is billed as a comedy, but inspires few guffaws. Instead it functions more like a prime time school for little liberals, gently nudging forward a social issue that gets addressed through open, non-threatening dialogue each week. The main character is history teacher Pete Dixon, played unflappably by Lloyd Haynes. Everyone knows he is dating guidance counselor Liz McIntyre (Denise Nicholas), which allows the pair to spend free periods figuring out how best to approach each tender subject of the week.

Starring as fictional Walt Whitman High, the brick structure that appeared in the opening credits was Los Angeles High School built in 1917 at Olympic and Rimpau. The building sustained damage during 1971's Sylmar earthquake and became the site of a preservation battle between alumni and developers, which ended when the school's famous tower was gutted by a mysterious fire.

Yet the structure (a symbol of the vast twentieth-century U.S. community building project that erected world class -- often problematic -- systems and institutions) survived in the imagination as a site where cultural clashes got compassionately worked out. Students struggled to express themselves. Teachers argued over shifting pedagogical methods. Sexes battled. Classes conflicted. Times changed. Somehow (in this fictional universe, anyway) people with opposing viewpoints learned to treat each other respectfully, even if they never actually mended their divisions. In the vernacular of the era, diverse populations came together to "rap about what's going down, you dig?"

After its destruction, the building morphed into myth, a daydream of positive social progress, an imaginary arc bent toward a justice that proved unequal and elusive. (Read any number of currently banned books to uncover real U.S. history for yourself.) As a site appearing weekly on TV, and then for years later in after-school reruns, Walt Whitman High was itself a gently destructive fiction, selling a utopian self-image of the U.S., and indoctrinating children like me into believing the values represented there were real and broadly shared by the mainstream. It was only T.V. The episodic storytelling structure revealed its own artifice -- problems of the week brought forward and solved in under 30 minutes, opposing viewpoints aired, lessons learned, minds changed.

In one episode, Bud Cort (Harold and Maude) appears in John Lennon glasses, love beads, and fringe, fighting for his right to express himself against a dress code written in 1940. Hilariously, one parent on a committee convened to overhaul the antiquated guidelines says out loud that he will contest the results of a panel vote should it not go his way. While he is clearly the villain, the real lesson (easily overlooked in favor of the viewpoints expressed by the series' main characters) is that little tyrants everywhere will pull the levers of power to impose their will on the opposition, no matter how broad its base.

In another episode, a young Bob Balaban (Best In Show, Moonrise Kingdom) tangles with a conservative father, who escalates quickly when his teenage son expresses opinions contrary to his own. The irate patriarch complains to the school board about Mr. Dixon, the teacher he believes is exerting too much ideological influence on his son, and vows to have him fired for encouraging his child to think for himself. It's an outrage! Those who believe there is a correct way to express identity will do everything they can to force others to conform.

Room 222 is an image of a lost world, and a reminder that, though over 50 years have passed, little has changed. We have been arguing over the same issues for decades -- and are somehow further from solutions and more entrenched in disagreement.

I have always had a knack for finding the right words to say the wrong things. I am a contrarian by nature, with a deep black sense of humor. Nevertheless, when faced by repeated, endless, years, and piles of proof demonstrating humanity’s most bitter stupidity, I blame Room 222 for the tiny voice inside my head that insists, "there has to be a better way." As if I believed in the goodness of people, harumph…

One would think that, as a middle aged man, I would most closely identify with history teacher Pete Dixon, but no. I have never been, could never be, that steady or self assured. Pete is seldom racked with self doubt; he rarely, if ever, loses his cool. Instead, I see myself more in the bumbling student teacher, Alice Johnson, played with appealing awkwardness by Sebastopol-born actress Karen Valentine, who appears in the pilot episode on her first day student teaching for Dixon. Over the course of the series, Johnson becomes a teacher herself, but continues to struggle with self doubt.

I, like Valentine's Alice, am never not a novice. I seem to be caught in an endless loop, constantly learning and unlearning at the same time. Each semester new students arrive in my classrooms, and I doubt I have the skill to teach them, since I have not taught these particular individuals before. Somehow, knowledge, practice, or expertise kicks in and I magically (mysteriously) know what I am doing. Hopefully, the questions my students ask or the interpretations they put forward each semester are novel, forcing me to think about subjects I've long considered in a new light. This is what I get out of the teaching deal, along with not enough money to live on.

I know Room 222 molded itself into the soft tissue of my brain when it was still impressionable. I cannot escape its opening images. They won't let go. The hurt of dying hope persists, regardless of how much reality I force myself to face attempting to snuff it out for good. Whenever Room 222’s wistful theme song plays back in my head, the light I have struggled to extinguish reignites. It glows blue like a pilot flame.