high school kids and the way they really acted in TV history? I know they were all like 20 somethings on the show for real, just curious what your take might be?

Well, they were certainly more realistic than the Saved By the Bell kids!!!

The sweathogs were a collection of stereotypes. There was the jock (Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington) the bully (Juan Epstein) the nerd (Arnold Horshak) and the macho ladie's man (Vinnie Barbarino). So a guess you can say they represented that particular cross section of high school students fairly realistically. But their are so many other high school students who don't fit those stereotypes. So "Welcome Back Kotter" was only a partial representation of typical high school students at best.

Defintely a good representation of high school kids in the HOOD-lol

Their ages in real life didn't affect how they came off as high school students. I look at my old year books from exactly that time frame and marvel at how "grown up" we all looked, at least as seniors! It's like that Bob Dylan song, "My Back Pages": "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now"!

My kids are in high school now and the same stereotypes still apply. Not just in the "hood" either--I was bused to school from an upper middle class suburb to one slightly less so, and my girls go to school in the middle of a cornfield out in the country now. "There is nothing new under the sun...."