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The Numbers Six and Seven Are Making Life Hell for Math Teachers
‘Six seven’ sends teens into a frenzy that schools have been powerless to stop. ‘It’s like throwing catnip at cats.’
Math teacher Cara Bearden braces herself for any equation that yields the two numbers, knowing her students will immediately scream them right back at her. “SIX Sevennnnnn,” they squeal with a palms-up, seesaw hand gesture that looks somewhere between juggling and melon handling. The meme is ripping across the internet and spilling into real life, especially at school.
“If you’re like, ‘Hey, you need to do questions six, seven,’ they just immediately start yelling, ‘Six Seven!’” says Bearden, who teaches sixth- and eighth-graders at Austin Peace Academy in Austin, Texas. “It’s like throwing catnip at cats.”
Now teachers avoid breaking kids into groups of six or seven, or asking them to turn to page 67, or instructing them to take six or seven minutes for a task. Six is a perfect number, and seven is a prime number, but only a glutton for punishment would put them together in front of a bunch of 13-year-olds.
Math teacher Cara Bearden says uttering the numbers in front of her students is ‘like throwing catnip at cats.’
The meme’s meaning (and its whole point) is that it has no meaning. Maybe if French philosopher Albert Camus had a TikTok, he could explain it, given how well he understood repetitive cycles of senselessness. But Reddit works, too.
“The fact that six seven is not funny,” one person wrote, “is funnier than 67 itself.”
The meme is a prime example of brain rot, the internet junk food consumed by people of all ages to suck away time, productivity and the living of life. Kids have been saying “six seven” for about—sorry—six or seven months since the spring, but the recent return to school has supercharged the trend.
If “six seven” weren’t the rage, another meme would be. Not long ago, the phrase “Skibidi Toilet” was inescapable internet slang. But six seven has more entry points into actual conversations between teachers and students. Social Studies: The Summer of Love, the country’s hippie moment, took place in 1967. Science: Carbon is atomic number 6 on the Periodic Table of Elements. Nitrogen is 7. Geography: The world has seven continents, but only six with countries.
Religious schools get a catchy one: God created the universe in six days, the Bible says, and rested on the seventh.
Six seven is a generational inside joke. Recently, a bunch of young people filled an In-N-Out Burger, waiting for the announcement of order number 67. Athletes who are either 6’7” or wear the number 67 are hearing six-seven shouts from kids. It’s bringing random joy from pain scales to parking garages.
By many accounts, the six-seven craze traces back to late last year and the rapper Skrilla, whose song “Doot Doot (6 7)” includes the phrase “six seven,” a reference to 67th street in Philadelphia where many of his friends grew up. The song caught on with video edits of the NBA’s LaMelo Ball, the star 6’7” point guard on the Charlotte Hornets.
Then in March, the meme spiraled further into youth culture with “the 6-7 Kid,” a viral video of a boy with forward-swept hair who lurches toward the camera and delivers a giddy “six seven” with hand motions. That this one moment became so central to the craze—it was plucked from the middle of a 36-minute basketball video—makes almost as little sense as the craze itself.
The meme has been great for at least one person: Skrilla. He’s now packing venues on a tour whose highlight is the six-seven line in “Doot Doot.” The 26-year-old rapper loves how something universal has come from a gritty song about street life that he wasn’t even planning to release. He leaked it late last year as an afterthought.
By most accounts, the craze traces back to late last year and the rapper Skrilla.
Skrilla doesn’t elaborate much on the interpretation. “I never put an actual meaning on it, and I still would not want to,” he says. “That’s why everybody keeps saying it.”
He sounds delighted by the classroom mayhem the phrase has inspired. Asked if he has a message for all those kids shouting “six seven” in school instead of paying attention, he replies: “Six seven.”
Some teachers figure the only way to stop six seven is to say it themselves, thereby killing it with their uncoolness. On social media, math faculty describe asking ChatGPT to devise tests where every answer is six, seven, 67 and so on.
Sean Rainville says there is some relief that 67 isn’t charged with sexual innuendo like middle-schoolers’ previous favorite number, 69.
“This is very close to middle-schoolers’ previous favorite number, 69,” Sean Rainville, a math YouTuber, says of the figure charged with innuendo that once had no rival in the number arena. “There’s some relief for teachers that this meme is not sexual.”
Astronumerologist Jesse Kalsi, author of “The Power of Home Numbers,” calls six and seven “a very unconventional energy” that is somewhat unknowable. “It has a meaning,” he says, “but it is very hidden.”
Bearden, the Austin math teacher, says she usually tries to find the humor in the moment. Showing irritation would just make it worse, plus she likes it when any numbers make her students laugh. The one who has truly lost his patience with it is her son, Whit, a seventh-grader at Austin’s General Marshall Middle School who says the phrase interrupts all his classes. He tries to zone out when it does.
“I just silently go to my happy place,” he says. Where is his happy place? “School before six seven.”
Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com
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