‘6-7!’ How Connecticut teachers are adopting the TikTok meme echoing through classrooms

Right now, a middle schooler's favorite numbers likely add up to 13.

The viral "6-7" meme, adopted earlier this year by Paige Bueckers, has swept through the youth of Connecticut and migrated into classrooms, leaving teachers to craft creative solutions to a potential source of disruption, where the mention of either number can lead to a chorus of voices screaming the other.

CT Insider spoke with five middle and high school teachers across the state, all of whom reported hearing the meme in their classrooms, with usage increasing throughout fall. Several of them presented creative solutions that adapted the meme for their teaching purposes.

Luckily, teachers agreed, "6-7" largely is harmless. Propelled to virality on TikTok by the rap song "Doot Doot (6 7)" by Skrilla, as well as a video of two kids saying the numbers and performing accompanying hand gestures at a basketball game, the purpose of the meme is almost entirely self-referential: "There's no nefarious meaning," one teacher noted.

"It's just silly. It's silliness," said Meghan Geary, an English teacher at Woodland Regional High School in Beacon Falls and former Connecticut Teacher of the Year. Her students often would shout "6-7" when it appeared as line numbers in plays such as "The Crucible."

"I just kind of go with the flow, and we're able to just get right back to work," Geary said.

Several Connecticut teachers have found ways to incorporate the meme into learning, often drawing from resources shared in online teacher groups.

Karla McClain, who teaches choir at Illing Middle School in Manchester, said she had found a song online, titled "6 7 Sigma Rizz," that she had her kids sing for two days to the tune of the Dutch folk song "Sarasponda." McClain says the song drew mixed reactions in the class, with some kids more hesitant to participate and others loving the exercise.

"It's more about engaging with the kids and showing, 'Look, I found this, I'm trying to engage with you and understand your words and your slang,''' McClain said. "And it's making fun of them a little bit because they do appreciate a good roasting, middle school kids are great with humor."

For Brooke Hadgraft, who teaches seventh-graders English Language Arts at Sage Park Middle School in Windsor, letting the kids shout out the number when they reach page 67 of a reading was a small way to "allow them a second to be kids."

Hadgraft said the meme had not been overly disruptive in the classroom, but that on a day when she was out, she left behind a unique assignment with the substitute — her students had six to seven minutes to write a 67-word response on what the "6-7" meme means to them. When she returned the next day, she said the students had found the assignment hilarious, and all of them had completed it.

Valerie Fortney, a science teacher at Woodland Regional High School, used the meme as an opportunity to have some fun with her honors chemistry class, in the form of a pop quiz on the periodic table.

Questions in Fortney's quiz included "How many protons does carbon have?" and "Elements in group 16 have how many valence electrons?" The catch was that every answer was either six, seven or the atomic number 67, making the quiz both thematically accurate and meme-appropriate.

"They were super quiet as they started the 'pop Quiz.' Then one at a time they started giggling and making faces. I could not keep a straight face at all," Fortney wrote to CT Insider. "We went over the answers for all the questions out loud. The whole class was laughing as we kept exclaiming 67!"

Despite the current ubiquitousness of "6-7," teachers were confident the meme did not have much staying power.

Jessica Roach, an eighth-grade math teacher at Whisconier Middle School in Brookfield, who uses the meme to help students remember the fraction 2/3 (it's .6777 repeating), said the meme already had cycled down to kids as young as second grade, which soon would make it uncool for the middle schoolers.

Teachers said "6-7" was just the latest in a long line of memes, including dabbing, the word "yeet," and the video game Among Us, to briefly enrapture the youth of Connecticut.

"Since it's so harmless, you'll have an easier time leaning into it and being silly than getting mad about it," McClain, the music teacher, said. "Then they just push you, and that's not fun. It's more fun to just lean into it, and then they stop because they realize, 'Oh, it really does sound dumb.'"