The class was on page 66 of their math textbook.
Cristina Kusaka, a fourth and fifth grade teacher at an elementary school in San Francisco, had already planned to skip page 67, and not merely because those numbers have effectively become an earth-altering gag for millions of youngsters, but because she just wasn’t covering what was on that page.
“You could see them at the edge of their seats, like, they were so excited for me to say, ‘Okay, now turn to page 67,’” Kusaka remembered.
When she told the class to turn to page 68, her students were crestfallen.
“They were, like, ‘You did that on purpose. You don’t want us to have any fun.’”
Kusaka is one of hundreds of public school teachers in San Francisco who hear the numbers dozens of times a day. Some teachers have banned the utterance of the numbers “6 7” altogether, while others have chosen to lean into it, perhaps in an effort to make it cringe. (Nothing is worse than a joke adults find funny, too.)
Right now, though, “6 7” remains inescapable, a number that haunts teachers’ dreams.
A quick debrief on “6 7.” As with other brain-rotted ephemera, context hardly matters to your understanding of it: A person (and by a person, I mean, a child) says “six-seeeeeven” while moving their hands up and down in a half-shrug, kind of like an extremely lazy juggler or a balancing scale. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
6 7 originated from the Philadelphia drill rapper Skrilla, who released a song titled “Doot Doot (6 7)” in March of this year. He utters, in an almost glottal tone, the numbers “6 7.” (He has said in past interviews that the numbers don’t mean anything.)
The song gained some traction in fan edits of clips of basketball players, most notably LaMelo Ball, who stands at 6 feet 7 inches. Then, it spread, first by Kentucky high school basketball player Taylen Kinney, then by a child who popularized saying the numbers while doing the hand gesture. (He is now the ne plus ultra example of a “Mason 67,” a jokey insult for a certain brand of white boy.) By now, it’s been spoofed on South Park and has made Dictionary.com’s 2025 word of the year, proving that a string of numbers can be a word if repeated often enough.
Public school teachers bear the unique burden of having to deal with dozens of children who all want to laugh anytime that sequence of numbers pops up, which is often, given that six and seven are in the top 10 of numbers. 6 7 might be said while counting, often occurring as a page number, or two dates on the class calendar every single month.
Andrea James, a school social worker at a school near the Mission, said that kids she was escorting to an after-school program got giddy after seeing a license plate with “6 7.” Kids light up when 6, or 7, or any permutation of those two numbers pop up in their day-to-day life. Look for it, and it pops up a lot.
This has been going on since the spring, at the very earliest, based on what public school staffers have told me. But it came in fits and starts: first a couple of mentions, then chatter among teachers from other schools, before it revved up across elementary and middle schools at the start of this school year.
It’s even a hit among kindergarteners. “The little ones, they don't have a phone, but because they hear the third graders say it, and the fourth and fifth graders, they go crazy,” said Stephanie Suarez, a classroom coordinator. “The little ones just think it’s cool now, too.”
Because “6 7” is not inappropriate (unlike another sequence of two numbers that begins with 6), teachers generally let it fly. Besides, it’s not all bad.
“Maybe even those that don't necessarily have good friends, like, that's a way that they can connect with somebody their own age,” Kusaka said.
Teachers I spoke to haven’t banned the numbers in their school, nor have they really heard of anyone else doing it. Sure, students will giggle at any mention of “6 7,” but class can usually go on uninterrupted. At worst, middle school teacher Brenna Boss told Gazetteer, she will ban it for the duration of a class if kids get rowdy for longer than a minute or two.
The question many parents and educators (and, let’s be honest, trend-chasing journalists) are asking is, How long will “6 7” last?
“I feel like it’s jumped the shark a little bit,” James, the school social worker, said. “There’s been adults with the costumes.”
On Halloween, some teachers dressed up as the numbers 6 and 7, either in an effort to embrace or defang the joke.
In Boss’ middle school, it’s already dying, circling the drain along with “skibidi.” Among high school teachers she knows, the phrase has already become passé.
“I’ve sort of seen it play out. ‘Okay, this was really popular. It was so funny to get this adult to say this thing that only us middle schoolers are a part of.’ And then it's like, ‘Oh, this is blown up out of control. This is cringe.’”
She anticipates that it’ll vanish entirely come winter break. But that’s not for another 6, 7 weeks.
