There has been a genuine brain-rot epidemic. Not just in Dover or Tuscarawas County, but rather everywhere you see teenagers. You will hear someone continuously yelling “67! 67! 67!” while shaking their hands up and down. It has gotten so bad that teachers have put them on worksheets or just say them in class, maybe it’s their way of coping with their brain-rotted students or, maybe, they actually find it funny.
I wanted to get a teacher’s perspective on how the earworm 67 has affected their classroom. Mrs. McConnell said, “Welp. I would say it is certainly bizarre. Why is it funny? I am not sure anyone knows.” She continued to say that she was aware of its existence even before school started, so as it came up, she acknowledged it. Even as a student, I find it annoying a lot of the time. I asked if it could ever get annoying, she said, “ I suppose so. 67’s hilarity may not last the entire year, but one thing is for sure: the number 2/3rd’s is definitely not going anywhere anytime soon.” Honestly, I really admire how much this joke gets played into by math teachers specifically. No other teacher has gone through dumb internet trends like math teachers. In the words of Mrs. McConnell, “It will continue to be .67. In the meantime, if students are smiling in response to numbers in a math class, that’s a win in my book!”
From all of my research (scrolling the internet all summer), 67 came from a song that got popular on TikTok over the summer. The 67 sensation first started with a trend because of the basketball player LaMelo Ball, who is 6 feet and 7 inches tall. It was an edit trend of the video, starting with a normal video, then transitioning into a LaMelo Ball edit when the song started or someone says “67.” With the explosion of this trend, there was a following of different celebrities trying to fit saying “67” in interviews or doing the 67 handshake to be in an edit. Personally, I don’t really think 67 is funny. It was at the beginning for a little while, but it got too much in too short a time. The biggest problem is that not a lot of people know where it comes from. For example, the 21 meme is well known. Basically, everyone knows it because a ton of people had Vine, and there weren’t different ‘sides’ of Vine like TikTok.
Since the beginning of this school year, and from what I hear in the halls, I would say that the Freshman and Junior classes are the most brain-rotted. A student at DHS, Alexis Bolton, who is very open about her love of all brainrot, says that, “Personally, I believe all brainrot is amazing. As a brainrot indulger myself, I do not believe that any word, number, or sentence can be dragged on in a fashion that could be viewed as ‘too much’. Personally, I believe that brainrot should be used MORE. 67 is such a monumentally glorious term to use, as is 41.” For those who have a life outside of sitting in bed on their phone might think: what on earth if 41? 41 has a very similar origin to 67; it comes from a song, and the rapper states that he is 41 years old and has 41 amounts of everything. I haven’t seen nearly as much of 41 as I see for 67, but in my opinion, they both equally rot your brain.
Another example is Italian brainrot, which started from AI-generated animals with an Italian accent that had some sort of dramatic story to them. As much as I dislike the use of AI, this is one of the only brainrot trends that I actually found funny. The fact that people could turn absolutely nothing into a beautiful story of heartbreak, romance, and betrayal, all starting with an AI image of a shark with three legs wearing sneakers, is truly joyful to me. There are so many different characters with families and unique looks. At first, I didn’t understand this trend, but the more I saw of it, the more I just understood Tralalero Tralala or Tung Tung Sahur. I don’t see Italian brainrot as much as I used to, which upsets me dearly. As a community of chronically online people, we need this back. Maybe we could do it without the use of AI this time. I don’t care how we bring it back; we just need to bring it back.
Brainrot has become such a large epidemic that different teachers use it in class, people connect it to almost everything, or people just say it to say it without reason. Personally, a lot of brainrot isn’t funny to me. I think it’s just annoying when it gets repeated over and over and over again. I think we should give the poor math teachers of the world a break with a different meme. Why not give something to science teachers?
