In my experience of living and working in rural places, trends arrive late. Actually, a lot of things arrive late to rural places. City water connection, electricity, paved roads, internet infrastructure of all kinds.
Thinking about the 6-7 trend reminded me of my introduction to Pokemon. According to Wikipedia, Pokemon debuted in 1996 and peaked around 2002. Meanwhile, I didn’t hear about it until somewhere around 2000-2001, kind of on the tail end of the wave. Of course, that was before social media and widespread internet, and my family didn’t consistently have cable, or should I say satellite because cable arrived late also. We mostly relied on a rusty antenna on the top of the house that was turned with a large dial inside the house. But I digress. Trends tended to arrive a little slower than they did elsewhere.
Before moving to Spain, I had already started hearing about the 6-7 meme trend online and figured I’d probably hear it in the schools where I teach. In language assistant groups, people were already talking about it before the school year even started, and by November I was hearing people complain about their 6-7 exhaustion. But despite all of that, I still hadn’t actually encountered it myself. Then again, most of the assistants I was hearing from lived in A Coruña, Santiago, or other larger cities in Galicia.
It wasn’t until January, after winter break, that I first heard a student say “6-7.” Both of my schools are CEIP schools with grade levels ranging from kindergarten through 6th grade, and both are located in separate rural towns of around 1,500 people on the northern coast of Galicia. My first encounter with the trend was at the school closer to a more populated area, mostly among some of the older students in what I would call a “united discovery”. After that, it slowly dispersed and became a small ongoing joke between the students, my English teacher, and me.
Meanwhile at my other school, which is noticeably more remote, I didn’t hear it until shortly after Semana Santa in April. First it appeared among some of the older grades, and then, somewhat surprisingly, among the kindergarteners a few weeks later. Interestingly, some of the kindergarten students have older siblings in the upper grades, but even then it still seemed to trickle downward slowly. By the time the younger kids started repeating it, some of the older students already seemed tired of it.
Now, I can speculate on the reasons for all this. Maybe there’s a language barrier considering 6-7 is an English-language trend, though it clearly spread through other parts of Spain much earlier. Maybe because I’m only at each school twice a week, I simply missed its earlier introduction. Maybe it had already circulated through the schools before I got here.
Still, it was an interesting reminder that things move differently in rural places, even now in the age of social media and high-speed internet. According to Wikipedia, the trend was popularized in 2025 and by March 2026 was already considered to be on the decline. Meanwhile, here on the rural coast of Galicia, it feels like we’re only just getting to it.