What Happens When Memes Show Up In School Textbooks: A Teacher’s Real Experience
I’m leaning over Mia’s desk during our close read of The Giver last Tuesday, half-zoned out thinking about the scheduled fire drill after lunch, when she taps the page with her chewed pencil eraser and snorts. “Nah, how is this meme in our actual textbook?”
I look, and sure enough, it’s printed right there in a blue “Connect To Your Life” sidebar, right after the chapter where Jonas watches his father release the twin. It’s the classic Drake two-panel meme: left side, Drake turns away from the camera with the text “Me reading assigned chapters in order before class”; right side, Drake grins, with “Me skipping to the end to see if the main character lives”. It’s not a kid’s doodle. It’s put there by the textbook publisher.
By now, half the class is craning their necks to look, and Javi, in the back row, flips three pages ahead and whoops, “There’s another one! Girl math but for essay deadlines!” It’s true: next chapter’s sidebar uses the viral girl math format to break down why a 100-word essay due tomorrow feels harder than a 1000-word essay due next week.
When we ordered these new textbooks this fall, the sales rep mentioned they were “updated for modern learners” and I just nodded. I’ve been teaching 7th grade language arts for 12 years, I’ve seen every iteration of “textbooks trying to be cool”: 2000s references to The O.C., 2010s Minecraft shoutouts, that one year every side bar had a QR code that didn’t work. I assumed this was just another marketing gimmick I’d ignore.
But within a week of school starting, I started getting emails from parents. One mom wrote that she was upset her kid was seeing meme content in a paid textbook, when she already limits TikTok at home. Another dad asked if we were cutting actual content to make room for internet jokes. I brought it up the next day in the teacher’s lounge, and half the room had stories: my 10th grade biology friend had a Distracted Boyfriend meme explaining mitosis (boyfriend is the dividing cell, distracted by a mitochondria instead of lining up chromosomes correctly), the 8th grade math teacher had a “One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor” meme explaining why you can’t skip steps when solving for x. Half the teachers thought it was silly, the other half thought it was distracting.
I decided to ask my students what they actually thought, after class that day. Most admitted it was kind of cringey that a bunch of adults who probably don’t use TikTok were picking memes for their textbook. But more than a third said they actually remembered the point of the sidebars with memes better than the boring content notes. Mia, the girl who first pointed out the Drake meme, told me she’d struggled with remembering to preview chapters before starting to read, but the joke stuck with her so much she now does it without thinking. That same week, I had a parent come in for a conference, frustrated about the meme sidebars, convinced they were lowering academic standards. I asked her 7th grade son to explain what the Drake meme was about, and he said, “It just says what everyone does anyway. It made me feel like the book gets it, you know?” His mom sat quiet for a minute, she’d had no idea the meme was tied to a study skill, not just a random joke.
That’s the thing no one talks about when they panic about memes in textbooks: memes aren’t just mindless junk for kids. They’re a shared language, the same way comic strips or variety show references were shared language for kids 50 years ago. When a textbook uses that language well, it’s just a shortcut to connect a new idea to something kids already know.
That said, it doesn’t always work. I’ve seen a Woman Yelling At A Cat meme in the grammar section that made zero sense and came off as mean to kids who mix up pronouns. I’ve had multiple pages where kids drew their own off-topic memes over actual text, turning a whole chapter into a series of Skibidi Toilet doodles that make the text unreadable. It’s never all good or all bad.
What I’ve started telling parents and other teachers is small, concrete stuff that doesn’t require a big fight or a textbook boycott. If you’re a parent and your kid comes home talking about memes in their textbook, don’t fire off an email to the principal first. Just ask one question: “What’s that meme supposed to tell you about what you’re learning?” Nine times out of ten, it’s tied to a study tip or a key concept, and you’ll get clarity in 30 seconds. If it’s just a random joke with no purpose, you can bring it up then. If your kid draws memes in their textbook margins, don’t automatically take the book away or yell. If they’re not covering the text, leave it be – a lot of kids process information better when they’re doodling. If they do cover the text, just ask them to keep a small cheap notebook for doodling during class, or keep a pack of sticky notes to cover the doodle when they need to read the page.
For teachers, if your new textbook has memes you don’t love, you don’t have to use them. If one falls flat, just pause for 10 seconds and say “Yeah, that’s pretty cringey. Let me tell you what they were actually trying to say here.” Kids respect that way more than you trying to pretend you think it’s cool.
Last Friday, I was grading exit tickets after school, and I found a crumpled sticky note stuck in my teacher’s edition, right next to the Drake meme. A student left it at some point this semester, and it says “this meme is lowkey good 10/10”. I laughed and stuck it back. We’re still figuring this out. Some memes work, some don’t. Some parents worry, some kids don’t care. It won’t break public education, and it won’t fix it either. It’s just a small shift, one of hundreds that have happened to textbooks as they try to keep up with how kids actually talk. I still cringe at half the memes I see in these books. But I’m also not going to throw the whole textbook out over a Drake reference.
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