The debate is real, and it gets heated. Something so simple as notebook colors can start a full-on argument among students. While some people stay with basic primary colors, others go all out with fun and different shades of colors. The colors a person picks are  influenced by a favorite teacher, school expectation for a notebook, or simply their favorite color. Here are the survey top-picked colors for our primary school subjects. 

For English, the most popular notebook color in someone’s backpack is blue. The runner-up colors were red in second, then yellow in third. English notebook colors created the most controversial argument from those in the survey. From people explaining why red was better to others, stating the best English notebook is rainbow colored. Most of the influence behind the winning blue notebook sounded to have come from teacher-recommended notebook colors in the past. One interesting exception was from Bradyn Powell, who believed that yellow was the best color for language arts.

“Language arts is yellow…my old Language Arts teacher’s name sounded similar to the color yellow.” Braydon has always picked the fun color yellow for English to represent that fun teacher he once had and will never forget.

You learn about all the exciting tales of adventures and wars in history. Or, in some cases, get bored by reading long chapters from an old book. This subject had brighter colors in the running, with the winning color yellow and the second orange. Some less-mentioned colors were blue and black. The people who gave blue or black as their answer had the response of something along the lines of “it just makes sense” as their reasoning, but it could relate to the dark past of many places throughout history. 

Math is a subject that many people also debate. For most, you either understand and enjoy it or don’t understand and hate it. Whatever the case, Quartz Hill High School students believe that red is the best color to hold all the complicated math problems you may have. The color red is most likely from the influence of past teachers but may be a way for students to show their passion for working out complicated problems in their book, seeing how red is associated with love and affection. Whether the color is from hatred of the subject or the satisfaction of finally understanding the math they are doing, red is the color for it. Ella Burns, who has firm opinions on the different notebook colors, said,

“Math just is red…Algebra always seemed red, but if we are talking about geometry, it’s green, but when you say the word math as a whole, I think of red.”

The last subject included in the survey was science. It is a diverse subject where you could list all the periodic table elements one day, and a week later, you could study energy transfer. The notebook color for this subject was green, winning by a landslide. The biggest reason I found behind this color was that people associated science with life and nature. 

Here is a quote by Ash Tope confirming nature’s influence on science notebooks.

 “For science and biology, it’s green. Most everything is green [when] it’s part of nature.” 

Besides the winning colors, students gave many odd but fun colors for each subject. These were primarily based on favorite colors that they gave to their favorite subject. Examples include pink for English, orange for math, and cyan for science.