Opinion by RubyScanlan

Students from all around the world have been a part of the long debated topic: color coordinated notebooks. Over the years, notebook improvements have widened the diversity of school notebooks, with more colors, textures and patterns developed for notebook covers. This has provided more than just your plain old black composition book. The debate has been raging about which color fits each subject throughout the years. 

The most debated duo is red and blue with the subjects math and English, both having been assigned each color once. This color coordination has been linked back to human psychology with red being associated with a student’s dislike in the subject versus blue being a student’s proficiency and positive interest. 

There is no “correct” answer for this debate – it all rests on science and theories. Some of these range from the color association with certain objects or feelings to synesthesia, which is “a phenomenon that causes sensory crossovers, such as tasting colors or feeling sounds,” according to the Cleveland Clinic, to overall preference of one subject over another. Answers will vary for every person asked to settle this debate.

According to The Physiology and Psychology of Colour, the color red can provoke feelings of anger since “Red simulates the posterior hypothalamus and therefore the sympathetic nervous system… All colours in the red spectrum –from red/orange to yellow, have a stimulating effect.” The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is in charge of managing your fight-or-flight response, dilating blood vessels to increase blood flow to vital bodily functions in a high stress situation. This can associate a negative connotation to the color.

Red for me, is math. There is nothing I dread more than staring at an Advanced Algebra notebook with all of the x’s, y’s and z’s menacingly gazing back. Horrifying graphs and dreaded inequalities are enough to ruin my day. I cannot FUNCTION (pun intended) when I have math class and therefore I have assigned red to math. 

Blue, according to The Physiology and Psychology of Colour, “stimulates the anterior hypothalamus, which contains the main regulating part of the parasympathetic nervous system. This means that all colours in the bluish spectrum, from blue/green to blue and violet, normally have a sedating, digestion-activating, sleep-inducing effect.” The parasympathetic nervous system can cause the contraction of blood vessels, slowing blood flow, heart rate and blood pressure, relaxing any muscles that were tense before. Blue is usually attributed to a positive experience, with the calming feeling that it evokes.

In my notebook, blue is for English. I love to read and write so English class is a walk in the park for me. I can write for hours, with a few essays of mine coming out to 500+ words! Safe to say that I do not feel blue when I am in English class. 

The least problematic color is green, with many associating it with science. According to Sensational Color, “In Western cultures, we connect green with money… environmental responsibility… and permission to proceed. Other cultures may associate green with concepts such as eternal life, spiritual growth, or entirely different symbolic meanings.” The color is one of the most prominent colors in our everyday lives, whether it is the color of stop lights, signs, cars and grass. The color green is seen in many different shades in nature, whether it is the flora of nature to microscopic plant cells. Biology and ecology are scientific topics that I associate the color green or teal, so I often snag a few different shades of green notebooks while back-to-school shopping.

 Although there are a few more colors of the rainbow, these notebook covers are the most iconic, with red and blue’s long debate and green’s overall agreement. The true meaning behind the debate is rooted in scientific discovery, the kind you would write about in your green book, and will continue to rage for as long as school exists.