Color is an important part of everyday life for most people. It helps us to perceive the world around us, better organize ourselves and even make us feel. Color theory has proven how different colors can make us feel different emotions and that many people associate color with certain feelings or concepts such as the classes offered in school. To find out what colors and associations people had I sent out a poll that got 546 responses  and will be covering the results along with expert opinions on the matter.

If you would like, feel free to try and guess the most popular answers before they are revealed as a sort of game-like-thing (it’s kinda fun).  

Favorite color: 

Before we cover the classes, let’s first start by looking at what the most popular color is. According to the poll, it was blue, which approximately 112 people answered. It was closely followed by green with about 109 people. This makes sense because worldwide, blue is considered the most popular color according to many studies. It also should be noted that blue is considered a ‘school color’ which may or may not make a difference.

English: 

Moving on to the first real subject we have English and all classes that fall under this label. When asked English 10 Honors teacher Jessica Phiri said that she believed that the class would be an Orange.

“Orange is bright and beautiful and so is literature,” Phiri said.

 Looking at the graph, it can be seen that yellow was the most popular response with 156 votes as opposed to orange’s 29. Phiri believed that yellow was picked for similar reasons as to why she said orange 

(KJM)

Math:

Next up is math. Some dread it, some love it, but it is undeniably one of the most commonly taught subjects. The on and off question of ‘what color is math’ is so popular that it is not uncommon to see it go viral every once in a while, and is commonly used as an interesting conversation/debate discussion. This question was also the inspiration for this article.

This time math teacher Dave Ginder went to tackle the question and said that math was red with the rationale that  “Math is all rose-y”. 

Not only does this align with the graph, but Ginder followed up by saying that “I almost said blue” which was the second place answer with 197 votes as opposed to Red’s 259 votes. This can finally answer the question by showing that according to both the students and the experts math is red.

(KJM)

Science: 

Keeping up with the STEM theme, science comes next with the most decisive popular answer.

When asked, Chemistry teacher Lionel Zhao said that “Traditionally I have used.. Green or purple for science. Purple for chemistry or physics, green for life science, biology, or environmental science.”

He came to this reasoning by remembering folders that he used when he was in school which is another common way people come to associate these things.

While purple only got 18 votes, green was the victor by a landslide with 66.9 percent or 364 votes. This was by far the most agreed upon answer with both the expert and majority of the poll supporting it. 

(KJM)

Social studies/History:

Social studies or more specifically history covers a massive amount of material, as most people would expect, because a lot of things have happened. 

AP US history teacher Harmony Mize was asked what color history was.

“Blue and red , because that’s the colors of the American flag,” Mize said.

It can be seen that she immediately focused on American history and based her answer around such, which is fair because it would be hard to base an answer on everything ever. An interesting note is that the flag logic could apply to many more countries and their history as well such as France, Britain, Russia, etc.

(KJM)

Now that the core classes are out of the way, next are electives. While not required, they tend to often be the favorite classes amongst students. It should be noted that for the electives I cover, not everyone has taken and those who have may have differing levels of experience which may alter the poll results. They also tend to be much more subjective.  While not all electives and types could be covered, I split some of the most popular electives into the groups: art, music and foreign language.  

Art:

Art is a medium that could be seen in hundreds if not millions of concepts and forms, but for simplicity this will not include anything that is elsewhere in this poll (music, english, etc.) even if they could be considered art. With the strong prevalence of diverse colors in art it is hard to pick just one color.

However after careful consideration art teacher Jamie Bauer managed to narrow it down to 2 colors. “I kinda torn between a very vibrant green and black,” Bauer said. “Green symbolizes growth and a lot of art making has to do with growth. A black because it is representative of a blank slate.”

These both seem like great logical points. However the most popular answer is purple with 171 votes. However this question has a lot of people who cited other unlisted options of which a lot of people answered something like rainbow or all colors which was a significant enough amount to be strongly noted.  “I do feel that purple is a really creative color,” Bauer said. “It’s not a ‘mainstream’ color. You don’t see it it a lot unless you are talking about something refined or ritzy. I’m surprised it was not rainbow.”

(KJM)

Foreign Languages:

For foreign languages, I was testing a theory. Would the different languages be different enough to warrant their own color, or would the process of learning another language in school keep them similarly structured enough for the color to be the same. 

As far as the poll goes the most popular answer was that the color did in fact depend on the language in question as seen here:

Next it was time to ask the experts.

First Spanish:  the most popular of the foreign languages taught at carroll. When asked spanish teacher Joanne Reyes said “Purple, because Latin-American culture is very passionate about different ways that we feel and I think purple would signify that.”

Japanese teacher Laura Semba echoed the answer purple by citing it as her favorite. Which is just as valid of a reason as anything else in such a subjective category. 

Finally the French teacher Lindsey Ravis was asked and her answer would make or break this theory. “I’d choose rose-pink because that’s my favorite color.”

Not only this but also many students in her class echoed her answer proving that French is pink and different languages can be different colors*, or at the very least 2 of them. 

Music:

For the last subject I asked marching band director Doug Hassell what color music was here was his response: 

“I think the color depends entirely on the music, and the context of the performance of the music on multiple levels.” He then went on to list several different things that could change the context such as tempo, lyrics, mood, tone, sound, and some others.

As music is a very dynamic art it makes sense to have such a diverse answer. Music can sound like literally anything and the fact that a color could not be pinned down just shows that. 

However the poll did not have this same problem and did manage to come up with an answer that was more supported then the others. Which was purple again. With 165 votes. It seems as purple is seen as an artistic color as both art and music have this as the most common answer. It also shares the similarity of pink in second place much like the art poll .  Even more surprising here is that there are not nearly as many custom answers as art despite the similar range in what music can do.  All this culminates in  very similar, yet distinct results. 

(KJM)

Neat trends:

Another interesting trend about electives is that French is the only one that did not end up as purple meaning that the majority of the electives were seen as purple. This seems crazy when considering the differences in these classes. Based on this it would not be a stretch to say that electives as a whole are purple. When compared to the more diverse core classes earlier it seems even more strange. Those classes had colors like red, green and yellow, with yellow being the only repetition . Another interesting thing is that while the majority of the core classes are primary colors, no primary colors appear with electives.

In conclusion, we can see that different subjects can create distinct feelings to different people that can in some cases be represented by a color. This can differ on both the subject and the person but in many cases a clear most common answer is shared, showing somewhat of a unity or understanding between students. 

TL;DR list: 

Best color: blue 

English: yellow

Math: red

Science:green

Social studies: yellow

Art: purple

Spanish: purple

Japanese: purple

French: pink 

Music: purple 

*unless you count english as a language class despite the very different curriculum to the other language classes in which case this was already disproven. 

If for any reason you want to see the full results of the poll and every answer given (some of which are fairly clever) the spreadsheet used is linked here.

 Thanks for reading  : ) <3