Exhausted, I glance over to my phone to see 1:47 a.m. glowing back at me from across my dimly lit room. Knowing I need to be up in just a few hours to get ready for school, a wave of frustration and anger crashes over me. Though longing for my bed, I know I have to keep pushing through to get my homework all the way to completion.

Over the course of my life as a student, I cannot count how many late nights like this I’ve spent in my room flustered, confused, tired and slowly drudging through math homework. Personally, I’ve never been able to call myself a math prodigy by any means — it’s always been a particularly difficult subject for me to wrap my head around. In my experience working in the subject, a few key emotions tend to rise within me: frustration, anger and confusion, to name a few. What do these all have in common? Most of them — especially anger — are commonly represented or associated with the color red. There’s something about being in a math classroom, or my bedroom in the wee hours of the morning, and being stuck on one tricky problem that just screams “red” to me.

I’ve often found that a math classroom is like a dentist’s office. In a past life I could imagine people anxiously waiting for their turn to be told they’re not flossing enough – I can still smell the fluoride. I think most people would associate dentist offices with blue if they had to pick a color. Something about the sterile, nervous environment makes it exude an icy, spine-chilling blue. When you associate this type of environment with any class I think you would be bound to carry the color over as well.

Although opinions may vary on the color palette for a math class, the one thing we can agree on is that science is and will always be green.