Giving the teacher an apple
Why Teachers are Associated with and Traditionally Given Apples
Widespread publicly funded, mandatory education has only been around since about the 19th century. Before then, the responsibility of providing schooling to children fell primarily on their families. Upper- and middle-class families tended to hire tutors or send their children to a private school run by a schoolmaster. That didn’t mean the children in lower-class families missed out on learning how to read and write. They often learned this at home, through apprenticeships, or at church-funded schools.
In addition, some poor families scraped together enough money to pay for their children to receive an education. Some even worked out a barter arrangement with teachers where they paid with surplus produce from the family farm. For instance, poor students from farming families in Denmark and Sweden often brought baskets of potatoes or apples to school as payment, among other staples (the potato being used for food, and the apple generally used for making drinks at the time).
In the United States, things changed when various social reforms came about in the 1800s. The reforms addressed issues ranging from food sanitation, treatment of the mentally ill, and even education. Schools became publicly funded and subject to regulations in order to ensure that all students were more or less getting the same educational opportunity.
By 1913, a majority of the states in the United States of America required that schools be paid for by the government. However towns on the sparsely settled western frontier still often bore the responsibility for paying for a teacher in the town. As before, they recruited teachers, and they provided a schoolhouse where classes could be held, a place for the teachers to live, fuel for heating, and often food. In these sorts of arrangements, students were also often tasked with helping the teacher maintain the schoolhouse, such as gathering on Saturdays to give it a thorough cleaning.
That tradition of bringing food to teachers continued even as the United States government took over the responsibility for funding public education in the West. The baskets of food were eventually replaced with smaller amounts as the old “Boarding Round” room and board pay system was replaced by more in the way of a cash salary.
But why do schoolchildren traditionally give apples to their teachers? As mentioned, there are records of students from such places as Denmark and Sweden bringing both apples and potatoes to their teachers, among other things, so why don’t students traditionally give potatoes to teachers? There are two generally accepted answers, one or both of which possibly contributing to this tradition over other food items like the potato.
For the first theory, teachers were often seen as a moral influence into the lives of children. (Indeed, the “Boarding Round” system often insured that teachers toed the line with the community’s moral standards- teach something outside of this, and suddenly see something like your food or heating fuel payment disappear.) Along with this, the “Tree of Knowledge” in the story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis has often been mistakenly referred to as an apple tree. This is partially thanks to Aquila Ponticus, who was a second century translator translating the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek. He took the liberty of referring to the Tree of Knowledge as an apple tree, even though the original text doesn’t say that. It’s likely that he chose this due to the fact that he was translating it into Greek for Greeks and that in Greek mythology apples were seen as symbols of desire and destruction.
Due to the prevalence of this “Tree of Knowledge” / apple tree idea, it wouldn’t be an out of place gift, then, for students to give their teachers an apple, the fruit representative of knowledge.
On to the second popular theory for the continuance of giving apples- apples arrived in North America shortly after the Jamestown Colony was founded in the early 1600s. These apples, unlike the ones found in supermarkets today, tasted bitter, but they could be used to make hard apple cider. Many people, whether rightly or wrongly, considered hard cider a safer beverage than water because widespread sanitation of drinking water did not yet exist. Apple trees also flourished in a variety of climates, contributing to the popularity of the fruit.
The sweeping social reforms that allowed schools and education to become regulated also posed a major problem for apples. The temperance movement that spanned from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century sought to eliminate the drinking of alcohol in the United States. Apple growers scrambled to re-brand the fruit in order to remove themselves from the controversy. Careful cultivation caused the fruit to lose its bitter taste and to become sweeter and sweeter with each new generation of apples.
Marketing campaigns also played a part in the apple’s new image. Phrases like “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” were dusted off and used to brand the apple as a healthy snack. So the theory goes that students and their parents who wanted to get on a teacher’s good side saw apples as a way to give the teacher a healthy, cheap snack, which was also quite versatile, able to be used now for both drink and a sweet treat. Thus, they chose to keep giving this food item, rather than something like the potato.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- The first apples were grown in Kazakhstan. For more on this, see: A Brief History of the Apple Tree
- The Red Delicious apple was one of those created when apple growers worked to sweeten apples in response to the temperance movement. On the other hand, Granny Smith apples were discovered quite by accident growing on the property of one Maria Ann Smith.
- The term “apple-polish” was coined in the early 1900s and means that a student is trying to get favors from their teacher- essentially a brown-noser or suck-up.
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Apple for Teacher
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A common stereotype of schools is the Teacher’s Pet giving the teacher a shiny red apple as a token of appreciation. Sometimes it’s given to them directly in front of the whole class, or it can be placed on the teacher’s desk in secret and anonymously.
A common variation is the class clown (or, conversely, the class bully) giving an apple with a worm inside to gross them out. A variation of this variation is to play a joke on the teacher by giving them an apple with gummie worm candies inside. Another common variation is for the student to give the teacher a chocolate-dipped, candy-coated apple as a Halloween, Christmas, and/or Valentine’s Day gift (this works best during the winter, as the heat of the warmer summer, late spring, and early fall temperatures would cause the chocolate coating to melt). Further variations include giving the teacher apple pie, apple cider, or apple-flavored ice cream and/or frozen yogurt instead of actual regular apples in their purest traditional form.
Sometimes some other type of fruits appear as yet another variation, best if it’s traditional fruit from the kids’ (or their parents’) gardens like pears or plums. Apples, pears, and plums are traditionally harvested in autumn, which makes them ideal gifts for teachers at the beginning of the school year. The trope seems to originate in a rule or a law from some communities: the village or town and its people were responsible for providing food for their local teacher.
Giving the teacher plain, traditional apples is now somewhat of a Discredited Trope, but the apple is still strongly associated with teachers (at least those teaching in elementary schools).
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Why do we give an apple to the teacher?
As far as anybody can tell, the origin of American schoolchildren giving an apple to the teacher cannot be traced to one definitive moment or source. The tradition seems to have been born from practicality, then nurtured by happy coincidences working in concert sometime between 1880 and 1920, with an early-19th century prologue. To answer the question is to create the sort of messily insane, pieced-together timeline you see on police procedurals, its various dots connected with red string. It’s the kind of explanation that doesn’t make for the sort of satisfying trivia you can whip out for cocktail party small talk. But to investigate it is to delve deeply into our nation’s history and folklore.
This story begins with John Chapman, a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed—probably not all that shocking, considering this story is about apples in the 19th century. While the non-native apple had been transplanted from England with the first settlers back in the early 1600s, it was the efforts of Chapman and fellow settlers to the Northwest Territory in the early 1800s that ushered in the ubiquity of the apple throughout the country.
Back then, apples didn’t taste like the apples we have today. Early-American apple trees were usually grown from seeds, not grafted, which results in bitter or sour fruit not suitable for eating. As such, those apples were mainly used for making hard cider. Fortunately, old-timey folks loved cider and drank a ton of it—largely because cider, unlike water, wouldn’t give you dysentery. Anyone who’s ever played Oregon Trail (or worse yet, actually lived it from atop a covered wagon) knows what a bummer that is.
Those early Americans were also really into growing, cataloging, and experimenting with fruit, and apples in particular. In the book Nomenclature Of The Apple: A Catalog Of The Known Varieties Referred To In American Publications From 1804 To 1904 by W.H. Ragan, the author cites more than 14,000 varieties of apples that were grown in the United States in that 100-year span. By comparison, approximately 100 varieties are commercially grown today.
Mmm, coffee
You can order subscriptions as small as two bags per month and as large as 24, which is ludicrous, but nice to know that it’s an option.
As to what happened to the other 13,900, we must look to the Second and Third Wave Temperance movements. The fact that most apples in the 19th century were used for cider naturally didn’t sit well with opponents of alcohol like Carrie Nation, famous for wielding an ax in saloons—and in apple orchards. Backlash from Temperance Leagues only solidified the apple’s connection to alcohol in the national consciousness, prompting growers to rebrand the fruit if they wanted to continue to turn a profit. As a result, by 1904, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” had entered the popular lexicon. The apple was now publicized as a healthy food for eating, not just for drinking.
Within this same timeframe, another progressive movement was gaining momentum: education reforms. Only about half of the nation’s 5- to 15-year-olds attended school in 1840s. By 1870, all states had public elementary schools, and by 1918, every state required children to complete an elementary education. Even before these reforms, there was a tradition, passed down from life on the frontier, of giving the teacher food in return for their services. And while by the late 1800s, teachers were typically no longer paid in food harvested by a clutch of pioneer families who couldn’t afford anything else, the custom symbolically persisted and spread, to the point where teachers and apples became synonymous.
So why apples and not, say, a pear—or beef jerky? No one seems to know for sure. But the fact that autumn became the national standard as the start of the school year, with more students than ever reporting in the peak apple season of September—along with their being cheap, universally available, easily portable, nationally beloved, and newly decreed as healthy—grabbing an apple for the teacher seems like an obvious choice. In short, we give apples to the teacher not on account of some long-forgotten legend or inveterate custom, but because of sheer practicality—fostered by a series of serendipitous events.
As to why it’s persisted, centuries after frontier life, you can (as with so many things) blame pop culture. When Bing Crosby and Connee Boswell sang “An Apple For The Teacher” in 1939, and the next year’s Pinocchio saw Geppetto giving an apple to his little wooden son for his first day of school, the tradition became a trope.
Decades later in 1983, the 1940s-set A Christmas Story saw schoolchildren giving apples to Miss Shields—and Ralphie lumbering in with a giant fruit basket. The audience responds not because they remember giving apples themselves, but because the association has become such a part of our cultural language. So while they may not get any actual apples anymore, our teachers will be receiving tchotchkes with apples on them for years to come.
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An Apple for the Teacher или немного об американских традициях
Во многих американских фильмах о школе вы, скорее всего, видели сцену, в которой ученик дарит учителю яблоко. Я вам сейчас расскажу, откуда эта традиция взялась. На двух языках расскажу. Попробуйте прочитать сначала английский вариант, а потом проверить себя с помощью русского)
🇺🇸In American schools there is a tradition of gifting apples to teachers. Have you ever wondered where it came from?
Well, there are two theories. The first one is connected with Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. Here, the «Tree of Knowledge», from which Eve eats the forbidden fruit, is often depicted as an apple tree. So, the connection is obvious. Apple is a fruit of knowledge. Teachers give us knowledge. It’s a perfect match!
The second theory goes back to America’s western frontier. It’s said that «families whose children attended schools were often responsible for housing and feeding teachers». In that tradition, an apple for the teacher could be considered a sweet token of appreciation.
Anyway, «An Apple for the Teacher» is a nice tradition and it’s likely to stay for a long time. 🇺🇸
🇷🇺Есть такая традиция, дарить американским учителям яблоки. Про нее даже песня есть. Знаете, откуда она пришла?
Есть две теории. Первая связана с Адамом, Евой и Эдемским садом. Дерево познания, с которого Ева вкусила запретный плод, изображают в виде яблони. Дальше логика такая: яблоко — фрукт познания; учителя дают нам знания. Все сходится.
Следующая теория связана с американским старым Западом. Там семьи, чьи дети посещали школу, были ответственны за размещение и питание учителей. Яблоко считалось знаком благодаоности.
Вот такая милая традиция, которая, вероятно, будет жить ещё очень долго. 🇷🇺
Кстати, учителя радуются, когда им яблоки дарят. Это расценивается как знак уважения и признания того, что они хорошие учителя. Некоторые даже слишком рады такому подарку)
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