Apple a Day

Earlier this week, one of my students gave me an apple. I believe it was part of a fund-raising program at the school that involved students giving their favorite professors apples. Naturally, I was pleased to receive this beautiful piece of fruit, not the least because it came from an online student, and it's difficult to create those human connections with online classes.

This lovely gesture of apple-giving made me think of a being a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in the early 1900s. One of my great-grandmothers was such a teacher, and though I didn't really know her, I admire her for having this kind of fortitude and dedication to learning. This in turn got me thinking about the origin of students giving teachers apples, and I think it must prompted the student to think about this as well.  When I thanked her for the apple, she responded with a quote that she thought  might reveal something about the origins of the tradition: "Anyone can count the seeds in an apple but no one can count the apples in a seed." That's certainly a nice idea, and the quote, apparently from an unknown source, speaks for itself.

Other possible connections come to mind. Apples are associated with the pastoral landscape of America's past -- the America of abundance, the America of small farms and quaint orchards. We think of the legend of Johnny Appleseed, spreading the simple, nourishing beauty of apples across our young country as it grew and formed its identity. Apples are associated with hearty health and wholesomeness, as suggested by the old saying, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away," which is sometimes attributed to Benjamin Franklin, himself quite a teacher and lover of knowledge (as well as being an ancestral cousin of mine). We think of apples and other wholesome fruits as nourishing the brain and allowing us to learn and grow, and of course, they do just that.

Then there's that famous apple. In popular accounts of Genesis, it is an apple (although it's an ambiguous "fruit" in the King James version) from the Tree of Knowledge with which the serpent temps Eve. This makes sense, in a symbolic way -- giving a teacher an apple because an apple represents knowledge, but it makes the gesture seem somehow more sinister or at least mischevious, as if the student is playing a trick on the teacher. In this case, is the apple meant to suggest that the teacher corrupts the student with knowledge? This anti-educational subtext may seem vaguely American in all the wrong ways, but it's way too complicated and irreverent to make much sense, as far as I'm concerned.

Of course, the idea of tricks makes me consider the apple's association with Halloween (dunking for apples, candy apples) and its general association with autumn (apple picking, apple pies). Now we're getting somewhere. Apples are abundant in the fall, which is why we ended up making pies with them to begin with, and school of course begins in the fall. Anyone with an apple tree in frontier America must have had more apples than they knew what to do with, so of course they'd bring one for the teacher. Teachers in America have always been underpaid, as school was considered a mere supplement to the rigors of farm life, so they might have welcomed the free food. I certainly welcomed my apple when I received it, although I have one colleague who suggested I get it x-rayed for razors. (He said perhaps he had seen Snow White, with its poisoned apple, too many times, which brings up the sinister side of apples....)

And then there's the Apple computer, itself a symbol of modern knowledge and learning. Additionally, apples are fruit, and we speak of the fruits of knowledge. We could really keep going with this for some time. But just as an apple can only be eaten once, so we must limit what we learn and explore at any given time. It's better to eat the fruit and enjoy it for what it is.