Why Teachers Eat Apples

A Teacher’s Psychological and Sociological Perspective

A teacher friend of mine once described the tenuous relationship between teachers and students as an illusion of control, that if only the students knew how much potential power they possessed (through sheer numbers alone), teachers would have no control at all. In fact, they couldn’t; there are just too many students and too few teachers.

So much of teaching is based on that carefully constructed and maintained illusion. However strict or loose a teacher might run her classroom, ultimately teaching is predicated on students doing what the teacher says. The apple, as a mid-class snack, propagates the sense of power and control that a teacher requires.

History will provide other, more non-teacher centered, explanations. During the frontier period of American history, teachers were often boarded by the families whose children they were teaching. The apple was an easy snack with which to send those teachers to school. In 18th-century Scandinavia, apples were a plentiful enough crop that families would provide them to teachers as a way of paying for their children’s education; they spoiled easily enough, though, that baskets of apples soon became a single apple.

But if the apple had not been palatable to the teacher, it never would have become such a pervasive symbol of teaching; without a willing market of consumers, the apple’s association with teaching would not have been canonized. So there are what appear to be viable explanations of why teachers received apples, but why did teachers appreciate apples? Allow me to provide the teacher’s side of the story.

To put it simply, apples allow the teacher the eating experience that best maintains the teacher’s dignity and illusion of power. Consider a world in which, say, the orange was associated with the teacher. In front of the class, the teacher peels the orange, throws out the peels, and takes a big juicy bite of orange. Watch the class titter as orange juice drips down the teacher’s chin. Even the most practiced handkerchief user can’t wipe that away with dignity intact, much less lunging for the tissue box before the juice makes it to the clothes. Ibid for the pitted fruits: too much juice equals too little dignity.

The banana? Well, let’s all admit it, it’s just too sexual. And doubly so because it involves both ‘undressing’ and the inevitable implications of its consumption.

The bite-size fruits have potential (see: the grape) but the Roman-emperor-being-fed-by-slaves associations imply the wrong kind of power. Teachers don’t mind being seen as despots but no thanks to the deviant, slovenly, corpulent ruler that the grape suggests.

So, then, why the apple?

1. You hold the apple and it feels right. It has good heft, like a good pen. It sits comfortably in the hand. You toss it in the air and it falls satisfyingly back into your hand, with that satisfying thwap.
2. The color suggests dignity, even a certain violence (its association with blood should not be underestimated; note that no teacher has ever eaten a green or yellow apple). It creates the distance of a dark color, reminding students that the person before them is hardly a friend.
3. Take that bite. There is no small bite of an apple. That bite requires attack; it requires that primal opening of the jaws that allowed our less human ancestors to survive in the wild. And that sound, both the biting and the chewing, communicates control and domination; that crunch suggests what will happen to students if they fall out of line.
4. And of course there is danger to the apple’s associations. The apple is the forbidden fruit: the fruit that reveals the unknowable, the fruit that has a secret, the fruit that will confer an exclusive power on its wielder and will exclude those without it. No student can know what a teacher eating an apple knows.

Does this sound desperate? The insecure justification of an arbitrary phenomenon through faux-reasoning and desperate connections? Perhaps. But anyone who works in schools (or, really, who works with kids) understands its power dynamics; it’s part of why we love the job: the rush of always being on stage, always being judged, always assessing our reputation in our students’ eyes (even if we experience that on a subconscious level).

And the apple is a small piece of that tenuous relationship. So next time you’re looking to send a message of power, of control, of dignity, grab an apple. Just make sure it’s red.