Remember when you used to bring an apple to the teacher?  Probably not, but in the American mind, this was always a big thing, right?  The classic image of a teacher’s desk with papers and pens and inboxes and outboxes, and a shiny red apple up front for all to see.  There was the apple-polisher stereotype, that one kid who was so intent on impressing the teacher that he or she was the one who always brought that apple.  The ones who didn’t were the kids who threw spitballs and dunked the pigtails of the little girls who sat in front of them into their inkwells. During my brief career as a teacher, I can tell you that spitballs are still a thing, though inkwells are not.  And giving apples to the teacher isn’t a thing, either.   Not that I’d have minded a student bringing me an apple; it just never happened to me.  I never saw it happen when I was a student, either, back in 19(ahem).   Yet we still link apples and teachers in our minds—good teachers, anyway.   Teachers’ organiza

On September 26, 1774, John Chapman was born in Leominster, Massachusetts. At age 18, he and his 11-year-old half brother headed out to the frontier, moving around quite a bit.  At the time, the “frontier” included the western half of Pennsylvania, where the two of them wandered from job to job, doing quite a bit of work in apple orchards.  Their father moved to Ohio in 1805, and the brothers joined him there, and that’s where John got really serious about orchards.  He apprenticed with an orchard owner and soon started off down his life’s path.  Chapman would become known for his mastery of apple cultivation, and soon after earned the nickname Johnny Appleseed. If you attended elementary school in America, you’ve probably heard of Johnny Appleseed.  The popular image is of a rugged, gentle frontiersman walking around the Northwest Territory barefoot and wearing a tin pot on his head, every so often reaching into a bag of apple seeds and planting apple trees, covering the region wit