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An apple for the teacher

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