Study of the top of a Blenheim Orange apple (1873)

The tradition of giving apples to teachers likely began in 18th-century Scandinavia. In places like Denmark and Sweden, where teachers were often housed and fed by the families of their students, apples were a practical offering—something plentiful, nourishing, and easy to store. When the practice crossed into frontier America in the 19th century, it continued not as a luxury, but as a necessity. Teachers, poorly paid or compensated in kind, relied on the generosity of their communities. The apple was a gift of gratitude. A gesture of sustenance.

Over time, the apple became symbolic. As the role of the teacher professionalized and salaries replaced barter, the apple endured, now gleaming on desk corners, etched into schoolhouse emblems, and pressed into the memories of childhood. A red token of esteem. A sign that one who labors with minds might deserve something sweet.

But apples are never just one thing.

Some are tart. Some bruised. Some too early, some overripe. Some good for pie, others for cider, others best eaten straight from the tree, crisp and defiant. The apple, like the student, like the teacher, resists uniformity. And to teach well is to know this.

I didn’t always know it.

I began my career as many do: armed with content and a classical model. I was a scholar with a plan. I believed in the power of knowledge, its weight and elegance. Teaching was delivery. Mastery. Precision. Students were vessels to be filled with the best of what had been thought and said.

But then came the gaps. The essays that didn’t land. The hands that didn’t rise. The lessons that fell into silence. And slowly, through the dissonance, I began to shift. Toward messier truths. Toward constructivism. I learned that knowledge isn’t poured—it’s built. Layered. Negotiated. That students bring stories with them, not blank slates but living texts. That learning happens not only when I speak but when I listen. I began to see teaching less as delivering apples and more as tending an orchard.

And now, years later, I find myself leaning into humanism. Into the hope that teaching might do more than prepare students for a test or a task. That it might help them become. I look now for self-actualization. For the quiet click of confidence. For the student who once believed they couldn’t, suddenly realizing they already had.

This is not sentimental. It is earned. Through wounds and weather. Through years of watching students arrive hard and leave open. Through seasons of failure and rediscovery. It is the work of attention.

Which brings me to Ruskin.

In 1873, John Ruskin painted a watercolor study of a Blenheim Orange apple. It is not idealized. It does not shine like a grocery store specimen. Its skin is russeted, its colors uneven. A cratered stem burrows into its crown. It sits heavy and real against a pale background, refusing metaphor. And yet it becomes one.

Ruskin, too, was a teacher. He believed that the act of looking—really looking—was both a moral and artistic responsibility. "The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way," he wrote. His apple is not just a fruit; it is a witness. It is a refusal of polish. It is truth seen clearly and told with care.

What if that were our pedagogy?

Not the apple polished for show, but the apple offered in honesty. Not the student scrubbed for the metric, but the student met in their wholeness. Not the teacher idealized, but the teacher present, fallible, learning alongside. What if the classroom were a studio of sight? A place where we did not decorate the fruit but observed it, attended to it, named its shape?

As this school year closes and graduation nears, I think of fruit again. We so often treat commencement as culmination—the fruit picked, displayed, consumed. But that moment is not just celebration. It is release. It is the letting go of something tended, weathered, and watched. Teachers know this. We see the blossom, the drought, the sudden ripening. We see the fruit fall before it's ready, or hang on longer than we thought it could. Graduation is joy and grief braided together.

The rise of homeschooling in recent years has complicated this metaphor. In some cases, it has deepened it—parents who study pedagogy, who adapt curriculum, who apprentice themselves to the craft of education. But often, it has flattened it. The assumption that presence equals instruction. That love is enough. That anyone who knows a thing can teach it. And while I honor parental care, I defend the vocation of teaching. Because real teaching is not instinct. It is a discipline of vision. A choreography of patience. A quiet refusal to give up on people in process.

Not everyone who holds an apple is a teacher. Not everyone who shares information is an educator. Teaching is the art of tending and the science of timing. It is knowing the difference between a bruised apple and a rotten one. It is understanding that variety is strength. That not all apples ripen at the same time. That not all growth is visible.

So here, at the close of the season, I think again of Ruskin’s apple. Honest. Imperfect. Enough. And I offer it to my colleagues—those who watch, who wait, who name what they see. Those who see the fruit fall, and know it for the miracle it is.

To them, I offer this apple.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week.