An Apple A Day Keeps The Children At Play

I’m a middle school teacher in an area where about half of the students come from socio-economically challenged families.

One of my coworkers moved into his parents’ house when they became too elderly to care for it. He had no interest in the massive amounts of apples that he could enjoy every fall from his mom’s orchard. So, every morning, he picked two bags full of apples and put the bags next to the door in the teachers’ lounge. The students were welcome to get free apples as long as the core ended up in a trash can. If a single apple core was thrown in the wrong place, there would be no more apples. Not a single core ever ended up outside a trash can since no one wanted to be the reason for ending the apple bonanza. 

As the final two classes of the day began, most teachers brought with them a supply of apples and handed them out to the students to munch on in class.

Some days, we still had plenty of apples left at the end of the day, and my coworker then convinced some student we knew came from a struggling home to bring home the leftover apples. Almost every time, the students dropped by the next day and told us in great detail how their moms had used the apples for all sorts of goodies.

When the students in more well-to-do families told their parents of our apple bonanza, several parents brought in bags of apples from their own gardens. That was incredibly sweet, but we struggled a little with getting through up to eight huge bags of apples per day.

We noticed that during the weeks when the students got these free apple snacks, in the afternoon, they were a lot more alert and active in these last classes of the day. It was almost like they were somehow energized.