Thomas Jefferson, Allen Iverson, & soft pretzels

What do these 3 things have in common? Students in my classes are equally excited by them. I got the same reaction to them all in my first lecture (which covered where I'm from and the schools I have attended)
The teachers in this program are gobbed into one group to teach topics on "Western Culture"- but many of us are puzzled by how our knowledge of western culture is anything similar to our British counterparts here. Not only does our pronunciation and rate at which we speak differ, which has been slightly problematic for the students, but our 'pop' cultures differ. It reinforced how often we (westerners) label 'Asians' rather than natives of a particular country.